And such wild echoes from the darken'd hill,
That holy men fled from the scant fill'd grave,
And left bare buried that unholy priest."
Across the loch from the quiet grave-yard on the hill, lies "Bowerhope's lonely top," and Bowerhope farm, so loved of its tenant of many years ago. In his "Reminiscences of Yarrow," the late Rev. Dr. Russell mentions that "Bowerhope farmhouse was so low in the roof that my father at the exhortations had to stand between two of the rafters, so that the Kitchen full of people and full of smoke was not the most pleasant place to speak in. Yet old Sandy Cunningham, the tenant, used to say: 'Ministers may talk o' Heevin' as they like; commend me to Bowerhope; I cud tak a tack [lease] o't to a' eternity.'"
On our right, on the same side of the loch with us as we stand facing Bowerhope, is Henderland, where, on a spot called the Chapel Knowe, is a grave-slab, and on it, sculptured, a sword and what appear to be armorial bearings, with the inscription: "Here lyis Perys of Cokburne and hys wyfe Marjory." This, we used to be told, was the grave of a famous freebooter, whom King James V, (dropping in, as it were, one day while the unsuspecting reiver sat at dinner,) took, and hanged over the gate of his own castle, the tower whose weather-battered fragments are still to be seen here.
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His wife, it was said, fled to the adjacent Dow Glen, a rocky chasm through which rushes the Henderland burn, and there, says Sir Walter Scott, cowering on what is still called the Lady's Seat, she strove "to drown amid the roar of a foaming cataract, the tumultuous noise which announced the close of his existence." But Cokburne of Henderland, like Adam Scott of Tushiealaw, was executed in Edinburgh, before King James set out on his expedition. Moreover, that Cokburn of Henderland's Christian name was William. This, therefore, cannot be the grave of James' victim in 1530. but whatever the real story of "Perys Cokburne and hys wyfe, Marjory," their fate has given rise to a ballad fuller of pathos than all the countless pathetic ballads of Yarrow,
"My love he built me a bonny bower,