Through groves that had begun to shed
Their golden leaves upon the pathway,
My steps the Border Minstrel led.”
Hogg farmed, unsuccessfully, Mountbenger, before he removed across Yarrow to Altrieve, where he spent the last year of his life and where he died. In his youth he had herded sheep on Blackhouse heights, where looking down on the ruined peel on the Douglas burn are the stones that mark the place where the “seven bauld brethren” fell, in their pursuit of “Lord William and Lady Margaret”. The escaping lovers lighted down at this “wan water”.
“‘Hold up, hold up, Lord William,’ she said,
‘For I fear that ye are slain.’
‘’Tis naething but the shadow of my scarlet cloak
That shines in the water so plain.’”
But it was his “heart’s bluid”, and the pair were buried together in St. Mary’s Church, whose deserted graveyard is set on a shelf of Hendersyde Hill, overlooking the loch, and fronting the dome of Bowerhope Hill.
On the banks of a burn which flows into Yarrow a little below where it issues from the loch is Dryhope Tower. “Auld Watt” of Harden came to it to bear away Mary Scott, the “Flower of Yarrow”, and part of the provision for their housekeeping was the spoils of the “first harvest-moon”. Half-way along the shore of St. Mary’s, at Cappercleuch, pours in the Meggat Water, a stream that drains some of the highest ground in the Southern Uplands. It was a favourite royal hunting-forest in 1529, when James V came this way intent on the extirpation of the Border thieves; and fate threw in his path Cockburn of Henderland, whose tower was near Meggatfoot. The hollow and waterfall of the “Dowglen” are shown where his lady sought shelter, while “they broke her bower and slew her knight”; the spot, with names inscribed, can be seen in a little clump of wood beside the ruined peel to which she bore him on her back and dug his grave:—