The great round-backed, solemn Border hills, in summer time kindly sleeping giants, smiling in their sleep, take on another guise when winter smites with pitiless blast, when
"The sounds that drive wild deer and fox
To shelter in the brake and rocks,"
bellow fearsomely among the crags, and down glen and burn rushes the White Death, bewildering, blinding, choking, and at the last, perhaps, with Judas kiss folding in its icy arms some luckless shepherd whom duty has sent from his warm fireside to the rescue of his master's sheep. You would not know for the same those hills that so little time gone past nursed you in their soft embrace. Then, in the warm, sunny days, shadows of great fleecy clouds chased each other leisurely up the braes through the bracken and the purpling heather; the burn sang to itself a merry tune as it tumbled from boulder to boulder, rippling through pools where the yellow trout lay basking; on the clear air came the call of grouse, and afar off a solitary raven croaked in the stillness of a sun-steeped glen. Now the bracken is dead, the bent sodden and chill with November's sleet; against a background of heavy, leaden-grey sky the heather lies black as if washed in ink. Across from the wild North Sea comes a wind thin and nipping, waxing in strength, and with the gathering storm piping ever more shrilly down the glen, driving before it now a fine, powdery white dust that chokes nostril and mouth, and blinds the eyes of those whom necessity compels to be out-doors. It is "an oncome," a "feeding storm." Thus have begun many of the great snowstorms that from time to time have devastated the Border and taken heavy toll of man and beast.
In March 1615 snow fell to such a depth, and drifted so terribly, that not only did many men perish, but likewise "most part of all the horse, nolt, and sheep of the kingdom." In the years 1633 and 1665 there were great storms, when vast numbers of sheep perished, and "the frost was severe enough to kill broom and whins." But greater than these, both in devastating effect and in duration, was the memorable storm of 1674. The early part of that year was marked by extraordinarily tempestuous weather. In January came a violent gale from east and by north that strewed the coasts with wreckage. Down by Berwick and Eyemouth, by St. Abb's, and along all that rugged shore, the cruel sea sported daily with bodies of drowned sailors, flinging them from wave to wave, tossing them headlong on to a stony beach, only with greedy far-stretched grasp to snatch them back again to its hungry maw. In every rocky fissure, where angry waves spout cliff-high and burst in clouds of spray; in every rugged inlet, where the far-flung roaring seas boil furiously, timbers and deck-hamper of vessels driven on a lee-shore churned ceaselessly, pounding themselves to matchwood.
Throughout January, and till February was far advanced, this bitter easterly gale blew fiercely. In mid-February the wind died down, leaving a sky black with piled-up cloud gravid with coming evil. Inland, hill and river lay frost-bound, white with snow, and already the pinch of winter had begun to make itself seriously felt amongst the sheep. In those days, beyond driving the flocks, when necessary, from the hill to more sheltered, low-lying country, but little provision was ever made for severe weather, and even the precaution of shifting the sheep to lower ground was frequently too long delayed. Turnips, of course, had not yet come into cultivation in Scotland, and feed-stuffs were generally unknown.
This time farmers were caught napping. On 20th February a rising wind drove before it snow, fine powdered and dry as March dust, and with the waxing gale, and cold "intense to a degree never before remembered," the drift quickly became a swirling blizzard which no living thing could face. Day and night for thirteen days this maelstrom of snow continued, and till the 29th of March no decided improvement took place in the weather; the snow lay deep, and the frost held, so that there was "much loss of sheep by the snow, and of whole families in the moor and high lands; much loss of cows everywhere, also of wild beasts, as of doe and roe."
"The Thirteen Drifty Days," folk called this storm, and by that name it has gone down to history. "About the fifth and sixth days of the storm," says the Ettrick Shepherd, writing in Blackwood's Magazine of July 1819, "the young sheep began to fall into a sleepy and torpid state, and all that were affected in the evening died over-night. The intensity of the frost wind often cut them off when in that state quite instantaneously. About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to build up huge semicircular walls of their dead, in order to afford some shelter for the remainder of the living; but they availed but little, for about the same time they were frequently seen tearing at one another's wool with their teeth. When the storm abated on the fourteenth day from its commencement, there was, on many a high-lying farm, not a living sheep to be seen. Large misshapen walls of dead, surrounding a small prostrate flock, likewise all dead, and frozen stiff in their lairs, was all that remained to cheer the forlorn shepherd and his master."
As a matter of fact, something like nine-tenths of all the sheep in the south of Scotland perished in this one storm, or if they did not then actually perish, their vitality was so lowered, their constitutions so wrecked, by the intense cold and the long deprivation of food, that they never again picked up condition, but died like flies when the spring was further advanced. Hogg says that in Eskdalemuir, out of 20,000 sheep "none were left alive but forty young wedders on one farm, and five old ewes on another. The farm of Phaup remained without a stock and without a tenant for twenty years subsequent to the storm." On another farm all the sheep perished save one black-faced ewe; and she was not long left to perpetuate her breed, for dogs hunted her into a loch, and she too went the way of her fellows.
Amongst other great storms, Hogg also mentions one in this same century, long remembered as the "Blast o' March." It occurred on a Monday, the twenty-fourth day of March, and was of singularly short duration, considering the havoc it wrought. The previous Sunday was so warm that lassies returning from Yarrow Kirk in the evening took off shoes and stockings and walked barefoot; the young men cast plaids and coats. To their unconcealed astonishment, as they sauntered homeward these young people found that an old shepherd, named Walter Blake, had driven his entire flock of sheep into a sheltered position by the side of a wood, near the road. Now, Blake was a deeply religious man, one to whom the Sabbath was in the strictest sense a holy day, a day too sacred to be broken in any fashion whatever, except for some extraordinarily powerful reason. On being asked how it came to pass that he was found thus following his worldly vocation, to the neglect of church-going, he said that in the morning he had seen to the northward so ill-looking a "weather-gaw" that he was convinced a heavy storm was coming, and that probably before morning there would be a dangerous drift. The young men laughed the old one to scorn. A snowstorm! The auld man was daft! Why, the air was like June; no sensible body would even so much as dream of snow.
"Belike we'll be up to oor oxters in snaw, the morn, Wattie," chirrupped one damsel, in the bicker of rustic wit and empty laughter that flew around.