WEIR OF HERMISTON : INTRODUCTORY
In the wild end of a moorland parish,
far out of the sight of any house, there stands a
cairn among the heather, and a little by east of it,
in the going down of the braeside, a monument with
some verses half defaced. It was here that Claverhouse
shot with his own hand the Praying Weaver of Balweary,
and the chisel of Old Mortality has clinked on that
lonely gravestone. Public and domestic history
have thus marked with a bloody finger this hollow
among the hills; and since the Cameronian gave his
life there, two hundred years ago, in a glorious folly,
and without comprehension or regret, the silence of
the moss has been broken once again by the report
of firearms and the cry of the dying.
The Deil’s Hags was the old
name. But the place is now called Francie’s
Cairn. For a while it was told that Francie walked.
Aggie Hogg met him in the gloaming by the cairnside,
and he spoke to her, with chattering teeth, so that
his words were lost. He pursued Rob Todd (if any
one could have believed Robbie) for the space of half
a mile with pitiful entreaties. But the age is
one of incredulity; these superstitious decorations
speedily fell off; and the facts of the story itself,
like the bones of a giant buried there and half dug
up, survived, naked and imperfect, in the memory of
the scattered neighbours. To this day, of winter
nights, when the sleet is on the window and the cattle
are quiet in the byre, there will be told again, amid
the silence of the young and the additions and corrections
of the old, the tale of the Justice-Clerk and of his
son, young Hermiston, that vanished from men’s
knowledge; of the two Kirsties and the four Black
Brothers of the Cauldstaneslap; and of Frank Innes,
“the young fool advocate,” that came into
these moorland parts to find his destiny.