From a short distance beyond Dundee, called 'The Beautiful' in the days of old, the lovely and fertile Carse of Gowrie, so famed in Scottish song, stretches far westward, bounded by the Firth of Tay on the south, and a line of undulating hills on the north, till it narrows to a vale among the rocky eminences that overlook the fair city of Perth. The Carse is not quite a dead level, for here and there slope up wooded or cultivated elevations, named Inches, serving to show that in the ages they won their name the Carse had been a wide, open lake; but above one of these inches towers the abrupt, though not very lofty, rock crowned by the Castle of Dundargue, an edifice on which the surrounding hills have looked down for centuries. Bronze or iron rings, to which the Romans are said to have moored their galleys, were lately to be seen in the rock of Dundargue, and cables have been found at the foot of the Sidlaw Hills, relics of the time when an inland sea rolled its waves against their now grassy slopes. The original castle, or strong square tower, starts flush from the edge of the rock, out of which its oubliette and lower vaults are hollowed, standing clear and minute against the sky, and its machicolated battlements rise high above the more florid modern additions of the days of James VI. and Queen Anne. From its stone bartizan can be seen the sweep of the broad, blue Firth of Tay, with its vessels, the varied surface of the beautiful Carse of Gowrie clothed with leafy timber, narrow stripes of sand-edged land, and long stretches of cultivated ground, studded with curious old orchards and ancient and hoary forests of dwarf oak; and on the north and west the glorious blue mountains, piled over each other in ranges, and capped, afar off, by the historic Grampians. The earliest portion of the edifice is said to have been built by Sir Malise Graham, and possesses the battlemented bartizan, which was a decided feature in the architecture of Scotland long before her intimate connection with the Continent; and the tenures of many houses in the vicinity are still held by owners who, if they had to fulfil the original obligations, would be compelled to bring to the castle coal for its fires, beer and beef for its tables, and oats for the chargers of the men-at-arms, with cords to bind and hang prisoners condemned to the dule-tree.