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Stopped a night in Inverness, another at Elgin, and spent the Sabbath with my friend, Anthony Cruickshank, at Sittyton, about fifteen miles north of Aberdeen. Sittyton designates hardly a village in Aberdeenshire, but it has become a point of great interest to the agricultural world a second Babraham.
Truly, if let loose in some of our New England fields, he would prove himself a tremendous "railsplitter." After spending a quiet Sabbath with this old friend and host at his farm-house at Sittyton, I took the train for Edinburgh and had a week of the liveliest enjoyment in that city, attending the meetings of the Social Science Congress.
He paid 170 guineas for "Brawith Bud," and she made his "herd's fortunes." He astonished the country by his crosses between the shorthorns and West-Highlanders. He was dead against the system of forcing for the show-yard. Foremost among eminent breeders of shorthorns in the north at the present time are the Messrs Cruickshank, Sittyton.
All through this period he carried with him his first interest in cattle-culture, but was unable to make a beginning in it until 1837, when he purchased a single Shorthorn cow in the county of Durham, and soon afterward two other animals of the same blood. These constituted the nucleus of his herd at Sittyton.
He is one of those four- handed but one-minded men who, with a pair to each, build up simultaneously two great businesses so symmetrically that you would think they gave their whole intellect, will and genius to one. Anthony Cruickshank, the Quaker of Sittyton, has made but little more noise in the world than Nature makes in building up some of her great and beautiful structures.
He was the first man in Aberdeenshire who gained a prize at the Smithfield Club Show, the animal being a Hereford ox; and he was also the first that sent cattle by railway to London. He and the Messrs Cruickshank, Sittyton, had everything their own way in the show-yard for years. The late Mr Grant Duff of Eden was one of the greatest and most systematic breeders of shorthorns in the north.
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