The military roads were about eight hundred miles in extent, and maintained at the public expense. But they were laid out for purposes of military occupation rather than for the convenience of the districts which they traversed. Hence they were comparatively little used, and the Highlanders, in passing from one place to another, for the most part continued to travel by the old cattle tracks along the mountains. But the population were as yet so poor and so spiritless, and industry was in so backward a state all over the Highlands, that the want of more convenient communications was scarcely felt. Though there was plenty of good timber in certain districts, the bark was the only part that could be sent to market, on the backs of ponies, while the timber itself was left to rot upon the ground. Agriculture was in a surprisingly backward state. In the remoter districts only a little oats or barley was grown, the chief part of which was required for the sustenance of the cattle during winter. The Rev. Mr. Macdougall, minister of the parishes of Lochgoilhead and Kilmorich, in Argyleshire, described the people of that part of the country, about the year 1760, as miserable beyond description. He says, "Indolence was almost the only comfort they enjoyed. There was scarcely any variety of wretchedness with which they were not obliged to struggle, or rather to which they were not obliged to submit. They often felt what it was to want food.... To such an extremity were they frequently reduced, that they were obliged to bleed their cattle, in order to subsist some time on the blood (boiled); and even the inhabitants of the glens and valleys repaired in crowds to the shore, at the distance of three or four miles, to pick up the scanty provision which the shell-fish afforded them."*[2] The plough had not yet penetrated into the Highlands; an instrument called the cas-chrom*[3] [Image] The Cas-Chrom. --literally the "crooked foot"--the use of which had been forgotten for hundreds of years in every other country in Europe, was almost the only tool employed in tillage in those parts of the Highlands which were separated by almost impassable mountains from the rest of the United Kingdom.