Young Hay of Talla."
Hay was one of two executed on 3rd January 1568 for the murder of Darnley.
If you would gain a good idea of this part of Tweedsmuir, climb by the steep, crumbling sheep-path that scales the Linn-side, till you reach the spot where Mr. Thomson has made his sketch of the Reservoir. There, lying on the heather by the sounding waters, or beneath the rowan trees where blaeberries cluster thick among the rocks, you may picture to yourself a meeting that took place by this very spot two hundred and thirty-one years ago. On commanding heights, solitary men keeping jealous watch lest Claver'se's hated dragoons should have smelled out the place of meeting; below, where the Linn's roar muffles the volume of other sounds, a company of blue-bonneted, stern-faced men, singing with intense fervour some militant old Scottish Psalm, followed by long and earnest extempore prayer, and renewed Psalms; and presently then falling into dispute as vehement as before had been their prayer and praise.
[Original]
This was that celebrated meeting of Covenanters in 1682, of which Sir Walter Scott, writing in "The Heart of Midlothian," says: "Here [at Talla] the leaders among the scattered adherents, to the Covenant, men who, in their banishment from human society, and in the recollection of the severities to which they had been exposed, had become at once sullen in their tempers, and fantastic in their religious opinions, met with arms in their hands, and by the side of the torrent discussed, with a turbulence which the noise of the stream could not drown, points of controversy as empty and unsubstantial as its foam." Dour men they were, and intolerant, our old Covenanting forebears, ready at any moment to
"prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks."
Yet who can withhold from them his respect, or, in many points, deny them his admiration?