Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 20
General
Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 20
Scottish Borders (Scotland) -- Fiction
The next resting-place seems to have been in the midst of the "Lang
Whang"--a barren and bleak muir, which stretches eastward ten or eleven
miles beyond Carnwath. Here an enclosure was effected by means of stakes
and ropes, as the binding system had been found ineffectual, there being
generally some method adopted by the fettered sufferers to relieve
themselves. Within this enclosure these three hundred men stood or lay
during a dark and a rainy night, without fire, and with very scanty
provisions; whilst the demons on the outside of the enclosure lighted up
fires of the heath, and of some peats which were found ready dried in
the neighbourhood, and spent the night in roasting all manner of
barn-door fowls, pigs, and even sheep, which they had captured as they
passed along. Refreshment of a spirituous character was not denied them;
and their songs, and their blasphemies, and their insulting language,
"rose up in the midst of the wilderness" as Govan expresses it--"to the
throne of the Most High, calling for vengeance in the day of
retribution, on the head of the oppressor."
"This," continues he, "is a second morning, and a cold, and a gloomy,
and a dreadful one it is. Clavers and his attendants are galloping up
from Carnwath, where they have been spending the night in jollification
wi' the laird; and we are just about to renew our dismal march. My leg
is exceedingly troublesome; but, as we advance but slowly, I make a
shift to get on. One man died last night raving mad; and another, I much
fear, has put an end, with his own hand, to an unendurable existence. O
Lord, give me strength to bear whatever thy wisdom sees meet to
inflict!"
From the Lang Whang, the Grass Market was reached on the succeeding
evening, and, after being united with two hundred prisoners from
Stirling, they were all marched from the Grass Market; and, after some
seasonable refreshment, ordered by the humane and kind-hearted Duke of
Monmouth, into the Greyfriars' Churchyard, there to abide--from the
month of June to that of December following--all the peltings of the
pitiless storm, without a sufficiency of food, and entirely without
covering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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