The Pech Stane

I went looking for the Pech-stane.    It is still listed in the RCAHMS Canmore website as one of our local standing stones.   A pech stane is an old Scots name for any such solitary stone. It was last visited by reviewers for RCAMHS in 1972 when it still measured 4' x 4' 6''x 4' 6'' - slightly less than the, probably fanciful, drawing in an old book on local history.

Alas, the Pech-stane is no more.  It has vanished, vanquished, after standing for millennia, by the demands of modern agriculture. It was just too much in the way of the tractor and combine harvester.

Fragments of the Pech-stane?

 The stone stood on a ridge in what had been the great Billie Mire. a vast quagmire so difficult to cross that it thwarted the advance of armies from Julius Agricola to Oliver Cromwell.  It is is still recalled in farm names such as Causewaybank.  The Pechstane on its rise may have been a marker for safe pathway through the morass.

The mire was guarded on its northern edge by the castles of Billie and Bunkle (Bonkyl) which sound like characters from a children's television programme. The castles were derelict long before the mire was drained in the nineteenth century.

Billie Castle

Bunkle (Bonkyl) Castle

The mire was the haunt of the bittern, the myre- drum in Auld Scots, a reference to its call, the myre snipe and the horse-gowk or greenshank.

No more the screaming bittern bellowing harsh

To its dark bottom shakes the shuddering marsh

John Leyden Scenes from Infancy

The draining of the bog meant the end for its inhabitants including those supernatural beings, the will o' the wisps and bogles that haunted it.

 From the earliest times folk had held these places in awe, entrances to the underworld. They had thrown valuable offerings into them and even sacrificial victims.

 A folk memory of this superstitious fear is captured in the fragment of verse.

Grisly Draedan* sat alane

   By the cairn and Pech-stane

          Said Billie wi' a segg** sae stout

          I'll soon drive grisly Draedan out

           Draedan leuched and stalked awa

             Syne vanished in a babanqua.***

*       (The) Dread one

**     probably, a bull-rush

***   a quaking bog

Now the Draedan Burn is a harmless watercourse and the great babanqua of the Billie Mire is fertile, productive farmland.

The Draedan Burn

The rich farmlands from the Billie Mire

The dreaded spirits of the bog have all vanished like the bittern and the Pech-stane. 

No sane person would like to return to those times but, wandering along the Draedan Burn  one feels, as Leyden did a couple of centuries ago, a twinge of regret, a fleeting wish to hear the myre-drum booming again among the rushes.