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Here, too, were preserved in great veneration, long years after Arthur had passed away "to be king among the dead," portions of that miraculous image of the Blessed Virgin which, the old historian Nennius tells us, the king bore into the stress of battle that day among the hills of Wedale. And here, till about 1815, lay a very large stone on whose face was the well marked impression of a foot, said by tradition to have been the imprint of the foot of the Virgin. To be converted into road-metal has doubtless been its fate. There are still, I believe, in Stow, the remains of a very old church, not, however, those of the original church of Wedale.
Leaving Galashiels by road past Boldside, with a glimpse of the Eildons and Abbotsford to the left, three miles from the town and immediately above the junction of Tweed with its tributary the Ettrick we cross the former river. Hard by, to the right, in a wood on top of Rink Hill, are the remains of a very fine British camp. Here for the time we again quit the banks of Tweed, and proceed up Ettrick. A mile from the junction of the rivers, we pass near the old churchyard of Lindean, where once stood the ancient church in which, the night after his assassination in 1353, lay the bloody corpse of Sir William Douglas, the Knight of Liddesdale, slain by his kinsman.
In connection with this churchyard, there used to exist a belief that greatly troubled the minds of country folk in the surrounding district. Away back in those evil times when the Plague raged through Scotland, very many of its victims were buried in a common grave in Lindean churchyard. But the church was demolished after the Reformation, and the churchyard gradually fell out of use as a place of burial. There came a time when the people had no farther need for it; why, thought some practical person, should it not be ploughed up and cultivated? There was but one thing that saved it from this fate;—not reverence for the ashes of the rude forefathers of the hamlet that lay here at rest, but the sure and certain belief in the minds of their descendants that in the event of the soil being disturbed, there must inevitably be a fresh outbreak of the dreaded Plague. It is curious and interesting to read of the blind horror with which our ancestors in their day regarded this scourge; but their horror is not hard to understand. Sanitation did not exist in those times, medicine as a science was impotent to curb the ravages of the dreaded pestilence. The people were helpless; to save themselves there remained only flight. And in what remote spot might flight avail them in a Plague-swept land! In that outbreak during the seventeenth century, temporary houses, or shelters, were erected in many parts of the Border, and into them were hurried persons smitten by the pestilence—and often, no doubt, persons suffering from some very minor ailment which their panic-stricken neighbours diagnosed as Plague. It is not to be supposed that once there, they would get much, if any, attention; they would simply take their chance—a slender one—of recovery. And if they died, so great was the dread in the minds of the living that, in many instances, to save unnecessary risk, the authorities merely pulled down the building over the dead bodies, and heaped earth on top. At a period even so late as in the writer's boyhood, there were many spots—perhaps in very remote districts there may yet be a few—where the Plague was said to be buried, and where to disturb the soil was believed to be a matter of extreme danger; the pestilence, like some malevolent fiend long held down, would inevitably break loose, and again Grim Death would hurl his darts broadcast at old and young, rich and poor. In his Scenes of Infancy Leyden alludes to the belief:
' "Mark, in yon vale, a solitary stone,
Shunned by the swain, with loathsome weeds o'ergruwn!
The yellow stonecrop shoots from every pore,
With scaly sapless lichens crusted o'er:
Beneath the base, where starving hemlocks creep,