We went into the shepherd's cot to get a drink of milk, when I read to
our guide Mr. Hogg's description, asking him if he thought it correct.
He said there was hardly a bit o't correct, for the grave was not on
the hill of Cowan's-Croft nor yet on the point where three lairds'
lands met, but on the top of a hill called the Faw-Law, where there was
no land that was not the Duke of Buccleuch's within a quarter of a
mile. He added that it was a wonder how the poet could be mistaken
there, who once herded the very ground where the grave is, and saw both
hills from his own window. Mr. L--w testified great surprise at such a
singular blunder, as also how the body came not to be buried at the
meeting of three or four lairds' lands, which had always been customary
in the south of Scotland. Our guide said he had always heard it
reported that the Eltrive men, with Mr. David Anderson at their head,
had risen before day on the Monday morning, it having been on the
Sabbath day that the man put down himself; and that they set out with
the intention of burying him on Cowan's-Croft, where the three marches
met at a point. But, it having been an invariable rule to bury such
lost sinners before the rising of the sun, these five men were
overtaken by day-light, as they passed the house of Berry-Knowe; and,
by the time they reached the top of the Faw-Law, the sun was beginning
to skair the east. On this they laid down the body, and digged a deep
grave with all expedition; but, when they had done, it was too short,
and, the body being stiff, it would not go down; on which Mr. David
Anderson, looking to the east and perceiving that the sun would be up
on them in a few minutes, set his foot on the suicide's brow, and
tramped down his head into the grave with his iron-heeled shoe, until
the nose and skull crashed again, and at the same time uttered a
terrible curse on the wretch who had disgraced the family and given
them all this trouble. This anecdote, our guide said, he had heard when
a boy, from the mouth of Robert Laidlaw, one of the five men who buried
the body.
We soon reached the spot, and I confess I felt a singular sensation
when I saw the grey stone standing at the head, and another at the
feet, and the one half of the grave manifestly new-digged, and closed
up again as had been described. I could still scarcely deem the thing
to be a reality, for the ground did not appear to be wet, but a kind of
dry rotten moss. On looking around, we found some fragments of clothes,
some teeth, and part of a pocket-book, which had not been returned into
the grave when the body had been last raised, for it had been twice
raised before this, but only from the loins upward.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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