Conclusion ' 361 



hardly fail to see that the evidence which points to the middle of the 

 12th century as the time when our crosses were carved receives an 

 added confirmation from the circumstance that this was precisely 

 the period when the rule of David was at its height. 



ancient Cave of Whithorn, —the Candida Casa of St. Ninian. ... It was 

 only . . . since what became practically my farewell journey in Italy in 

 1882, that I recovered the train of old associations by re- visiting Tweed- 

 side, from Coldstream up to Ashestiel ; and the Solway shores from 

 Dumfries to Whithorn ; and while what knowledge I had of southern and 

 foreign history then arranged itself for final review, it seemed to me that 

 this space of low mountain ground, with the eternal sublimity of its rocky 

 seashores, of its stormy seas and dangerous sands , its strange and mighty 

 crags, Ailsa and the Bass, and its pathless moorlands, haunted by the 

 driving cloud, had been of more import in the true world's history than all 

 the lovely countries of the South, except only Palestine. . . . Guy Man- 

 iiering, Redgauntlet, a great part of Waverley, and the beautiful close of 

 The Abbot, pass on the two coasts of Solway. The entire power of Old 

 Mortality rises out of them. . . . For myself, the impressions of the Solway 

 sands are a part of the greatest teaching that ever I received during the 

 joy of youth.' 



(149) 



