OS1/1/78/68

Continued entries/extra info

[Page] 68
Parish of Rhynie
[continued from page 67]

Description Continued - "James, Professor of History in the University of Edinburgh" published in 1860. _ page 280. After speaking of the underground houses he says. "Their early, and indeed aboriginal strongholds, again, varied with the situation and material. We have the green mound, steeply escarped, and giving barely room on its summit for the wooden castle of which the material was supplied by the neighbouring forest." (Of this there is an instance near the old church of Auchindoir.) "The little island of firm land in the midst of a mountain lake, or still more impracticable morags: Sometimes a structure of piles in the lake where there was no island: the circular redoubt - like a large pen for cattle, placed high on a hill side of stone, & a dry ditch such as afforded protection for the cattle and their owners against the hurried onslaught of a foraging enemy" and so on. He proceeds on pages 281.282. "Of the same class were the vitrified forts which Crown the tops of many of our hills, and which have exercised the ingenuity of antiquarians too much and with too little success, for me to speculate on their formation. I may observe, however, that the vitrified wall in no cases rises to any R. Dickson S.R.E. [Sapper Royal Engineers]