The place where Gilnockie stood is without any doubt a little lower down the Esk than Hollows Tower, at a point where the river makes a serpentine bend and contracts into a narrow, rocky gorge, impossible to ford. Here, at the Carlisle end of Gilnockie Bridge, on the high tongue of rocky land that projects into the stream, are faint but unmistakeable outlines of a large building, with outworks. The position is magnificent--impregnable, in fact, to any force of olden days unprovided with artillery. On three sides the rocky banks drop nearly sheer to the water, and across the root of the tongue are indications of a protecting fosse. It is impossible to imagine a site more perfect for a freebooter's stronghold. To have neglected it, in favour of such a position as that occupied by the Hollows Tower, would have been on the reiver's part to throw away the most obvious of the gifts of Providence. {422}Local tradition has it that Johny had a drawbridge by which, at will, he could cross the river. [Illustration: 0442] Certainly there is a projecting nose of rock just at the narrowest part of the stream, immediately above the present stone bridge, but one would be inclined to doubt if the engineering skill of Scotland in the {423}sixteenth century was equal to the task of constructing a serviceable drawbridge capable of spanning a width so great. There, is a curious stone that projects _inwards_ from high up in Hollows Tower, the original purpose of which forms to the amateur lover of ancient buildings a quite insolvable puzzle. The stone measures, roughly, from the wall to its tip about three feet in length, and its diameter is perhaps ten or twelve inches. Towards the end farthest from the wall it has a well-marked groove on the upper part and sides, as if heavy weights had frequently been suspended from it by ropes or chains. Its position is on the light of a narrow door that opens two or three feet above the floor-level of the room into which the stone projects, and the stone itself must have been close to the ceiling of the chamber. What was its use? An intelligent but youthful guide, when the writer was at Hollows, suggested with ghoulish delight that it was "a hangin'-stane." But that, surely, would have been wilful waste on the part of the Armstrongs, so long as trees were available. Nor is it likely that they got rid of prisoners in this way with a regularity sufficient to account for the well worn groove in the stone. It does, however, recall Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's feelings, when "at the top of the south-western angle of the Tower [of Neidpath], a large mass of the masonry had fallen, and laid open a chamber roofed with a Gothic arch of stone, from the centre of which swung, vibrating with every heavy gust of wind, an enormous iron ring. To what strange and wild horrors did this not awaken the fancy?"