Notes on Rereick. 31 



mill on the other side of the water. But it was decided that the 

 thirlaoe was legal. Thirlag-e was legal to the present day. A 

 case with reference to Gordieston, in the parish of Glencairn, had 

 been decided in the Court of Session. That farm was within a 

 mile of one mill and a mile and a half of another ; but it was 

 thirled to a mill three miles away, and the court decided that the 

 farmer must either send his grain to the mill or pay multures to 

 the miller. 



II, — Notes on Rerrick. By Rev. GeO. M'Conachie and Mr P. 

 SULLET. 



Mr Sulley laid before the meeting some notes on the parish 

 of Rerrick, the joint work of the Rev. G. M'Conachie, M.A., and 

 himself. Alluding to the former prevalence of smuggling in the 

 district, a traffic for which the caves of Barlocco afforded good 

 facilities, he said many smuggling cellars existed in the parish in 

 places where they would never be suspected. Not many years 

 ago a pig rooting about a ruined house suddenly disappeared, and 

 disclosed the existence of a spacious rock cellar, but there was 

 then not even an empty brandy barrel in it. There were formerly 

 barytes mines on Barlocco, hematite iron mines at Auchenleck, 

 and copper mines on Heston ; but none of these are now worked. 

 It was said that whenever the directors of the last company which 

 worked the Auchenleck mine were expected it was regularly 

 " salted " with hematite from Cumberland. Within living memory 

 " a stone fire" had been placed in a farmhouse by the tenant who 

 was leaving. It was at one time a common custom for a farmer 

 who was evicted, or who was leaving his farm under a sense of 

 grievance, to fill up the fire-place in every room with broken 

 bottles and small stones and cover them over with larger flat 

 stones, and to lay on his successor a curse which should never be 

 lifted until these fires burned. AVhen the stone fire had been laid 

 and the curse said, the doors were locked and the tenant made his 

 way out by the window, the curse alighting on the first person 

 who entered thereafter. It was a custom also in such cases to 

 sow a part of the farm with sand, and to curse the succeeding 

 tenant until the sand should grow. This form of cursing was 

 carried out in the parish perhaps seventy years ago, and tradition 

 said that the incoming tenant did not thrive ; but this was pro- 



