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Updated: May 12, 2025
It chanced that one of the largest mules made directly towards the fords of Lochar, and the youths, catching the flying bridle at either side, applied a sort of brake which sufficiently slowed the beast's movements to enable such agile skipjacks as Sholto and Laurence to mount.
By this time the banners of the visitors were discernible crossing the fords of Lochar, while high advanced above all private pennons two standards could be seen, the banner royal of Scotland, and close beside the rampant lion the white lilies of France. "Saint Bride!" cried the Earl, "have they brought the King of Scots to visit me?
But when the gay tones of the lady's laughter floated back on the air, as his master and she rode forward by the edge of Dee towards the Lochar Fords, the first fear with which he had looked upon her in the greenwood returned upon the captain of the guard. Earl William and the Lady Sybilla talked together that which no one else could hear.
Archers there were from the border towards the Solway side lithe men, accustomed to spring from tussock to tuft of shaking grass, whose long strides and odd spasmodic side leapings betrayed even on the plain and unyielding pasture lands the place of their amphibious nativity. "The Jack herons of Lochar," these were named by the men of Galloway.
Even if Caerlaverock were in hideous surroundings, it would be magnificent: but the river Solway is its silver foreground, and Lochar Moss is its mysterious background; so it is perfect in beauty as in strength, and if only no such hateful things as cannons had been invented, it would not now be a ruin.
It was still early morning of the great day, when Sholto and Laurence MacKim, leaving their mother in the kitchen, and their young sister Magdalen trying a yet prettier knot to her kerchief, took their way by the fords of Glen Lochar to an eminence then denominated plainly the Whinny Knowe, the same which afterwards gained and has kept to this day the more fatal designation of Knock Cannon.
But there was no jeering to their faces, for not one of those Maxwells, Sims, Patersons, and Dicksons would have thought twice of leaping behind a tree stump to wing a cloth-yard shaft into a scoffer's ribs at thirty yards, taking his chance of the dule tree and the hempen cord thereafter for the honour of Lochar.
The first stone flew wide, though the splash caused the mule to shy into deeper water, to the damping of his rider's legs. But the second, being better aimed, took the animal fairly on the rump, and, fetching up on a fly-galled spot, frightened it with bumping bags and loud squeals into the woods of Glen Lochar, which come down close to the fords on every side.
The lads were soon at the fords of Lochar, where in the dry summers the stones show all the way across one in the midst being named the Black Douglas, noted as the place where, as tradition affirms, Archibald the Grim used to pause in crossing the ford to look at his new fortress of Thrieve, rising on its impregnable island above the rich water meadows.
First I raised the west from Strathaven to Ayr. Thence I carried the news to Dumfries and along the border side. But to-day I have seen the Lady Sybilla on her way to take ship for France. From her I heard the news that all I had done was too late." "That foreigneerin' randy! Wad ye believe the like o' her? Yon woman that they named 'Queen o' Beauty' at the tournay by the Fords o' Lochar!
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