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Mary's Loch were almost unfished, and rare sport we had in them, as boys, staying at Tibbie Sheil's famous cottage, and sleeping in her box-beds, where so often the Ettrick Shepherd and Christopher North have lain, after copious toddy. "'Tis gone, 'tis gone:" not in our time will any man, like the Ettrick Shepherd, need a cart to carry the trout he has slain in Meggat Water.
The farm consists of green hills, lying along the valley of the Meggat, a little burn, which descends from the moorlands on the east, and falls into the Esk near the hamlet of Westerkirk. John Telford's cottage was little better than a shieling, consisting of four mud walls, spanned by a thatched roof.
Fingerlings he keeps, and does not return to the water "as pitying their youth." Let us not grudge him his sport as long as he fishes fair, and he is always good company. But he, with all the other countless fishermen, make fish so rare and so wary that, except after a flood in Meggat or the Douglas burn, trout are scarce to be taken by ordinary skill. As for Thae reiving cheils Frae Galashiels,
Ah, Buddha, if thy tale be true, Of still returning life, A monk may I be born anew, In valleys free from strife, A monk where Meggat winds and laves The lone St. Mary's of the Waves. Yarrow, which flows out of St. Mary's Loch was never a great favourite of mine, as far as fishing goes.
Men got into the way of fishing these pools after a flood with minnow, and thereby made huge baskets, the big fish running up to feed, out of the loch. But, when last I rowed past Meggat foot, the delta of that historic stream was simply crowded with anglers, stepping in in front of each other.
All through the rest of the year, in the remotest places, tourists are hard at them with worm. The crowd of anglers in glens which seem not easily accessible is provoking enough. Into the Meggat, a stream which feeds St. Mary's Loch, there flows the Glengaber, or Glencaber burn: the burn of the pine-tree stump.
Mary's Loch, and up the Moffat, and across the Meggat Water; but none of these are within the view. Round are pastorum loca vasta, lands of Buccleugh and Bellenden, Deloraine, Sinton, Headshaw, and Glack. Deloraine, by the way, is pronounced "Delorran," and perhaps is named from Orran, the Celtic saint.
The Shepherd could no longer fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much of a size that the country people took them for herrings.
He had, like the little river Meggat, on the banks of which he was born, floated gradually on towards the outer world: first from the nook in the valley, to Westerkirk school; then to Langholm and its little circle; and now, like the Meggat, which flows with the Esk into the ocean, he was about to be borne away into the wide world.
The hamlet stands on a green hill-side, a little below the entrance to the valley of the Meggat. It consists of the kirk, the minister's manse, the parish-school, and a few cottages, every occupant of which was known to Telford. It is backed by the purple moors, up which he loved to wander in his leisure hours and read the poems of Fergusson and Burns.
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