The author who is found thus to speak of the rude hill-fort was an experienced officer of engineers, on service in Scotland. The tone of professional respect with which he treats the effort of the primitive engineer is remarkable; one might suppose him discussing the merits of Sebastopol or Cronstadt. In the unprofessional, such works create perhaps all the more astonishment from their unexpected magnitude; for when you are desired to ascend a desolate, uninteresting-looking secondary hill, in a remote district of Scotland, apart from any of the tourist circuits, you do not expect to find its brows covered with some triumph of industrial development. The height necessarily ascended before these works can be seen—a matter which must have made the raising of them all the more formidable—keeps them away from observation. Were they on flat ground, and near watering-places, they would be among the wonders of the world. In the vastness of the mass of collected stones, they are more like the great breakwaters of harbours of refuge than any other works we can name. Even more remarkable than General Roy’s Caterthun, appears to us to be the Barmkyn of Echt, a few miles farther north. The etymologist may call Barmkyn a corruption of Barbican if he likes. The lonely hill is so steep and circular that it seems as if it must have been artificially scarped. Scarcely from below can any curve be seen to interrupt the straight line of the ascent, and one is utterly unprepared for the mighty ramparts of stone—five of them—of which the innermost encloses a space of about an acre, quite flat, and seeming to be levelled, as the sides of the hill seem to be scarped, by art. It may be a question if these stone masses were ever built, either so as to represent external courses, like the Roman wall in Northumberland, or even in the fashion called cyclopean. They bear, in their heaped character, and the regularity of their course, more resemblance to the moraines on the edge of the glacier, than to any other object, natural or artificial, with which we happen to be acquainted. So ancient, indeed, must they be supposed to be, that in the war with the elements all minuter structural characteristics seem to have been lost, and the stones lie, not as they were placed, but virtually in a heap of ruins.