"teem with the most repulsive pictures of the weakness, bigotry, turbulence, and fierce and treacherous cruelty of the populace. False and corrupt innovations of literature, a compound of facts and fiction, intermingling the old and the new in heterogeneous assemblage, would persuade us to think much more of our forefathers than they thought of themselves. Scotland, until the most modern date, was an utter stranger to civilisation, presenting a sterile country with a famished people, wasted by hordes of mendicants readier to seize than to solicit--void of ingenious arts and useful manufactures, possessed of little skill and learning, plunged in constant war and rapine, full of insubordination, disturbing public rule and private peace. For waving pendants, flowing draperies, brilliant colours, eagles' feathers, herons' plumes, feasts or festivals so splendid in imagination, let naked limbs, scanty, sombre garments to elude discovery by the foe, bits of heath stuck in bonnets if they had them, precarious sustenance, abject humility and all those hardships inseparable from uncultivated tribes and countries be instituted as a juster portrait of earlier generations."[237] This statement as to Scotland is correctly drawn from social conditions which have now passed away, but which, down to the beginning of last century, belonged to the ordinary life of the people. Thus it is recorded that "over all the highlands of Scotland, and in this county in common with others, the practice of building what are called head-dykes was of very remote antiquity. The head-dyke was drawn across the head of a farm, when nature had marked the boundary betwixt the green pastures and that portion of hill which was covered totally or partially with heath. Above this fence the young cattle, the horses, the sheep and goats were kept in the summer months. The milch cows were fed below, except during the time the farmer's family removed to the distant grazings called sheilings. Beyond the head-dyke little attention was paid to boundaries. These enclosures exhibit the most evident traces of extreme old age."[238] [Illustration: REPRESENTATION OF AN IRISH CHIEFTAIN SEATED AT DINNER, 1581 FROM DERRICKE'S "IMAGE OF IRELAND"]