Note 357 — Chapter III

A curious description of their appearance, given by the Derby Mercury in 1746 (in Thomson's Memoirs of the Jacobites, vol. iii. p. 115), may be compared with the more general statement in Anderson's Prize Essay on the Highlands, Edinburgh, 1827, p. 128. ‘Cattle were the main resources of the tribe—the acquisition of these the great object of their hostile forrays. The precarious crops gave them wherewithal to bake their oaten cakes, or distil their ale or whisky. When these failed, the crowded population suffered every extreme of misery and want. At one time in particular, in Sutherland, they were compelled to subsist on broth made of nettles, thickened with a little oatmeal. At another, those who had cattle, to have recourse to the expedient of bleeding them, and mixing the blood with oatmeal, which they afterwards cut into slices and fried.’