The Brownie of Bodsbeck

 James Hogg monument at The Loch of the Lowes

James Hogg is now being given the status he deserves as a writer.  During his lifetime and for long afterwards, he was regarded as a minor figure in Scottish  literature.  Befriended but patronised by Scott and the  Edinburgh literary establishment, his true ability wasn’t fully recognised.
 Now, his Confessions of a Justified Sinner is seen as a truly modern novel
The Brownie of Bodsbeck is his tale of the bloody strife that surrounded the struggle between the Stuart kings on their new English throne and their Presbyterian Scottish subjects
Published after Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, it received little of the latter's popularity but Hogg himself was always at pains to point out that it was written before Scott’s novel but held back by the publisher, presumably not to foreshadow and possibly devalue what was certain to be another bestseller from Scott.
Scott has been accused of caricaturing the Covenanters and white-washing the Royalists which is what one would expect from a member of the Tory establishment.  True or not, Hogg’s account is much  more from the people’s point of view as they saw their herds seized, their relatives shot and tortured by ruthless agents of the Crown.   James Graham of Claverhouse, latterly Viscount Dundee, was such a man and his swathe of suppression through the Borderlands forms the background to the novel.

The Watch Law from where a lookout was kept during Covenanter services

 A group of Covenanters, mainly in the southwest, followed the teachings of Richard Cameron and offered armed resistance to the Crown
When the crown ejected ministers from their parishes for refusing to submit to the rule of bishops, the Covenanters followed them to the hills and worshiped at open air services called conventicles.
Every year in July, an open air “Blanket preaching” is held at the Kirkyard of St Mary of the Lowes by St Mary’s Loch in Yarrow in memory of the Covenanters.
http://www.selkirk.bordernet.co.uk/news/30.html

 As the threat from government forces increased the Covenanters began to carry weapons to their conventicles and to post armed pickets to keep a lookout.
The Cameronian regiment - The Scottish Rifles - which arose from these Covenanting origins, continued to take their rifles to church parades and to post sentries at each service until disbanded in 1968

Chapelhope

Hogg’s story concerns Katherine the daughter of the farmer at Chapelhope, a farm in Yarrow.   Hope is one of these intriguing geographic terms. On the coast it means a bay- Longhope.  In the hills it means a valley or hollow .  There are several hopes in the Brownie of Bodsbeck - Kirkhope, Riskinhope,  Kershope
  Katherine plays on the superstitions of her family and neighbours by pretending to be in league with the Brownie of Bodsbeck allowing her access to the moors at night.   According to custom, brownies must be placated with food - bannocks and milk, thus Katherine is able to hide and feed the fugitive Presbyterians in the hills.
Clerk, the cowardly priest, a Royalist spy who denounces his parishioners, attempts to seduce her under the guise of exorcism but is unhinged when he meets, Katherine’s brownie - a  escaped Cameronian, twisted and misshapen by torture and hidden by her in a cave under the waterfall at Chapelhope.
 It is clear where Hogg’s sympathies lay and, with only eighty years separating his birth from the death of “Bluidy Clavers” at Killiecrankie,  his childhood would have been filled with tales of the “Killing Times”.

The Brownie of Bodsbeck is, at times, difficult as some of the dialogue is in the everyday speech of the locals which even in Hogg’s day contained many words that were slipping out of usage.  He makes passing reference to this when Clavers is interrogating an old shepherd and  admits to not understanding him

Chapelhope still has its beautiful linn or waterfall but never was there a cave.

The chapel that gives the hope its name and where the sly priest Clerk spied on his flock is now a series of grassy mounds and the only flock that attends there are the sheep.

Rodono Chapel ruins

All is now quiet and peaceful with few reminders of the death and oppression visited on the people of the valley, but perhaps the hills remember.