226 FIELD MEETINGS. 
Field Meeting—Sth September, 1906. 
(From the Dumfries and Galloway Standard.) 
SPRINGKELL AND ECCLEFECHAN. 
The last of the season’s field meetings of Dumfriesshire and 
Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society took place on 
Saturday, when between forty and fifty ladies and gentlemen paid 
a flying visit to Hoddom Church and Ecclefechan, and spent the 
afternoon at Springkell, as the guests of Sir Edward and Lady 
Johnson-Ferguson, viewing the works of art of which their palatial 
residence is a veritable treasure-house, and enjoying a walk along 
the sylvan banks of the Kirtle to the scene of the tragedy of love 
and jealousy celebrated in the fine old ballad of “ Fair Helen.’’ 
The bulk of the party journeyed from Dumfries ; and on the way 
their number received accessions from Annan, Lockerbie, and 
Moffat. Driving from Annan by way of Hoddom Bridge, they 
first halted at the parish church of Hoddom and had an oppor- 
tunity of viewing the interior, in which the old custom of a 
separate gallery for the chief heritor is still maintained. In the 
porch is preserved an inscribed slab, which links Christian Britain 
of the twentieth century with Pagan Rome of the second. It is 
a tablet dedicated to Jupiter, and was probably brought from the 
important military station of Birrens (on the farm of Broadlea, 
near Kirtlebridge), or perhaps from the post which the Roman 
soldiery occupied on Birrenswark Hill. It was built into the 
wall of the old church, for which much of the material might be 
got from the buildings left by the Romans, and since its demoli- 
tion in 1815 the stone has been preserved in the modern church. 
Many of the words in the inscription are contracted, the first three 
being represented only by initials ; but the skilled in such matters 
render it thus: “Sacred to Jupiter, the best and greatest. The 
First Cohort of Germans, called the Nervana, under the command 
of L. Fenius Felix, the tribune, erected this.’’ Among the 
memorials of the dead in the surrounding graveyard is the family 
tombstone of the Sharpes of Hoddom, the record on which in- 
cludes the names of the litterateur, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, 
and his brother, General Matthew Sharpe, the first popularly 
elected member of Parliament for the Dumfries Burghs. One of 
the oldest stones is inscribed in large raised letters to the memory 
ne 
