Legendary Tales of the Highlands (Volume 2 of 3) by Thomas Dick Lauder

There is a long, low, flat-topped, and prettily wooded eminence, that rises out of the middle of the bonny haughs of Kilmaichly, at some distance below the junction of the rivers Aven and Livat. I don’t remember that it has any particular name, but it looks, for all the world, like the fragment of some ancient plain, that must have been of much higher level than that from which it now rises, which fragment had been left, after the ground on each side of it had been worn down to its present level, by the changeful operations of the neighbouring streams. But whatever you geology gentlemen might say, as to what its origin might have been, every lover of nature must agree, that it is a very beautiful little hill, covered as its slopes are with graceful weeping birches, and other trees. The bushes that still remain, show that, in earlier times, it must have been thickly wooded with great oaks, which probably gave shelter to the ould auncient Druids, when engaged in their superstitious mysteries. At the period to which the greater part of my story belongs—that is, in and about that of the reign of King James the III.—the blue smoke that curled up from among the trees betrayed the existence of a cottage, that sat perched upon the brow of its western extremity, looking towards the Castle of Drummin. This little dwelling was much better built, and, in every respect, much neater than any of those in the surrounding district; and its interior exhibited more comforts as to furniture and plenishing of all sorts, and those too of a description, superior to any thing of the kind which a mere cottager might have been reasonably expected to have possessed.