Talla to Gameshope

The way begins

Passing the Megget Stone (Blog 07/09/18) and descending the winding single track road to the Talla reservoir,  I came to the little bridge at Tallalinnfoot where, after a series of waterfalls or linns in Auld Scots, the Talla Water merges with the Gameshope Burn.

Sheep's bit Scabious

 Leaving the car, I set off up the track by the Burn. It is a most special place with strange rock formations and mounds or kames, left over from its glacial past.

Kame

The kames are hillocks composed of layers of sand and gravel laid down by glacial meltwater.  Is this how the glen got its name?  A "hope" is a valley so it might have been Kameshope at one time and changed over the years.

Following the burn up through the glen is almost mystical, so pleasing is the sound of the waterfalls and the sight of the boulders, the so-called erratics, scattered across the landscape where they were left by the ice as it retreated all those millennia ago.

The Borders Forest Trust has started to restore the original  woodland habitat that once preceded the sheep bitten uplands now so characteristic of the border hills. They've described it as the Children's Forest for it will be generations before it comes to fruition and fuses with  their first project, the Wildwood at Carrifran Gans to the south in a continuous swathe of  primal forest that has not been seen here  for thousands of years.  

Replanting has begun

While applauding the idea, I felt a little pang of regret that the bleak wildness of the place will eventually be softened and the vistas of stone and moor will be clad with trees. At least, I will still be able to enjoy it in my lifetime.

Field Mouse-ear growing with Foxglove

One of the massive stones is known as Peden's Pulpit after the famous Covenanter, Andrew Peden who is said to have preached there.

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  The Rev Andrew Peden had to leave his parish under the vicious suppression mounted by the restored Charles Stuart against his Presbyterian subjects., the Covenanters  A time known as "the killing times" and so vividly decribed by James Hogg in his novel The Brownie of Bodesbeck.(Blog18/03/14)

The story starts with the line

"It will be a bloody night in Gemsop ( Gameshope) this."

Conventicles were held in remote locations in the hills where the chance of discovery by the Royalist troops was lessened.
The Blanket Preaching at St Mary's Kirk in Yarrow  recalls these outdoor meetings when a blanket was held over the preacher's head to protect him from the elements. (Blog10/08/14)

 Peden supported the outlawed worshipers for ten years until he was caught, imprisoned and deported to the Americas. A sympathetic captain freed him en route to return to his preaching. His name is remembered across the lowlands of Scotland. There is a Peden's pulpit on Rubers Law (Blog 06/04/15) ), a Peden's Cove or Cave, a Peden's Tree, a Peden's church in Ayrshire.

 The track petered out after the Gameshope bothy, the site of the old sheep farm and I wasn't equipped for the higher ground so I had a slow wander back to the car just enjoying the atmosphere of this most exceptional of valleys.