The scene of all these terrors has long since disappeared; the plough and roller have passed over its foundations; and all that it recorded of an ancient and interesting, though unfortunate family, with its silent though impressive narratives of the unsettled lives, rude manners, uncouth tastes, and warlike habits of our ancestors, has also perished. It was pulled down by a proprietor of Cromarty, who had purchased the property a few years before; and, as he was engaged at the time in building a set of offices and a wall to his orchard, the materials it furnished proved a saving to him of several pounds. He was a man of taste, too, as well as of prudence, and by smoothing down the eminence on which the building had stood, and then sowing it with grass, he bestowed upon it, for its former wild aspect, so workmanlike an appearance, that one might almost suppose he had made the whole of it himself. Two curious pieces of sculpture were, by some accident, preserved entire in the general wreck. In a vaulted passage which leads from the modern house to the road, there is a stone slab about five feet in length, and nearly two in breadth, which once served as a lintel to one of the two chimneys of the great hall. It bears, in low relief, the figures of hares and deer sorely beset by dogs, and surrounded by a thicket of grapes and tendrils. The huntsman stands in the centre, attired in a sort of loose coat that reaches to his knees, with his horn in one hand, and his hunting-spear in the other, and wearing the moustaches and peaked beard of the reign of Mary. The lintel of the second chimney, a still more interesting relic, is now in Kinbeakie Cottage, parish of Resolis: and a good lithographic print of it may be seen in the museum of the Northern Institution, Inverness; but of it more anon. All the other sculptures of the castle, including several rude pieces of Gothic statuary, were destroyed by the workmen. An old stone dial which had stood in front of the gate, was dug up by the writer, out of a corner of the lawn, about twelve years ago, and is now in his possession. When entire, it indicated the hour in no fewer than nineteen different places, and though sorely mutilated and divested of all its gnomons, it is still entire enough to show that the mathematical ability of the artist must have been of no ordinary kind. It was probably cut under the inspection of Sir Thomas, who, among his other accomplishments, was a skilful geometrician.