“The tradition of Ettrick Forest,” says Scott, Minstrelsy, 2d ed., 1803, I, 4, “bears that the Outlaw was a man of prodigious strength, possessing a batton or club with which he laid lee (_i. e._ waste) the country for many miles round, and that he was at length slain by Buccleuch or some of his clan.”[112] This account is not in keeping with the conception of the Outlaw given by the ballad, but indicates the ferocious robber and murderer, the Cacus of popular story, of whom no doubt the world was actually once very guilty, and of whom there are many specimens in British tradition as elsewhere.[113] As such he seems to turn up again in Galloway, where he haunts a forest of Kirkcudbrightshire, called the Black Morrow wood, from which he sallies out “in the neighboring country at night, committing horrible outrages.” Of this personage, Mactaggart, in his Gallovidian Encyclopedia, p. 73, says: “Tradition has him a Blackimore, ... but my opinion is that he was no Blackimore; he never saw Africa; his name must have been Murray, and as he must have been, too, an outlaw and a bloody man, gloomy with foul crimes,[114] Black prefaced it, as it did Black Douglass, and that of others; so he became Black Murray.” And he adds that this pest was disposed of by the people pouring a barrel of spirits into a spring one night when he was out on his rambles, whereof drinking the next day, he was made drunk and fell asleep, in which condition his foes dirked him; or according to others, one of the McLellans of Kirkcudbright took to the wood single-handed, found the outlaw sleeping, and drove a dirk through his head, whence the head on the dagger in the McLellans’ coat of arms.[115] 2. The castle, says Scott, is supposed by the common people to have been the castle of Newark; but “this is highly improbable, because Newark was always a royal fortress.” The only important point, however, would seem to be who was the keeper of the castle. The Douglasses are spoken of as holding it from about 1326 to 1455; John de Moravia was Custos after 1462. The Outlaw’s five hundred men are shooting on Newark lee in =A b= 18^4, and Newark lee is twice mentioned elsewhere in that copy. Sheriff Plummer in his letter to Herd says: This I take to be the castle of New-wark, on the west end of which are the arms of Scotland supported by two unicorns. But in Scott’s preface we are told that Sheriff Plummer has assured the editor that he remembered the _insignia_ of the unicorns, etc., so often mentioned in the ballad, in existence upon the old tower at Hangingshaw. Whether the etc. covers the picture of the knight and the lady bright, and Sheriff Plummer had therefore changed his opinion, does not appear. 15^3. “Birkendale brae, now commonly called Birkendailly [see =C= 2^1], is a steep descent at the south side of Minchmoor, which separates Tweed-dale from the Forest, at the top of which you come first in sight of New-wark Castle.” Plummer’s letter to Herd.