the Scotch highlands.

Between the forests were open wolds, dotted with white sheep and golden
gorse; rolling plains of rich though ragged turf, whether cleared by the
hand of man or by the wild fires which often swept over the hills. And
between the wood and the wold stood many a Danish "town," with its
clusters of low straggling buildings round the holder's house, stone or
mud below, and wood above; its high dikes round tiny fields; its flocks of
sheep ranging on the wold; its herds of swine in the forest; and below, a
more precious possession still,--its herds of mares and colts, which fed
with the cattle in the rich grass-fen.

For always, from the foot of the wolds, the green flat stretched away,
illimitable, to an horizon where, from the roundness of the earth, the
distant trees and islands were hulled down like ships at sea. The firm
horse-fen lay, bright green, along the foot of the wold; beyond it, the
browner peat, or deep fen; and among it, dark velvet alder beds, long
lines of reed-rond, emerald in spring, and golden under the autumn sun;
shining river-reaches; broad meres dotted with a million fowl, while the
cattle waded along their edges after the rich sedge-grass, or wallowed in
the mire through the hot summer's day. Here and there, too, upon the far
horizon, rose a tall line of ashen trees, marking some island of firm rich
soil. Here and there, too, as at Ramsey and Crowland, the huge ashes had
disappeared before the axes of the monks, and a minster tower rose over
the fen, amid orchards, gardens, cornfields, pastures, with here and there
a tree left standing for shade. "Painted with flowers in the spring," with
"pleasant shores embosomed in still lakes," as the monk-chronicler of
Ramsey has it, those islands seemed to such as the monk terrestrial
paradises.