Dumfries and Galloway: People and Place, c.1700–1914

Introduction

Edward J Cowan

Dumfries and Galloway is ringed, quite comfortably, by the hills and the sea. Merrick, in Galloway, at 843 metres, is the highest hill in the south of Scotland, eclipsing the elevations of such Moffats as White Coomb (821 m) and Hart Fell (808 m). The region’s name has always proved rather cumbersome. Founders of The Gallovidian Magazine in 1899 wanted to rename Dumfries and Galloway ‘Galfresia’, in an attempt to confer more of an identity upon the three Solway counties. Needless to say, they were unsuccessful. Their suggestion might have been preferred to Dumfries and Galloway’s present unfortunate internet domain name, ‘dumgal’. In just over one thousand years nomenclature has advanced from Gall-Gael (Gall-Ghàidheil) to dumgal! Much of Dumfriesshire was anciently Galloway.1 Others have seen it as part of the Borders, a designation that many in the county, especially to the north, would reject.

Population numbers 148,000 in an area of 6,426 km2. Dumfries’ share of people is 49,221, followed in size by Stranraer and Annan. The main arterial highways are the A75 leading west to the Irish ferries, and the M74 heading north to Glasgow, carrying five-sixths of the traffic coming into Scotland. Otherwise it is possible to drive for miles without encountering much competition. As a visitor remarked, ‘It’s like driving on your ain wee road.’ Rush hour in Kirkcudbright equates to Edinburgh on a wet Sunday morning in February.

The locality comprises three fairly well-defined units. The county of Dumfries to the east of the River Nith, extends to Roxburghshire. The Stewartry of Kirkcudbright is west of the river, so called because when Archibald Douglas, ‘The Grim’, became Lord of Galloway in 1372, he appointed a steward to oversee the administration of justice and the collection of revenues between Nithsdale and the Cree. Kirkcudbright has long been the caput of the district. The third part of Dumfries and Galloway was, and is, Wigtownshire, known locally as ‘the Shire’ (pronounced ‘Share’).2 The whole region is defined by water and mountains, with elevated moorlands, bleak but beautiful, on the western and eastern extremities. Deuteronomy 8:7 describes it well:

For the Lord bringeth thee unto a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains, of depths that spring out of the valleys and hills . . . The land is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven.3

Dumfries has long celebrated her superior biblical reference in Matthew 12:42: ‘the queen of the south shall rise up in the judgement with this generation, and shall condemn it’!

The southern boundary, the historic frontier with England, is mainly supplied by the Solway Firth extending from the River Sark in the east, along a lengthy westwards coastline before it curls north to join the Clyde.4 Heading back east, the northern, regional boundary is largely provided by the hills, running more or less along the line of the 55th parallel, all the way to the Kershope Burn bordering Kielder Forest. The region enjoys a maritime climate, which means that it does not normally experience extremes of heat or cold. Autumn and winter temperatures are generally between 6°C and 7°C, rising to 11°C in April and perhaps around 19°C in summer. Most residents would claim that summer sun is in shorter supply than they would like, stressing the amount of rainfall throughout the year, on average 87.25 mm. Water is almost always plentiful and too often abundant. The river valleys flood fairly frequently as water pours from the hills into the Solway. Snowfalls generally have a short residence, notably at the lower levels, but snow has been experienced at Wanlockhead on 1 June. The temperature is frequently half that of the English Home Counties. The ‘dark and drublie days’ from November to February have doubtless contributed to depression and bipolar disorder in the population. Scotland, along with the rest of Europe, was ravaged by the mini Ice Age extending from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, accompanied by such diseases as plague and cholera. 1816 was a year of crisis which should have been celebrating the end of the Napoleonic wars, but instead was one of atrocious weather end to end, in which no crops grew and no birds sang.5

Until recently, Scottish historians tended to neglect weather just as they failed to realise the problem of light. There was not enough of it. The ministers may have preached about God separating the light from the darkness, calling the light day and the darkness night, but for most folk over the centuries activities requiring light ended at sunset. Dwellings of the Dumfries and Galloway poor were said to be as dark by day as by night; central hearths and a ‘lum’ or a hole in the roof created a near impenetrable internal fog of smoke. Even in big hooses furniture was pushed back against the wall to avoid tripping in the dark, and people carefully memorised the layout of their buildings, sometimes cutting notches on bannisters, or other markers to guide them.

Another legacy of God’s binary organisation was the notion of light as good, and darkness as bad, the latter haunted by spirits, monsters and the Devil himself, as well as drunkards, adulterers, thieves and murderers. Those occasional nights of pure darkness, which render the wayfarer quite blind, and feel almost physical in their oppressiveness, are reminiscent of Lady MacBeth’s, ‘Come thick night and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,’6 or the memorable lines of the traditional ballad,

It was mirk, mirk nicht,

There was nae stern licht.7

Archbishop Hamilton’s catechism of 1551 counselled the faithful to use the law of God as you would use a torch when,

ye gang hame in a mirk nicht, for as the torche or bowat [small light] schawis you lycht to decerne the rychte way fra the wrang way, and the clene way fra the foule way, even sa aucht ye to use the law or command of God as a torche, bowat, or lanterin.8

In reality, the majority could not afford outdoor lights, which were in any case unreliable, just as candles indoors, if used at all, were beyond the means of most. Even some bourgeois families used ‘rushies’. Locals used to collect rushes from the shores of lochs and rivers (Fig. 0.1). Gathered in high summer, the plants would be thrown into water to keep the peel supple before it was removed, leaving the pith intact. The piths were then bleached and dried for about a week, after which they were dipped in scalding fat until saturated. A pound of dry rushes required 1,600 of the original plants. The finished product would be placed in one of a variety of rush holders, which were often not fit for purpose. Rushies made from tallow, usually evil-smelling mutton fat, were said, by a man in 1911 who used to make them when younger, to give a dismal light – ‘darkness visible’.9 Movies or television dramas on historical themes always show the sets as far too richly lit. When folk told tales of Fairyland they always remarked on the brightness of the illuminations in the fairy court. Such conspicuous brightness equated with fabulous wealth, dismissed by canny Scots, including no doubt the frugal folk of Dumfries and Galloway, as ‘sheer extravagance’.

Fig. 0.1 Cutting reeds by the River Dee to make ‘rushies’ for lighting. A painting by William Mouncey. (Courtesy of The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh)

G W Shirley, who was the head librarian of the Ewart Library in Dumfries, attempted to compare Dumfries and Galloway by introducing a note of historical determinism. Like many of us, he found the cumbersome title of the region rather inconvenient, suggesting that the incompatibility of its parts caused Sir Herbert Maxwell’s History10 to collapse; ‘he straddled an ill-assorted team’, which ‘drove an ungentle pair’.11 Shirley argued that the Nith really belongs with Galloway rather than the east of the region, which one commentator dubbed ‘the Lowlands of Eskdale’,12 encroaching on fertile Annandale, once a deanery and a stewartry. One of the best views in Scotland is from the top of the Devil’s Beef Tub13 looking towards the expanse of the Solway and the English Lake District. The Romans marched through here, as did many an English army intent upon destruction and conquest. To the east Moffat, Eskdalemuir, Lockerbie, Ecclefechan, Canonbie and Langholm are situated on, or at the edge of, river valleys, elevated moorlands, hill country and (modern) forests. Eskdalemuir is unique in our region in having been the subject of an ethnological study.14 Gretna, situated right on the frontier, might have played a part in fostering the union of Scotland and England, but instead it became renowned for irregular marriages, like several other sites along the border, such as Fiddleton Toll Bar in Ewes, where the public beddings described by Thomas Beattie took place.15

As I ride the Carlisle Road,

Where life and love have been,

I hear again the beating hoofs

Go through to Gretna Green.16

Shirley also points out that all of the river systems of Dumfries and Galloway run south, making cross-country travel difficult to this day.

Shirley’s historical differences include the Romans, who were prominent in Dumfries but believed, in his day, to be absent in Galloway.17During the ‘misty centuries’, Christianity arrived in Whithorn a century earlier than Dumfriesshire. Anglo-Saxons did not penetrate the west, while Ruthwell, on Solway’s edge, acquired the finest example of their crosses. Viking activity was greater in eastern Dumfriesshire (possibly) than Galloway. Gaelic conquered Galloway, at first co-existing with, but later supplanting, Brythonic or Welsh. Galloway (or some of it) resisted Norman inroads; Dumfries did not. Galloway supported the Balliols in opposition to Robert Bruce; Dumfries launched his career. Border towers, built as defences against English invasion, were more numerous in Dumfries than in Galloway. As we say in these parts, our folk died in their thousands defending their country, while the Gaels hid behind the protection of their islands and glens! The Douglases had an iron grip on both Dumfries and Galloway for over a century. Persecution of Covenanters was more intensive (maybe) in Galloway. More Galwegians supported the Jacobites than did the Doonhamers.18 Finally, and intriguingly, much more has been written about Galloway than Dumfries.19 Coincidentally, Archibald B Scott contributed a paper to the same issue of The Gallovidian Annual on people and language in Galloway, which is interesting but not entirely scholarly.20 He had a bee in his bonnet (or perhaps in his dog collar, for he was a minister) concerning the Picts, about whom little was recorded in Galloway until the recent excavators of Trusty’s Hill, Gatehouse-of-Fleet, pronounced the Pictish symbols genuine, but created by Britons.21

Dumfries was characterised by Burns in ‘The Five Carlins’ as,

Maggie by the banks o Nith

A dame wi pride eneuch.

It remains the metropolis of Dumfries and Galloway. Arthur Johnston celebrated the ancient burgh in a Latin ode: ‘O Scotland, cherish the altars of Dumfries above all others, for it was here that golden liberty was born to thee,’ a reference to Bruce’s murder of John Comyn at the town’s Greyfriars kirk in 1306. Over 300 years later a Cromwellian soldier reported that the local rabble ‘nauseate the very air with their tainted breath so perfumed with onions that to an Englishman it is almost infectious’.22 He and his kind ogled the young washer-women who ‘danced carantos in tubs’ under Devorgilla’s Bridge three times a week. In Tobias Smollett’s novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Melford claims that if he was confined to Scotland for life he would choose to live in Dumfries.23 John Wesley praised the ‘candid, humane, well-behaved’ townsfolk, ‘unlike most that I have found in Scotland’.24 For Walter Scott, the ‘Dumfriezers’ constituted ‘a sturdy set of true-blue Presbyterians’.25

Fig. 0.2 The Auld Bridge, Dumfries, from the New Bridge looking south towards Whitesands and St Michael’s Church. The windmill (upper right) is now the Burgh Museum. Note washerwomen on lower left. (From J McDiarmid, Picture of Dumfries & its Environs Consisting of Eight Views & Vignette Engraved by John Gellatly from Drawings by A. S. Masson, Edinburgh, 1832, plate 3)

Kirkcudbright was characterised by Daniel Defoe in 1778 as ‘a harbour without ships, a port without trade, and a fishery without nets’, a situation due to the poverty and predispositions of the inhabitants who, while grave and religious, had no notion of enrichment through trade, ‘for they strictly obey the scriptures in the very letter of the text by being content with such things as they have’.26 Robert Heron was also somewhat critical of the place while lauding its inhabitants as virtuous, intelligent and of liberal disposition, but he thought their laxness in matters of ecclesiastical discipline was inadvertently encouraging illicit behaviour. The earl of Selkirk and his son, Lord Daer, are commended for their advances in agricultural improvement, though Heron, who was undertaking a tour of Scotland in order to assess the impact of Enlightenment upon the country, thought the burgh should make greater use of agricultural produce, just as it should export more fish. There are many bankers and money dealers in the town, which he thinks is unhealthy, making credit easily available and therefore bankruptcy more prevalent. Kirkcudbright has recently lost a cotton mill to Gatehouse-of-Fleet, which was involved in aggressive expansion under the watch of the Murray family.27 On the positive side, the merchant family of Lennox ran a successful transatlantic enterprise extending to New York.28

Wigtown was the smallest of the county towns, characterised by S R Crockett as ‘that quaintest auld farranted county town, or rather county village in Scotland. Something kindly and self-respecting there is about the very douce quiet of its houses. Its square seems permanently hushed as for an open air communion’.29 The route from the county buildings to the sea is overlaid by the memory of the Wigtown Martyrs, Margaret McLauchlan and Margaret Wilson, who, according to tradition, were sentenced by Grierson of Lag in 1685 to be drowned in the Solway for refusing to abjure the Covenant. Some commentators, this one included, seriously question if the event ever happened but tradition demands that Wigtown remains their shrine.30 The burgh’s history suggests that it was built in the wrong place. Dependent on a tiny harbour and somewhat off the main road before the railway came through in 1875, it failed to develop economically, facing challenges from the more advantageously situated Stranraer and Newton Stewart. Passenger trains ceased in 1950; complete shutdown was fourteen years later. Soon thereafter the community spirit which Wigtown had long enjoyed addressed improvement and refurbishment, culminating in its creation as Scotland’s National Book Town and a highly successful annual book festival, which at time of writing (2018) is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Stranraer’s ‘Clayholers’, named for a suburb, and a bay of Loch Ryan, enjoyed the boon of reasonable road, rail and sea links as well as the Irish crossing. Newton Stewart, the gateway to the splendid Galloway Hills, is on the main road west from Dumfries.

A significant chunk of the historiography of Dumfries and Galloway was in the hands of members of the local aristocracy. Peter McKerlie heroically took on the task of writing his five-volume Lands and their Owners in Galloway.31 He has often suffered criticism for his errors but on the positive side he excavated huge amounts of documentation, much of it stored in obscure places, in order to make some sense of Galloway’s highly complex patterns of landholding. He approvingly quoted Lord Barcaple, who remarked that even the humblest Galwegians ‘were remarkable for intelligence’ and that the whole community was in a ‘well-ordered state’, though clearly some of the detractions were irritating. Of Galloway he wrote that, ‘those who, or whose families, have been the shortest time in the district, are the loudest in claiming it as their own loved land’.32

Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw was a politician, a convinced Christian, a prominent sabbatarian and overall a humane and decent individual. He introduced his study with a memorable quote from Job 8:8, 9: ‘Inquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers: for we are but of yesterday, and know nothing.’ In 1864, he published the first version of the Hereditary Sheriffs of Galloway, a history of his ancestors and the province. He had a pleasing style and a strong sense of narrative, relating that in the seventeenth century Stranraer traders left their homes on horseback early in the morning, crossed from Portpatrick to Donaghadee, rode to Belfast for the market and returned home at night. When someone praised Cromwell’s justices as fairer than those of the Scots, an irate Scottish judge riposted, ‘deil thank them, a wheen kinless loons, wi neither kith nor kin to bother them’.33 Agnew approvingly lists those landowners who, to their cost, sided with the Covenanters, noting that dragooning bred fanaticism, as the irreconcilables became ‘hill folk’ and ‘mountain-men’.34 Dissidents dressed in women’s clothing to attack and punish the curate of Balmaclellan. Landowners again suffered after the battle of Bothwell Bridge. Lord Stair organised the Galloway landowners to approve and vote for the first article of Union in 1707. Nevertheless, Agnew obviously had considerable sympathy for the subordinate classes during the south west’s greatest struggle.

Sir Herbert Maxwell (1845–1937), author of a history of the region and numerous other relevant publications, president of the Society of Antiquaries, chairman of the National Library of Scotland and of Historic Monuments of Scotland, is perhaps most effectively introduced by his grandson Gavin (1914– 1969):

My grandfather had been the first to achieve academic fame, though paradoxically he seems to have been the first to find his income insufficient. He inherited a sizeable estate the net rental of which was £16,000 per annum and after an interminable and distinguished, though perhaps over-deployed career as politician, (sometime Secretary of State for Scotland and a Lord of the Treasury), painter, archaeologist, historian, naturalist and writer of stupendous output he departed this life as a Knight of the Thistle, Privy Councillor, fellow of the Royal Society, Lord-Lieutenant of the County of Wigtownshire and Grand Old Man of Galloway; the possessor of a shrunken estate of 9,000 acres – and the noteworthy failure to have anything of any real value left in the house.35

Gavin had rather an idiosyncratic view of family history, as of many other topics:

The Maxwells avoided fame but not always notoriety, the peculiar wickedness of certain holders of the title being documented with scurrilous relish in the parish records. The worst had a black page boy whom he beat to death, and a white horse on which he went wenching at night, wandering far afield like a tomcat and leaving not a few unacknowledged kittens.36

Sir Herbert, on form, was a wonderful writer, see his Memories of the Months and his books on natural history, but in writing ‘an impartial and dispassionate review of the course of events and social change in Dumfries and Galloway’37 he comes across as sound, if somewhat flat and tired. Nevertheless, he was extremely popular with the reading public and also enjoyed an enviable academic reputation, while serving most of his life as a politician. He wrote that ‘witness to the continuity of [Dumfries and Galloway’s] ethnology’ was the mix of languages in the region’s nomenclature.38

Inevitable concomitants of the estates were hunting and shooting. The Scottish feudal nobility as early as 1550 complained that they could ‘get no pastime, hunting or hawking, by reason that the wylde beasts and wylde fowls are exiled and banished by them that schuttes with guns’.39 Parliament responded with an enactment which stated that anyone shooting deer, roe or other wild beasts with a culverin or pistol would incur the death penalty and confiscation of their goods, which seems a somewhat hefty punishment. Associated legislation decreed a price list for poulterers selling game. Thus cranes and swans were to be sold for no more than five shillings, ‘Wild Goose of the great breed’ two shillings, the claik (barnacle), quink (golden-eye) and rute (Brent goose) 1/6d each, blackcock and grey hen 6d, quhaip (curlew) 6d, and plover, small moorfowl and woodcock 4d. Also listed are rabbits, larks (by the dozen), snipe, quail and gryce (a tame or wild pig).40

Galloway and the wilder parts of Dumfriesshire had long been known as excellent hunting areas. The Forest of Galloway is recorded in the twelfth century, a huge area extending from Cree to Urr, from the Forest of Buchan in the wild country around Glen Trool to the ‘New Forest’, first documented around 1300, in the upper Glenkens. In the east, the great forest of Ettrick, including Eskdale, extended into Dumfriesshire. The word ‘forest’ is related to ‘foris’, which means ‘out of doors’, but it was not necessarily densely wooded.41 The medieval forest was often ‘a wild uncultivated waste’ set aside for hunting, but it had other uses too. There were settlements within forest bounds. One example was Dalry, whose priest in the fifteenth century sought to raise money for the repair of his church, ‘which is situated in the woods, far from habitation of other Christian faithful and among fierce men ill-versed in the faith’.42 Similar language was used by the gentlemen of Carsphairn (‘a very desolate wilderness containing 500 communicants’), who petitioned the General Assembly in 1638 to carve a new parish out of Kells and Dalry, with regard to ‘the salvation of souls of barbarous and ignorant people who has heretofore lived without the knowledge of God, their children unbaptised, their dead unburied, and no way for getting maintenance to a minister’.43 Considering the topography it is likely that the name Kells derives from ‘groves’ rather than chapel sites.

Cattle, sheep and Galloway nags were pastured in the Forest, while pannage was the right to permit pigs to forage in the woods. Oak bark was used for the tanning of hides. Indeed, there was so much human activity that the Forest had its own laws, which would have been unnecessary in an empty wilderness. Some animals, and not just deer, were confined to ‘parks’, hence the regional farms with ‘Park’ in their name, a term later reiterated when illegal Irish cattle were placed in enclosures in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, giving rise to the activities of the Levellers.

In his Large Description of Galloway (1684), Andrew Symson mentions ‘the considerable woods upon the west side of the Loch of Kenmoir, Karn Edward Wood, the forest of Craig Gilbert’.44 In 1691, the earl of Hopetoun, owner of the lead mines at Leadhills, paid Sir Alexander Gordon of Earlstoun 23,000 merks (£113,164.31 in today’s money) for some of his woods. One hundred years later, Kenmure exported timber to England from Loch Ken via the Dee and Kirkcudbright. As Robert Heron headed homewards to New Galloway in 1791, he enthused about the Drumrask oaks but otherwise lamented that wood was too scarce to be used as fuel. However, he waxed eloquent about the Kenmure Woods, ‘of stately elms, beeches and pines’, Shirmers ‘embowered in wood’, and the oaks of Glenlee, whose distinguished owner, Sir Thomas Miller, Lord President of the Court of Session, had recently died.45 He also noted that the country people considered the cutting down of hawthorn trees to bring bad luck (see Chapter 11). He also reminds us that memory of the medieval woodlands is preserved in place-names such as Forrest and Bush.

Entries in the Old Statistical Account reveal that the region was still rich in natural woodland at the end of the eighteenth century. There were an estimated sixty acres of natural woodland in Balmaclellan parish, where it was recommended that more trees be planted to provide animal shelter.46 At Carsphairn it was erroneously claimed that woods had abounded 150 years earlier but had been consumed by the iron smelters.47 Dalry reported six miles of natural woods of considerable extent along the banks of the Ken, which were still there fifty years later.48 There were also plantations at Earlstoun and at Todstone, Cleugh, Glenhoul and Arndarroch, all on the High Carsphairn Road. Kells could boast 500 acres of natural woodland scattered over several sites, mostly oak, ash, birch, alder and hazel, but deer had vanished from the forest.49

By the time of the New Statistical Account (1830s and 1840s), the woods of Airds, Kenmure and Glenlee remained worthy of remark.50 Much of Balmaclellan displayed ‘extensive plains of moss, possessing all the sterility of the desert, incapable of the least improvement’.51 The Reverend George Murray noted the destruction of fine large specimens of silver fir at Barscobe, destroyed in the hurricane of 1839. He also reported the ‘Daffin Tree’ at Killochy, a large ash of unusual shape, and a meeting-place of the locals.52 To ‘daff’ was to playfully pass the time; Daffin Hill is still so named. Carsphairn remained destitute of wood, while shepherds were resistant to plantation as detracting from pasture.53

There has been a long history of hunting in the south of Scotland. William Wallace, Scotland’s national hero, is first recorded as an outlaw in Ettrick Forest. James VI disapproved of the use of weapons: ‘Hunting with running hounds is the most honourable and noble sort of sport, for it is a thievish form of hunting to shoot with gunnes and bowes.’54 Guns evolved slowly, flintlocks becoming common from the end of the eighteenth century. Aberdeen minister A J Forsyth invented the percussion ignition, to be followed by breech loaders, which truly brought about a revolution in the ‘sport’ of shooting. About the same time killing became more efficient as drives were organised, designed to ‘drive’ such birds as grouse towards the line of waiting shooters, mostly aristocrats and the well-off, for the activity was expensive, as were the guns and the increasingly effective ammunition. A flash in the pan became a thing of the past, or of proverb, as the gentry, or some of them, became obsessed with the slaughter of birds and beasts.55 Hugh S Gladstone of Capenoch, Penpont, author of the magisterial Birds of Dumfriesshire, like many of his ilk saw no conflict between a love of birds and a passion for killing them. He reported that in 1869, 247 black grouse and sixty-nine other creatures classed as game were killed by eleven guns at Glenwharrie (Dumfriesshire) in one shoot. At Barnshangan (Wigtownshire), Lord Dalrymple and five guests shot 105 blackgame, 222 grouse, twelve partridges, one snipe and ten hares. Near Langholm, Lord Dalkeith, the heir of Buccleuch, and a friend, in half a day killed ninety-eight blackgame. In 1911, 2,523 grouse were killed by eight guns on the Dumfriesshire/Roxburghshire border. Two heroic English ‘sportsmen’ told Gladstone that they had organised ‘Sparrow shoots’, the sparrow having been designated ‘the Avian Rat’. At a four-day shoot in Dumfriesshire, six guns ‘who would be classed as distinctly below the average’ shot 111 grouse, forty-five blackgame, eighteen partridges, 496 pheasants, fifteen woodcock, seventeen duck, 120 hares, forty-six rabbits and seven wood-pigeons, consuming 2,138 cartridges. Gladstone senior on one occasion shot a pheasant which landed on a hare, killing it, feather and fur in a single hit!56 The largest bag ever recorded anywhere, according to Gladstone, was in 1797 when, in Austria, Prince Lichtenstein and eleven others in fourteen hours shot 39,000 ‘pieces of game’. This story recalls the disgraceful fact that in America passenger pigeons numbering 136 million in 1871, were extinct by 1914. The last two great auks in Iceland and the world, once also numbered in millions, were killed in 1844. In the nineteenth century, the human race apparently declared war on a population that could not fight back. It is almost sad to report that large leather-bound game books, with entries in beautiful copperplate, several of which I have been privileged to examine, are treasured objects of great beauty.

Fig. 0.3 Shooting party at Glenwhargen, Scaur Water. (Courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Libraries, Information and Archives)

Shooting, like all sports, generated its own lore and anecdotes, such as that of an irate Capenoch keeper who, fed-up and frustrated by a hopeless shooter, grabbed his gun to the accompaniment of ‘Hoots mon! gie me the gun; ye canna shoot.’ This worthy was fond of quoting, ‘There’s mair room to miss than to hit’ and he once told a man who failed to fire at a bird, ‘If ye dinna fire ye’ll never get; the bird’s aye in mair danger than yersel’.’57 Gladstone listed twenty-nine varieties of birds shot in thirty years ‘within six hundred yards of the front door of his house’. Birds described as ‘vermin’ were carrion-crow, heron, jackdaw, jay, kestrel, magpie, merlin, owl, rook and sparrowhawk. He had also fished grayling, grilse, herling, perch, salmon and trout from Scaur Water. Mammals did not escape: victims included cat, hedgehog, otter, rat, stoat and weasel. Adders were also killed.

Since medieval times, a myriad of Scottish laws governing hunting had accrued. Poaching was on a domestic scale until the eighteenth century, when notices would appear in which local landowners banded together to warn would-be law-breakers of the hazards of illegal activity. Great pains were taken to reserve the taking of game as the privilege of the upper classes. A piece of shooting folklore related that at the pick-up after a grouse drive, a participant, uncertain about who had shot one of the birds he recovered, asked his host, on whose ground the shoot took place, whether or not it was his. ‘Ma bird?’ shouted the laird, ‘They’re a ma birds.’58 There was an ongoing debate about whether or not ownership of land included the creatures that depended upon it or swam in related rivers. Hunters trampled the crops and ruined fences, while birds such as wood-pigeons, protected in doocots, consumed precious seed. In 1856, a tenant on the Cally estates complained that half his wheat crop had been eaten by hares, adding ‘the rabbits is also getting ruinously plentiful’. The Murrays of Cally reserved the right to ‘search for, take and kill game free of damage’.59 The neo-feudalists, the newly enriched from stints abroad or who made their fortunes in industry, were the worst in this respect. In some places gleaning was forbidden for the first time in history, and the right to collect dead wood for heating and cooking was banned. Some of the newcomers had little or no experience of farm management and rural life in general.

With the advent of steamships game could be swiftly transferred to the cities, encouraging ugly and sometimes violent gangs to invade estates seeking prey. If caught they faced fourteen years’ transportation, the same sentence that political radicals received. Gamekeepers had to arm themselves as gangs came up from England intent upon robbery. Poaching was perennial, smacking as it did of adventure, alongside possible profit and a chance to hit back at the landlords. It was even unofficially tolerated by some landowners. From April 1842 to April 1843 only 13 per cent of offenders committed to prison in Kirkcudbright were guilty of breaching the game laws. Out of 247 jailed in Dumfries that same year only twenty-one were poachers.60 Criminal gangs were a different matter, a problem only partially solved by additional staff and police activity.

There were similar tensions concerning Solway fishing rights. Inland farmers and landowners endlessly complained that because so many salmon were trapped at river-mouths, very few penetrated the interior. The Solwegians were caught up in irritating legislation and boundaries which were misunderstood, wilfully or otherwise. The firth was the great maritime route bringing contraband as well as legitimate cargoes to both coasts. So far as excisemen were concerned, the Isle of Man was a kind of Devil’s Island where anything or anyone could be bought and sold. Smuggling was a universal activity in places like Annan which shifted goods eastward to the Borders (see Chapter 5). In the eighteenth century, following the unpopular Union of 1707, smuggling affected all classes who regarded it as almost a patriotic activity.

The accompanying map (Map 0.1) shows the crowded part of the Solway, into which several large rivers drain, marked ‘Upper Limits’ at the head of the firth. It extended from the ‘Large House of Carsethorn of Arbigland in the parish of Kirkbean’ to the hotel of Skinburness in the parish of Abbey Holme, Cumbria. The intermediate section from Ross Point Lighthouse (Kirkcudbright) to St Bees Head was defined as the ‘Limits of the Firth’. The Solway at its greatest extent is contained by the line from Mull of Galloway to Haverigg Haw, a distance of more than sixty miles, as fixed by the Secretary of State in 1864.

Both sides of the Solway showed an interest in canal building. The Gatehouse Canal created some traffic and the Carlingwark Cut (Fig. 0.4), from the loch to the Dee, made the transportation of marl much easier and cheaper with good results. On the English side, the outcome was the Carlisle Canal, built by the Carlisle and Annan Navigation Company; the Robert Burns was the first ship to travel through it. A scheme for a waterway from Kirkcudbright to Ayr via the Ken did not materialise but it never seemed very realistic in any case. The upper Solway became a crowded corner for rail too, with the creation of the Solway Junction Railway in 1869. The viaduct across the firth was 1,940 yards long, a remarkably fragile looking structure which finally closed in 1921.61

Map 0.1 Map of the Inner and Outer Solway Firth. (Cartography by Helen Stirling; based on PP, 1896, XLVI, C.8182, Map 1: Report of the Commissioners of the Fisheries of the Solway Firth, Part I)

Fig. 0.4 Carlingwark Cut linking Carlingwark Loch and the River Dee. (Photograph by Lizanne Henderson, © padeapix)

Some of the perennial issues engaging both sides of the firth are illustrated by the ‘Salmon Wars’ of the nineteenth century, though it should be noted that this was less of a war between two nations than it was between different interests and classes. The Solway was regarded as ‘a patient labouring under a chronic disease, partly medical, partly surgical’ – for which application of remedies from a legal source is required, although ‘natural history and knowledge of the habits of the salmon must not be omitted from the consultation’.62

A testimony to the importance of trade for the economy of Dumfries and Galloway was the commissioning of Southwick lighthouse in 1748, the second oldest in Scotland. Several Galloway commentators feared that their harbours were becoming silted up and so had no great future. They were correct but Solwegians on the Dumfriesshire shore observed that the sea was receding, leaving behind a ‘barren and cheerless waste’, known as ‘sleech’, which heralded the possibility of land reclamation.

It has been stated that the Solway fishing industry did not get going until 1853 and when it did the disputes intensified.63 Fishermen on both sides were supposed to respect the median of the firth but few could be sure exactly where it was because it was continually shifting due to winds, tidal currents and the fragile nature of the seabed. England had banned all traps, such as stake nets. In 1563, the Scottish parliament enacted that ‘all cruives and yairs in waters that ebb and flow, or upon sands and shaulds [shallows] far within the water’ were to be put away, except in the waters of the Solway.64 The wording, of course, allowed lawyers to debate at length as to exactly what constituted ‘the waters of the Solway’.

Cruives were wicker baskets set in the river, like yairs, to catch fish. The most famous were the cruives of Cree at Penninghame, used by the locals as a river crossing. One witness claimed that they were meant to stop salmon advancing up the river as well as to catch them. A method known as ‘grappling’ was used on the River Annan’s Rock-Hole or Rotchel; another method was to beat the surface of the water. The use of shoulder nets at the Doaches, close to the mouth of the River Dee near Kirkcudbright, was considered unique (Fig. 0.5). Two large doaches, or traps, were built on either side of the river, linked by a gangway made up of rocks in the water and additional stone barriers, such as to stop any fish from passing upriver. The shoulder net was attached to a twenty-foot pole, the fisher dropping it into a likely pool. Sensing a catch, he would flick it out of the water to be clubbed by an associate standing nearby. The netter had to be a man of superior strength. The men would often be soaked to the skin, standing on rocks in the middle of powerful rapids.

Fig. 0.5 Shoulder netters on the Doaches, River Dee, Tongland. (From H V Morton, In Scotland Again, London, 1933)

The Solway, particularly the inner firth, was well-known for the practice of spearing or leistering salmon. The leister varied in length between twelve and twenty-four feet, headed by a fork of three or four prongs. The implement was originally favoured for river-beds that were too rocky for nets. The activity was also known as ‘shauling’, ‘when the tide is almost spent, and the waters turned shallow’.65 The missile could be thrown from the standing position or from horseback. The minister of Canonbie condemned the whole action as murder.66

The most famous Solway fishing activity is haaf netting (Fig. 0.6), which, in the past, involved a poke-net fixed to a beam twelve to fourteen feet long, but nowadays more likely eighteen feet in length. Some three or four fishers might take part, with the mouth of the net facing the stream. However, in the eighteenth century, it was stated that twelve to twenty men, known collectively as a ‘Mell’, might stand abreast out into the channel, ‘up to the middle, in strong running water, for three or four hours together’.67 Supposedly, the practice was introduced by the Vikings. Today it is proving difficult to attract youngsters to the sport for which there was at one time a lengthy waiting list occasionally depending on heredity.

Fig. 0.6 Haaf netting on the River Nith. (Courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Libraries, Information and Archives)

The duke of Buccleuch’s head keeper at Langholm deplored the increasing numbers of competing fisheries in the Solway – drift netters, whammel boats, cobles, shrimp boats, occasional herring fishers and, very briefly, eel fishers. It was alleged that paidle nets, supposedly set to catch white fish, were actually intended to take salmon. Furthermore, there were different closed seasons and closed days of the week in both countries and different sizes of meshes in nets. Elderly fishermen testified that, as fish stocks had decreased, the number of boats had expanded. At Waterfoot, Annan, in 1886, seventy-seven families, numbering 354 souls, depended on the sea. One old man, William Wylie from Annan, claimed to have been fishing for sixty-five years. When he was young, fish had been abundant, while flounders, sea trout and brown trout were now virtually wiped out. According to him, the way to increase stocks once more was to do away with fishery boards, not the most tactful response when testifying to such a board.68 One witness admitted that salmon fishing was a very selfish business: ‘if you do me today I will do you tomorrow’.69 Many complained that fishery boards favoured the landowners, who were indeed often over-represented on them. Fisherman Andrew Davidson of Annan spoke out: ‘I should like to see a representative board, not of men who know more about shooting grouse than catching salmon, but a board of practical men,’ who understood fishing. As he put it: ‘I do not mean a gardener to sit on a fishing board to give his voice.’70 The cacophony of voices can still be heard today.71

Fig. 0.7 The fishing fleet at Waterfoot, Annan. The Solway Junction Railway is in the background. (Courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Libraries, Information and Archives)

Some parts of Dumfries and Galloway were well populated with Covenanters in the seventeenth century, their memory persisting to this day. The National Covenant was the response to Charles I’s attempts to anglicise the Scottish Kirk. Drawn up in 1638, it fell into three parts. The first recycled the Negative Confession of 1581, a comprehensive rejection of popery initially imposed upon the court of the young James VI by those fearful of his inclinations and the destination of his precious soul. The second section cited a long list of dusty statutes designed to safeguard the Reformed Church. The third reinforced the absolute adherence of signatories to the Reformed religion, while demanding total rejection of recently imposed ecclesiastical innovations. Adherents were required to ‘stand to the defence of our dreade Soveraigne, the king’s Majesty, his Person and Authority, in the defence and preservation of the foresaid true Religion, Liberties and Lawes of the Kingdom’. The potential incompatibility of the defence of king and Kirk was to prove the crux of the Covenant.

Before 1638, discussion of covenants was largely an abstraction; the first example was when God promised Noah that never again would the waters cover the Earth. Thus a covenant entered into with God was an inviolable act that lasted for eternity. In addition, the Scottish Covenant was a document which supporters were required to sign, introducing a new era of contract and personal responsibility, something an omniscient God might not have considered absolutely necessary. War soon followed, to embrace the ‘Three Kingdoms’ of Scotland, England and Ireland. When the English required additional military support they appealed to the Scots, who obliged with the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. The English regarded the new agreement as a civil league whereby the Scots provided military assistance for the parliamentarians against Charles I, but the Scots regarded it as a religious covenant which aimed to impose religious conformity upon both countries. The south west did not play a notable part in the early phase of the Covenanting era, though some from Galloway did become involved in the ‘Whiggamore Raid’ of 1648, when a force of western radicals moved against the royalists. Charles I was beheaded in January 1649. Fanatical ministers, having purged the Covenanting army of all supposed undesirables, met their nemesis at the battle of Dunbar in 1650, when the staunch right arm of the Lord was smashed and Oliver Cromwell took charge.

For almost a decade, Covenanters nursed their grievances until Charles II pretended to adopt the Covenants and returned to his kingdom. The south west and much of Scotland then endured one of the worst and most miserable periods in their history. Charles detested the Covenants, which he had cynically owned, and soon began a new ‘reformation’ of the Kirk in the English image, leading to the deposition of Covenanting ministers, who conducted conventicles, services in the open air or in suitable farm buildings. Christ himself could be regarded as the first conventicler since it was well attested that he avoided the temple. Non-attenders at the kirk were subject to heavy fines. Nithsdale and Galloway suffered in particular from vicious persecution. Dragoons were billeted on the properties of dissidents. Revolt seemed inevitable and when it came it was backed by the men and women most affected, who took part in what was perhaps Scotland’s first true peasant revolt, the Glenkens Rising (1666), which was seared into the memory of Galwegians well into the twentieth century. Long after Old Mortality had gone to his grave, the folk of Dumfries and Galloway, and Ayrshire, were still erecting memorials to the Covenanters (Fig. 0.8). Many were imprisoned, shot or terrorised on the orders of the state. Others were transported to England’s overseas plantations. How many is not known; some died in storms and wrecks en route to the Americas. There were those also who were compelled by commitments to wives and families to deny the Covenants, kneeling on the ground and holding their arms above their heads as they abjured.

The rebels of 1666 were henceforward marked by the authorities. Lists were compiled of those who had participated or were suspected of so doing. Dalry and Balmaclellan were noted as hotbeds of sedition but so too, to a lesser extent, were the folk of Carsphairn and Kells (New Galloway), the four parishes becoming known collectively as ‘The Glenkens’.

This is not the place for a history of the later Covenanters but a few events must be mentioned in attempting to understand what they were about. John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, aka Bluidy Clavers, was entrusted with the governance of the south west. He made a wretched beginning by suffering defeat at the hands of the rebels at High Drumclog on 1 June 1679. Three weeks later he had his more than ample revenge at the battle of Bothwell Bridge. Thereafter, every suspected person, including children, according to the historian of the troubles Robert Wodrow, was questioned as to whether or not they were present at the battle, as the punishments, mostly bloody in the extreme, went merrily on. Richard Cameron returned from exile to issue, in short order, two revolutionary documents, the Queensferry Paper and the Sanquhar Declaration, both swearing allegiance to the Covenant and ‘the independent government’ of the Kirk, while overthrowing the kingdom of darkness in the form of popery and prelacy. The documents urged the abolition of the royal family and the setting up of a republic, the outlawing of the indulged clergy, and the defence of Covenanting worship and liberties. The whole episode would seem ridiculous if its supporters were less sincere but Cameron paid with his life at the skirmish of Ayrsmoss (1680). Donald Cargill was another single-minded victim of the gallows, craving eternal martyrdom on the small stage that was Edinburgh and Scotland, albeit he was just one among the many who suffered the horrors of state persecution at the hands of political servants who, whatever their private views, had little option but to adopt the measure they did. No state in the world could have tolerated the opinions and actions of the ‘suffering bleeding remnant’. For their part, the survivors among the latter looked back fondly to the ‘good ill days of persecution’.72

Fig. 0.8 The Nithsdale Martyrs Monument, Dalgarnoc, erected in the 1920s. (From J K Hewison, Dalgarnoc: Its Saints and Heroes: History of Morton, Thornhill, and the Harknesses, Dumfries, 1935)

The day of 29 July 1684 saw a botched attempt by some Covenanters to rescue one of their number who was being taken to Edinburgh for punishment. A party of dragoons was attacked in the steep and narrow Pass of Enterkin in the Lowther Hills by some ten to twenty would-be rescuers. At least two individuals were killed on each side, but the accounts are very confused. Drumlanrig Castle was under construction at the time and all of the builders were closely interrogated, as were the inhabitants of nearby parishes. Nithsdale and parts of Galloway were essentially placed under martial law. In some cases, censuses were made of men, women and children over fourteen, providing excellent, but so far little-used data, for researchers. In Kirkmahoe, numerous women who were identified as the spouses of named suspects were questioned, ‘all negative’. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before. It is a reasonable assumption that the information was provided by those ministers who had replaced their outed brethren. While we have little or no indication of how they went about the task, pages and pages of the printed records of the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland testify to the determination of the authorities. In Kirkmahoe, they were particularly concerned about dissident women. It had recently been decreed by the Privy Council that husbands were responsible for their wives’ crimes. For example, they could be fined if the women failed to attend the kirk, a practice they protested was unfair to themselves since they presumably could not, or did not want to, control their better halves. The male complaint was upheld but the significance of the novel development was that it revealed the emergence of female empowerment.

It is often asserted that some aspects of Covenanting ideology were incorporated in the settlement of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689, as indeed they were, but the faithful objected that the ‘revolution settlement’ was applied to the Kirk without consultation and they remained concerned that the English would continue to attempt religious uniformity between the two kingdoms. The remnants of the various devotees who had followed one or others of the radical Covenanting persuasion, such as the Cameronians and the Renwickians, formed themselves into societies sharing common interests, eventually comprising the United Societies, which were seldom united at all; in reality, they represented the collapse of the Covenanting movement. The writings and publications by and about the heroes of the Covenant circulated, freely and in substantial numbers, through to the end of the nineteenth century. Such works were to remain much more popular and much more widely read than those of the Enlightenment, which have received infinitely more scholarly attention. In the eighteenth century, there were arguments between the Auld Lichts and the New Lichts about the status of the Covenants, the former arguing that they were relevant for all time, the others believing that they were historical documents and no longer binding.73 Some of these arguments led to secession from the Church of Scotland, which recalls the old chestnut of how many ideas are required to create ten new Scottish Churches? The answer is one!

The establishment during the years of persecution and the ‘Killing Times’ of the mid 1680s was Episcopalian, but Catholics were still surprisingly conspicuous: the Browns of Carsluith; the Creichtons of Kirkconnel; the McKills of Troqueer and Dumfries; and various branches of the powerful Maxwell family, the chief of which was William, fourteenth Lord Maxwell, ninth Lord Herries and fifth earl of Nithsdale. The last-named was sent to the Tower for his part in the 1715 Jacobite Rising, as was Gordon of Kenmure:

Green Nithsdale, make moan for thy leaf’s in the fa’

The lealest of thy warriors are drapping awa;

The rose in thy bonnet, that flourished sae and shone,

Has lost its white hue, and is faded and gone!74

The foregoing obituary was not required thanks to Nithdale’s resourceful and heroic wife, Winifrede Herbert, who contrived a rescue by disguising him in female attire as a Mrs Morgan, thereafter spiriting him off to France.75 Kenmure was not so fortunate, suffering a brutal execution.

Although Dumfries has not proved immune to religious strife, it seemed to those of us who grew up in the burgh in the 1950s and early 1960s a fairly tolerant place. Naïve we may have been but we had no awareness whatsoever of sectarianism. Some Catholics were schoolmates who socialised like everybody else. We knew that St Joseph’s was a Catholic school which, to our cost, always hammered us at rugby. Some of our Protestants were sent to St Joe’s because they did not perform well at school in the pernicious, divisive, pedagogical tool known as the Eleven Plus, which was purportedly designed to separate academic and non-academic students. On the other hand, many emigrant friends in Canada have told me that what they least liked about Scotland was sectarianism, something they were very glad to leave at home.

A stain upon the south west that has long been recognised rather than ignored, as has been recently argued, was slavery.76 In Sunday school, children heard a lot about David Livingstone and his attempt to defeat slavery in Africa. As an undergraduate student, I heard the lectures of Kenneth Little, Professor of Anthropology at Edinburgh, on slavery and read his book on The Black Man in Britain. In the 1970s, I reviewed at least one book on the subject for the magazine Question. Many of us were surprised that a book on the Glasgow Tobacco Lords could exclude discussion of slavery.77 Books like James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name were extremely popular. The street names of Glasgow’s Merchant City are sad memorials of Glasgow’s dependency on slavery. Many in the south west knew that John Paul Jones had captained slave ships and that William Douglas had acquired a fortune exploiting slaves, enabling him to found both Castle Douglas and Newton Douglas, now Newton Stewart. Richard Oswald, Britain’s largest slave trader, owned the Cavers estate, Kirkbean. Samuel Robinson of Kirkinner wrote A Sailor Boy’s Experience Aboard a Slave Ship, published in 1867 and reprinted in 1996. In 1999, Donna Brewster taught us about The House that Sugar Built, indicating that many people like John McGuffie purchased properties in Dumfries and Galloway with money made on the backs of slaves. Frances Wilkins has greatly added to our knowledge of this sad topic.78 Lizanne Henderson in 2008 documented many individuals from the region who were involved in the trade, also discussing some of those involved in the abolition movement.79 The issue of slavery in this region was not ignored except deliberately, just like the Antiguan slave boy who had been told by his master, John McCracken from Glenluce, to look after his horse while he went for a swim and thus was too busily engaged to be able to help when McCracken was ‘destroyed by a shark while bathing’.80

One group that does not seem to be mentioned by very many commentators is that variously known as the Gypsies, the Tinkers, the Travellers, or in Dumfries and Galloway, the Tinkler Gypsies. The Gypsies, or Lords of Little Egypt, are thought to have arrived in Scotland around 1500. One of the most useful studies of these folk was published by Andrew McCormick, born at Glenluce but soon moving with his family to Newton Stewart, of which, after he qualified as a lawyer, he became sometime provost. His best-known book is probably Galloway: The Spell of its Hills and Glens (1932), which like his Words from the Wildwood, Sixteen Galloway Tales and Sketches (1912) is in danger at times of haunting the Kailyard. Charles S Dougall, headmaster of Dollar Academy and author of The Burns Country, wrote a fanciful introduction to Wildwood, which he described as:

a guide-book of a kind, a guide to the spirit of Galloway – the sad spirit that wails on the moors in the voice of heather-bleat, the lonely spirit that broods beside the mountain lochs, the eerie spirit that folds the hills in mantles of mist, the wild tumultuous spirit that shrieks in the hurricane and makes the hearts of even those who know it well to quake with dread.81

McCormick’s first book, The Tinkler-Gypsies of Galloway (1906), is an excellent source of information, a veritable source-book, since the author was fascinated by his subject, interviewing and photographing the Gypsies in their camps, as they worked on farms or just by the roadside whenever he could, as well as learning their cant, studying their customs and collecting their stories and folklore. Joseph Train passed some notes on the Gypsies to Walter Scott who, in general terms, incorporated and fictionalised them in his novel Guy Mannering. Like much other information he was given or absorbed, Scott very much made it his own, however bowdlerised and degraded, to the point that he was undeservedly regarded as somewhat of an authority on the Gypsies, as he was concerning many other aspects of Scottish history and literature that he equally contaminated. All gypsiologists were also interested in the Gypsies of Kirk Yetholm in the Borders, who were mainly Faas, related to the Marshalls and other wanderers in Galloway.

McCormick, dazzled by the spell cast by the ‘Wizard of the North’, wastes a lot of time and ink trying to sort out the inspiration or models for events and places in the novel. He is much more interesting when he relies upon his own knowledge. For example, he supplies specimens of cant such as ‘strammel’ (straw), ‘darbies’ (handcuffs), ‘shand’ (bad coin), ‘libben’ (lodgings) and ‘barri’ (good), the last of which inexplicably entered the cant of Scottish schoolchildren. Other words no longer in use included ‘oop’ (to unite), ‘sunkie’ (a low stool), ‘scouring the cramp-ring’ (being thrown into fetters or prison), and ‘frammagemm’d’ (throttled). He also preserved some superstitions. Galloway Tinklers would turn back if they met a ‘gley-eyed’ woman, one with a strabismus. There were many beliefs, bad and good, about flat feet. At New Year the most desired ‘first foot’ was a donkey, which failing a sheep. All believed in witches; many asserted they had heard pipers playing in caves or underground.82

The Tinklers travelled in gangs usually designated by the family name of their leader, a name which all did not necessarily share. There were gangs of Baillies, Millers, Kennedys, MacMillans, Watsons, Wilsons and O’Neills. Some claimed to be descended from members of the broken clans after Culloden. Others traced their origins to India and Spain. By the time McCormick interviewed them, the Romany bloodlines, if they had ever existed, must have been very thin indeed. The ‘gang aboot folk’ often fell foul of the law; women as well as men were accused of stealing, vagrancy, pickery (petty theft), riot and murder. Described as ‘sorners’ and ‘Egyptians’, they were punished by branding on the cheek, scourging, whippings and hangings. Many were transported to the plantations or colonies. There is plenty of evidence of persecution, as there is of guilt, though the two conditions were not always in sync.

Fig. 0.9 Gypsies’ encampment, somewhere in Galloway. (Courtesy of Dumfries and Galloway Libraries, Information and Archives)

There are at least two versions of the Tinker’s Loup episode on the Water of Ken, north of Dalry. One concerns a man who simply ‘louped’ or jumped when chased by dragoons, but McCormick collected an alternative verbal account at the ‘exact’ spot on Earlstoun Linn where it happened. A Tinkler had been mending pans for the farmer at Nether Carminnow. When his dinner was delayed he seized a pan full of puddings and took off with the cottars in hot pursuit. He ‘lowpit’ the linn, ‘wi the pan o puddins in his teeth, sat doon and ate them, and then threw the pan back to the owner and went his way’. His informant pointed out the exact rock on which the fugitive sat!83 Otherwise, the Gypsies made cans and knives, as well as horned spoons, or found casual work. They also were dealers in horses, practising horse whispering and doctoring when required, while also working with any other animals that came their way. There is ample evidence that they enjoyed their way of life, difficult though it could be. One man testified that, ‘I canna thleep in a hoothe an’ the door lockit.’84 The Tinkler-Gypsies is extremely rich in lore and culture but many feared that their way of life was under serious threat, one woman telling the provost that, ‘we get the name o being a bad lot, and God kens we’re far frae gude; but they’re no a tinklers that wield the budget,’85 which was to suggest that there was social and