However, to return to Gala. Here, as everywhere in the Border, vast are the changes that the past sixty or seventy years have wrought on the face of nature. Even at a time so comparatively recent as that when the present North British line of railway from Edinburgh to Carlisle was being constructed down the valley, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder remarks on the revolution that in his own experience a few years had made. "We know of no district," says he, "which has been so com{243}pletely metamorphosed since the days of our youth as that of Gala Water." In his boyhood, the whole wore a pastoral character. Crops were rare, and fences hardly to be met with. [Illustration: 0263] Not a tree was to be seen, except in the neighbourhood of one or two old places, and especially at and around Torwoodlee and Gala House, near the mouth of the river. Everything within sight was green, simple, and bare. Then he contrasts {244}this with the appearance of the valley at date of his writing, when "the whole country is fenced, cultivated, and hedged round. Thriving and extensive plantations appear everywhere." [Illustration: 0264] Could he see it, he would find the change even more marked now, with the "thriving plantations" grown and extended, countless trains thundering up and down the line day and night, and above all with his little village of "two thousand two hundred and nine inhabitants" grown into a great and busy town. In ancient days, this valley through which Gala flows was called Wedale,--the Dale of Woe, the Valley of Weeping, for here says Professor Skene, was fought one of King Arthur's great battles against the Pagans. At what is now the village of Stow--the Stow (old English, "place,") of Wedale--the Bishops of St. Andrews had a palace; and here, by the Lady well at Torsonce, stood in Arthurian days a church famed for its possession of fragments of the True Cross, bestowed, it was {245}said, by King Arthur himself. [Illustration: 0265] Here, too, were preserved in great veneration, long years after Arthur had passed away "to be king among the dead," portions of that miraculous image of the Blessed Virgin which, the old historian Nennius tells us, the king bore into the stress of battle that day among the hills of Wedale. And here, till about 1815, lay a very large stone on whose face was the well marked impression of a foot, said by tradition to have been the imprint of the foot of the Virgin. To be converted into road-metal has doubtless been its fate. There are still, I believe, in Stow, the remains of a very old church, not, however, those of the original church of Wedale.