Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/276

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Access to Mountains.
[Aug.

American, Mr William Louis Winans, is the strongest instance. This gentleman holds over 200,000 acres In Strathaffric and Kintail, covering some of the finest mountainous country in Scotland. Every one has heard of his stopping roads and breaking down bridges, of his deer-fences, of his watchers doubled and posted in bothies at short intervals along his march like sentinels round a Soudan zareba, to defend a tract in which it is said that no one, not even himself, has fired a shot for years. These are matters of common talk; and he would be a hardy advocate who, if these things are true, should attempt to justify such conduct as “proper and legitimate exercise of the rights of property.” A single story, the facts of which were proved before the sheriff, and decided on by the Court of Session, will show the nature of the man. The case I refer to is that of William Louis Winans against Murdoch Macrae.[1] That case was an action for interdict brought by Mr Winans against Macrae, to prevent the trespass of a pet lamb. The evidence was to the following effect: Mr Winans was lessee of Kintail, possessing about 200,000 acres of shooting, the greater part of which he had turned into a deer-forest. The public road ran through Morvich, and the defender’s cottage and half-a-dozen other cottages were close to the road. The road was not fenced. The defender had built his cottage some twenty years before the date of the action. He paid no rent for it, nor for a small detached piece of ground used for growing potatoes. Mr Mackenzie, the proprietor of Kintail, deponed that he could not say whether the house was built on the estate of Kintail or not, though it was surrounded on all sides by that estate. The plot of potato-ground was, according to the defender’s evidence, held by permission of the former tenants of Morvich, who, it further appeared, were in the habit of allowing the defender and the other cottars at Cairngorm each to feed a sheep or two and a cow on the farm. When the pursuer became tenant of Morvich, he took steps to have this custom of grazing put an end to. The defender, who had two sheep at the time, put them away within a short time of receiving notice to do so. The incident on which the case turned is best told in the defender’s own words, which were accepted as accurate by the Court of Session:—

“Within the last three years I have kept sheep. I had two hoggs last spring. Mr Winans' head-keeper, Mr Ross, ordered them away, and I sent them away. I did not intend to keep any more stock after that. I remember that I was one day cutting peats near the march at Leanassie and Morvich, and I found a lamb. I found it beside the river which runs at the march. I identified it as my own lamb. It was three weeks old at the time. This was in the beginning of summer. . . . The lamb was in a very poor state when I found it. It was very weak. At the time that we were collecting the sheep for clipping it lost its mother and never found it afterwards. I took the lamb home. I did not drive it before me, but took it home in my arms. . . . My wife used to feed it with milk when we had milk, and when we had none she used to beat up eggs and sugar and give it a mixture of both. I have seen my wife feeding it many a time. . . . It grew gradually strong by the nursing of my wife, and it used to run about. It became such a pet that it would follow us wher-
  1. ↑ Court of Session Cases, 4th series, vol. xii.—June 3, 1885.
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