Certainly he never lived in the tower that stands now on the steep bank hard by the river. That is no thirteenth century building. I fear, therefore, that the story of Michael and the Witch of Fauldshope, and of how, bursting one day from her cottage in the guise of a hare, he was coursed by his own dogs on Fauldshope Hill, can no more be connected with Selkirkshire than can the legend of his embassy to Paris, to which city he journeyed in a single night, mounted on a great coal-black {278}steed, who indeed was none other than the Foul Fiend himself. There is, however, a Witchie Knowe on Fauldshope; perhaps the Michael who really did live at Oakwood, sometime about the beginning of the seventeenth century, may have had dealings with the woman, which in some way gave rise to the legend. This "witch," by the way, was an ancestress of Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. Oakwood Tower is not very old, and it never was very strong--as the strength of peel towers is reckoned; its walls are little more than four feet in thickness, which is almost flimsy compared with those of its near neighbour, Newark. Above the dungeons, Oakwood is three stories in height, and its external measurements are thirty-eight by twenty-three and a half feet. Into one wall is built a stone on which are the initals R.S. L.M, initials of Robert Scott and his wife, probably a Murray. Between them is the Harden crescent; and below, the date, and 1602, which is no doubt the true year of the present tower's erection. Tradition tells of a haunted chamber in Oakwood; the "Jingler's Room," it was called, but what the story was, the writer has not been able to learn. The tower now is used chiefly as a farm building, and if there are any hauntings they probably take the unpleasant form of rats. Following up the Ettrick, presently we come to the village of Ettrickbridgend, near to which are the picturesque Kukhope Linns and Kirkhope Tower, a well preserved Border peel. In this tower in old days at times dwelt Auld Wat of Harden, or one of his family. Tradition tells that it was Wat who first spanned Ettrick with a bridge. It was a penance, self-inflicted, because of a mishap that occurred at the ford here to a young boy, heir of the Nevilles, whom Wat had carried off from his home in Northumberland. Wat's bridge stood a little way above the site of that which now crosses Ettrick at Ettrickbridgend, and I am told--though I have not seen it--that a stone from the old bridge, with the Harden coat of arms carved on it, may now be seen built into the present structure. {279} [Illustration: 0299] A little higher up, there falls into Ettrirk the Dodhead Burn, at the head of which is "the fair Dodhead," the reputed residence of Jamie Telfer, hero of the famous ballad. [Illustration: 0300]