The north coast, with its Cave of Smoo and its Kyles of Durness and of Tongue, is also grandly broken. The east shore, along which the railway runs to Helmsdale, is rather a strip of fields and woods. In the south-east corner lies Dornoch, which enjoys the distinction of being the smallest county town in the kingdom, literally a village, with a restored Cathedral as proof of city dignity, and on the site of its Episcopal palace a prison that has been closed for want of custom among the honest Highlanders. There has been little crime here since the last witch was burned on British soil in 1722 at Dornoch. What brings strangers to Dornoch, now that it has a railway branch, is its golf-links, extending for thousands of acres on the seashore; and this far-northern understudy of St. Andrews offers a remarkably good autumn climate, often mild up till Christmas. Not much bigger is Golspie, with its sea-girt pile of Dunrobin, seat of the ducal family that, owning most of Sutherland, and having incorporated the title and estate of Cromarty as well as the English peerages of Stafford and Gower, can hold up its head as the largest landowner in Britain. With a thousand or so people of its own, Golspie has a good hotel, from which strangers may visit the Dunrobin Glen and waterfall, the traces of gold-working that once promised to pay in this neighbourhood, and Ben Bhraggie conspicuously crowned by Chantrey’s statue of the first Duke of Sutherland. Above Helmsdale, the Ord ridge makes the Caithness frontier, round the end of which winds what is literally a highroad into our northernmost county, described by Pennant as more terrible than the Penmaenmawr track that used to be the bugbear of travellers to Ireland. The road has been improved, but the railway is here forced away from the sea, seeking an entry into Caithness farther inland. The southern part of this county is still Highland, where the train runs on miles and miles over unbroken stretches of heather; then farther north these fall away into a windy expanse of hollows and ridges, in which Nature would seem to have come short of material for ending off our island with picturesque effect; the central part has even been called the most forlorn wilderness in Britain. Caithness, like other countrysides, has been “improved” in our time; but still it shows wide, cheerless prospects of bog and waste, with peat stacks more frequent than trees, and scattered, turf-walled houses having their thatch bound on by straw ropes and weighted down by stones to keep them from being blown away. Verses signed by the well-known initials, “J. S. B.,” set in a frame of honour at John o’ Groat’s House, describe the bareness and bleakness of these poor fields, fenced by Flagstones and slates in a row Where hedges are frightened to grow; and Shrubs in the flap of the breeze, Sweating to make themselves trees.