I. From the Doon to the Girvan Water, along the Carrick Shore

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Abstract
The town of Ayr is situated on a piece of flat, low-lying, sandy ground, and a considerable area in the neighbourhood is of much the same description. Immediately the Doon is crossed the surface begins to rise, and continues to do so until it culminates in Brown Carrick Hill, 940 feet above sea-level. This hill only towards its summit still answers to its colour name, which, no doubt, before cultivation had crept so far up its sides, was even more appropriate. About three-quarters of a mile to the south of the lowest Doon Bridge, is the old quarry of Burnside, at one time worked for limestone, until the “tir” became too“heavy; not that it is very thick, but that it consists, where I examined it, of 5 feet of flinty chert. This chert is of a peculiar quality, being lightish-coloured, with numerous small cavities bristling with minute quartz crystals; but neither in it, nor in the underlying light-grey limestone, which is in parts crystalline, have I detected any fossils, although I have visited the locality several times. In Burnside quarry grows in some profusion the Potato-flowered Bitter-sweet, and in an adjacent cornfield the Poor man's Weather-glass has its beautiful crimson flowers wide open; the latter we take as a happy omen for a good day in which to accomplish the long walk that is before us, and when night comes we find that we have not been disappointed. In a cultivated field near by we get the rather scarce Buxbaum's This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract

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