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124 military state waited upon our travellers yet their fame went before them. At Ellon, where they breakfasted, the landlady asked Boswell: "Is not this the great Doctor that is going about through the country? There's something great in his appearance." "They say," said the landlord, "that he is the greatest man in England, except Lord Mansfield." They turned here out of their course to visit Slains Castle, the seat of the Earl of Errol. The country over which they drove this day was more desolate than any through



which they had as yet passed. In one place, writes Johnson, "the sand of the shore had been raised by a tempest, and carried to such a distance that an estate was overwhelmed and lost." Sir Walter Scott, who in the summer of 1814, sailed along the shore in a Lighthouse Yacht, says that northwards of Aberdeen "the coast changes from a bold and rocky to a low and sandy character. Along the Bay of Belhelvie a whole parish was swallowed up by the shifting sands, and is still a desolate waste. It belonged to the Earls of Errol, and was rented at £500 a year at the time. When