Chapter Thirty One.
Under the Gallows Knob.
The low-lying island upon which we found ourselves was certainly a dismal, out-of-the-world place, covered by rank grass and nettles, and yellow with St. John’s wort. Ruined walls were scattered around the castle of Threave itself, a square, roofless tower, which in the bleakness of its gaunt and terrible majesty suggested the idea of an armed skeleton, in the facial apertures of which lay the darkness of death and decay.
This was the monument of the Douglases’ pride and the engine of their oppression during their galling ascendancy, when Archibald rode with his retinue of two thousand armed retainers, many of them the most noted desperadoes, and ravaged the Border. The huge fourteenth-century fortress, once the pride of kings, was still a massive pile, with walls nearly seventy feet high, built of common grey moor stone.
As we wandered through it, the wind howling through the narrow slits where archers had sent forth their shafts, our friend Mr Batten pointed out in the lowest story the dungeon, arsenal, and larder; the barracks on the first floor; and, above, the apartments of state, where the Black Douglas lodged his friends or feasted his vassals, the walls of all massive, but now crumbling to decay.
Around the castle were the remains of a strong barbican, flanked at each angle by a circular tower, which had been secured in front by a deep fosse and vallum, both water and walls of the latter having long since disappeared.
Then, standing outside—while the rest of the party, seated on the grass, were eating their luncheon, laughing merrily and thoroughly enjoying the novelty of reaching such a place—Mr Batten pointed to a large granite bracket projecting from the front of the castle, high up near the roof: the far-famed “Gallows Knob” or “Hanging Stone,” which the Black Douglas was wont to boast was never without a “tassel,” either in the shape of a malefactor, or, if none such were in custody, some unoffending vassal!
When the Douglases maintained their power in Galloway the deeds committed within that grim, grey fortress were such as invest it with fearful interest. I recollected having read of its sinister memories, and some of them were now recalled to me by Mr Batten, who made a deep study of the subject. Indeed, as I stood there with Walter Wyman, apart from the gay Crailloch house party, gazing up at the high grey walls that had once sheltered the old soldier-monk and chronicler, Godfrey Lovel, I recollected how well the weirdlike halo that, to the present day, surrounds the place is expressed in those plaintive lines of the unfortunate Inglis of Torsonce: