76 DUMFKIESSHIRE AND GaLLOWAY A CENTURY AGO. 



Dumfriesshire, as he remembered them in his childhood, before 

 the beneficent influences of M'Adam had made themselves 

 generally felt. Anything like a hole in the road was promptly 

 repaired by the casting therein of a big slone. Over this stone the 

 wheels of passing vehicles heaved, descending on the other side 

 with a thud ; consequently in a short time the original hole was 

 represented by a diminutive mountain with a small pit full of mud 

 on each side of it. In Galloway and the upper parts of Dumfries- 

 shire there were no means of conveyance for those not wealthy 

 enough to keep carriages save common carts. I remember a 

 woman, who died in Sanquhar about sixteen years ago at a very 

 advanced age, telling me that in the year 1821 she had to go to 

 Edinburgh to undergo an opei'ation on her face, necessitated by a 

 growth in the cheek bone. I asked her how she went. " Oh, 

 just with the carrier's cart," she said, " and I was two days on the 

 road. We went to Biggar the first day, and to Edinburgh the 

 next." A two days' jolting in a carrier's cart, suffering the while 

 intense pain ! 



These difficulties of locomotion must have rendered life in the 

 most thinly populated parts of Galloway and Dumfriesshire 

 intensely lonely. In such villages as Dairy, Carsphairn, and 

 Wanlockhead people must have lived and died with only the most 

 fragmentary knowledge of any public events, or of any occurrences 

 beyond their own immediate neighbourhood. Newspapers they 

 had none ; postal communication was, on account of its expense, 

 practically non-existent. A little information may have occasion- 

 ally drifted down from some country mansion in the neig'hbour- 

 hood, or farmers returning from market towns may have brought 

 home news from the outer world ; but that was all. That the 

 general rate of intelligence was not of the highest order may be 

 gathered from the fact mentioned in Mackenzie's " History of 

 Galloway," that so late as the year 1805 the Procurator-Fiscal of 

 Kirkcudbrightshire thought himself bound to prosecute a woman 

 for witchcraft. She was sentenced to be imprisoned for a year, 

 and once in every quarter, on a market day, to stand openly for 

 an hour in " the jugs or pillory " at the market cross of Kiikcud- 

 bright. This, as far as I am aware, is the latest instance of 

 judicial punishment inflicted for witchcraft, though behef therein 

 lingered on to a later date. Mr Wilson, in an interesting account 

 of the famous Crawick Mill witches, mentions instances of un- 



