That Kinmont Willie avenged himself not once, but many times, on those
who had treacherously trapped him and done their best to make him meat
for the greedy English gibbet, is not a matter of surmise, but one of
history. His ride into Carlisle on that bleak March day, and the long
days and dreary nights he spent in chains in the English gaol, were
little likely to engender a gentle and forgiving spirit in the breast of
one of the most fiery of the "minions of the moon." When, in 1600, he
raided Scrope's tenants, they were given good cause to regret the
happenings in which Scrope had taken so prominent a part.
We have no record of the end of Kinmont Willie, and can but hope, for
his sake, that he died the death he would have died--a good horse under
him almost to the end, a good sword in his hand, open sky above him, and
round him the caller breeze that has blown across the Border hills. In a
lonely little graveyard in the Debatable Land, close to the Water of
Sark, and near the March dyke between the two countries, his body is
said to rest. Does there never come a night, when the moon is hidden
behind a dark scud of clouds, and the old reiver, growing restless in
his grave, finds somewhere the shade of a horse that, in its day, could
gallop with the best, and rides again across the Border, to meet once
more his "auld enemies" of England, and, to the joyous accompaniment of
the lowing of cattle and the jingle of spurs, returns to his lodging as
the first cock crows, and grey morning breaks?
"O, they rade in the rain, in the days that are gane,
In the rain and the wind and the lave;
They shoutit in the ha' and they routit on the hill,
But they're a' quaitit noo in the grave."
IN THE DAYS OF THE '15
Close on two hundred years back from the present time there stood far up
the South Tyne, beyond Haltwhistle, on the road--then little better than
a bridle-track--running over the Cumberland border by Brampton, an inn
which in those days was a house of no little importance in that wild and
remote country.
If its old walls could speak, what, for instance, might they not have
told of Jacobite plottings? Beneath its roof was held many a meeting of
the supporters of the King "over the water," James the Eighth; and here,
riding up from Dilston, not seldom came the unfortunate Earl of
Derwentwater, to take part in the Jacobite deliberations. The young lord
and the horse he usually rode were figures familiar and welcome to the
country folk around, and at the inn they were as well known as was the
landlord himself. It was not long after a secret meeting held here in
the earlier half of the year 1715 that the warrants were issued which
led to Derwentwater's flight from Dilston, and precipitated the Rising
that within a few months rolled so many gallant heads in the dust of the
scaffold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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