The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow

The Yarrow Flower

The Dowie* Dens of Yarrow, the river of sorrow, the valley of romance, of honour, of vendetta and feud, a valley that always stirs the imagination.

Only the stones remain from centuries of conflict, the silent stones.

The winding road runs alongside the river, the eponymous yarrow flower grows in the verges, the land is largely empty, given over to sheep and forestry but once, it thronged with farmers, warriors, huntsmen, lords and knights, reivers, raiders and thieves. Kings visited to chase deer and later to enforce their laws and appoint wardens to maintain them.

Much has been made quite properly of the depopulation visited on the Highlands of Scotland by "the clearances" but the Lowland clearances that emptied these valleys have often been overlooked.

 Long gone are the days when John Murray, the Outlaw Murray of the ballads, could...

keepis five hundred men... a royalle companie.

or even the eighty to a hundred horsemen raised by Scott of Buccleugh in the raid on Carlisle to rescue William Armstrong of Kinmont recounted in the ballad Kinmont Willie.

Now, only the sheep graze where once the people of the valley flourished. The villages of Yarrow and that of Ettrick that took their names from the neighbouring rivers have almost disappeared.

Yet the stones remain, From Neolithic standing stones to Iron Age marker stones and medieval towers, they stand mutely, keeping their secrets to their lichen covered hearts.

My trip took me past Foulshiels, the lowly cottage where Mungo Park, explorer of the Niger was born and on, past the standing stones with their evocative names, the Warriors Rest, the Glebe stone, the Yarrow stone.

The Warriors Rest, The Glebe Stone and The Yarrow Stone

The last of these, the Yarrow stone, is inscribed with the names of Nudoss and Dumnogenos, sons of Liberalis, princes of the Damnoni, the Strathclyde Britons, killed in battle with the invading Angles.

It is probably a reworked neolithic monument as the whole area seems to have been a religious site from earliest times with many burials.

Pressing on to Craig Douglas, I paused at the farm once occupied by James Hogg the poet and writer. It was the site of the Douglas tower destroyed on the orders of James II in 1450. Legend has it that it was the site from where the lovers eloped as recalled in the ballad The Douglas Tragedy, only to be caught at the Douglas stones further up the valley where the duel to the death of brothers and lover occurred.

He's mounted her on a milk-white steed

And himself on a dapple grey,

With a bugelet horn hung down by his side,

And lightly they rode away.

Lord Willam lookit o'er his left shoulder,

To see what he could see,

And there he spy'd her seven brethren bold,

Come riding o'er the lea.

The brothers and father do battle with Lord William, the brothers are slain and the father wounded but William sustains a mortal wound and dies in the maiden's arms.

Lord William was dead lang ere midnight

Lady Marg'ret lang ere day-

And all true lovers that go thegither,

May they have mair luck than they!

Lord William was buried in St. Marie's kirk,

Lady Marg'ret in Marie's quire;

Out o' the lady's grave grew a bonny red rose,

And out o' the knight's a brier.

And they twa met, and they twa plat,

And fain they wad be near;

And a' the world might ken right weel,

They were twa lovers dear.
  

The Bught Stones and the The Douglas Stones, ancient stone circles said to be the site of the fateful

affray, are now densely covered with conifer forest and, try as I might, I couldn't find them. That will be an expedition for another day

Blackhouse Tower

A later peel, the Blackhouse Tower still guards the path by the Douglas burn taken by the fleeing lovers.

St Mary's Loch

Further on towards St Mary's kirk, the kirk o' the forest, and the scenic St Mary's Loch, I passed Dryhope Tower, birthplace of Mary Scott, the Flower of Yarrow and wife of Walter Scott of Harden from whom Sir Walter Scott claimed descent. This redoubtable lady was alleged to have served a dish of spurs on a salver to her reiver husband indicating that times were hard and he needed to go raiding again!

Dryhope

Passing the loch and the kirk, I turned up the Megget Water, tributary of the Yarrow and passed the grave of Piers Cockburn, knight and reiver, hanged for his crimes by Royal Warrant at his castle door. Forever remembered in the ballad The Lament of the Border Widow, the story of Cockburn's demise has been romanticised to fit in with the old predictions and tales. The reiver was, in fact, executed in Edinburgh after due process of law. Still, it makes a good story in an evocative setting.

From Cockburn's tomb the road winds up past the Megget reservoir which flooded the valley and submerged the castle tower of Cramalt, long the hunting lodge of the Stuart kings. In The Bridal of Polmood, James Hogg that assiduous collector of ancient tales, describes how four hundred men would assemble to drive the deer " with hound and horn" to the archers on Hunter Hill behind Cramalt. 

Cramalt tower

  There is a facsimile of the ground plan of the old tower on the banks of the reservoir but the deer have long been replaced by sheep and the forest is no more.

Sheep not deer

The climb took me up to the watershed between the Megget and Talla waters running east and west respectively. Here, I found the Megget Stone. Perhaps it was a boundary marker between the Iron Age tribes, the Selgovae and the Novantae or maybe from even more remote times when these valleys were full of people with traders and farmers exchanging goods and produce at fixed points recognised by all.

The Megget Stone

 

The empty Megget  Vale

If only these stones could speak and show, what tales they would tell

*dowie  is  Auld Scots for sad or sorrowful

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.