Oykel, called by the Norse Ekkjal, the northern and perhaps also the
southern bank of which probably formed the ranges of hills known in
the time of the earliest Norse jarls as Ekkjals-bakki. Everywhere
else Cat was bounded by the open sea, of which the Norse soon became
masters, namely on the west by the Minch, on the north by the North
Atlantic and Pentland Firth, and on the east and south by the North
Sea; and the great valley of the Oykel and the Dornoch Firth made Cat
almost into an island.

Like Cæsar's Gaul, Cat was "divided into three parts"; first, _Ness_,
which was co-extensive with the modern county of Caithness, a treeless
land, excellent in crops and highly cultivated in the north-east, but
elsewhere mainly made up of peat mosses, flagstones and flatness, save
in its western and south-western borderland of hills; secondly, to
the west of Ness, _Strathnavern_, a land of dales and hills, and,
especially in its western parts, of peaks; and, thirdly, to the south
of Strathnavern, _Sudrland_, or the Southland, a riviera of pastoral
links and fertile ploughland, sheltered on the north by its own
forests and hills, and sloping, throughout its whole length from
the Oykel to the Ord of Caithness, towards the _Breithisjorthr_,
Broadfjord, or Moray Firth, its southern sea.[2]

Save in north-east Ness, and in favoured spots elsewhere, also below
the 500 feet level, the land of Cat was a land of heath and woods[3]
and rocks, studded, especially in the west, with lochs abounding in
trout, a vast area of rolling moors, intersected by spacious straths,
each with its salmon river, a land of solitary silences, where red
deer and elk abounded, and in which the wild boar and wolf ranged
freely, the last wolf being killed in Glen Loth within twelve miles
of Dunrobin at a date between 1690 and 1700.[4] No race of hunters or