Note S — PART VII. Highland Festive Amusements.

Mr. Pennant, in his Tour, vol. i. p. 111, notices the ceremony of the Bolteen or Beltane—the cakes baken with scrupulous attention to rites and forms, and dedicated to birds of prey, &c., or the being whose agents they were, to propitiate them to spare the lives of themselves and flocks. Within the last twenty or thirty years these observances have almost wholly disappeared. But the author himself is old enough to have reeled his bannock, and dived, by the foregoing spells, into the secrets of futurity.