The ground stretches away from it in a long sweeping slope up to the sky, and is green to the top, except where the bare grey rocks in some places crop out to the day. From the knoll may be seen miles on miles of hills up and down the valley, winding in and out, sometimes branching off into smaller glens, each with its gurgling rivulet of peaty-brown water flowing down from the mosses above. Only a narrow strip of arable land is here and there visible along the bottom of the dale, all above being sheep-pasture, moors, and rocks. At Glendinning you seem to have got almost to the world's end. There the road ceases, and above it stretch trackless moors, the solitude of which is broken only by the whimpling sound of the burns on their way to the valley below, the hum of bees gathering honey among the heather, the whirr of a blackcock on the wing, the plaintive cry of the ewes at lambing-time, or the sharp bark of the shepherd's dog gathering the flock together for the fauld. [Image] Telford's Birthplace In this cottage on the knoll Thomas Telford was born on the 9th of August, 1757, and before the year was out he was already an orphan. The shepherd, his father, died in the month of November, and was buried in Westerkirk churchyard, leaving behind him his widow and her only child altogether unprovided for. We may here mention that one of the first things which that child did, when he had grown up to manhood and could "cut a headstone," was to erect one with the following inscription, hewn and lettered by himself, over his father's grave: "IN MEMORY OF JOHN TELFORD, WHO AFTER LIVING 33 YEARS AN UNBLAMEABLE SHEPHERD, DIED AT GLENDINNING, NOVEMBER, 1757," a simple but poetical epitaph, which Wordsworth himself might have written.