SCOTTISH GAEDENS 



Ah! but time brings strange revenges. About ten 

 miles east of Castle Kennedy, on a bleak and 

 boggy moorland, are the ruins of Carscreuch ; a 

 mansion whereof Symson, the seventeenth century 

 chronicler of this district, drily observes that it 

 "might have been more pleasant if it had been 

 in a more pleasant place/' This most ineligible 

 residence, shortly after Symson described it, passed 

 by marriage into possession of Sir James Dal- 

 rymple, first Viscount Stair. Some three hundred 

 years previously, the Kennedy clan had violently 

 despoiled the Dalrymples of their modest posses- 

 sions in Ayrshire, accomplishing that purpose not 

 without much arson and bloodshed. The turn of 

 the Dalrymples came when the seventh Earl of 

 Cassilis, chief of the Kennedys, floundered into in- 

 numerable scrapes in covenanting times. Generation 

 after generation, the Dalrymples were serviceable 

 lawyers. Acre by acre, farm by farm, the wide 

 lands of Kennedy in Wigtownshire passed to that 

 family which owns them at this day. 



This first Viscount Stair, President of the Court 

 of Session, had a daughter Janet, out of whose 

 troubled fortunes Scott created Lucy Ashton, the 

 Bride of Lammermoor. The father of the seventh 

 Earl of Cassilis, who, as aforesaid, was forced to 

 part with his territory to his hereditary enemy, 

 also figures in Scottish romance, for his first wife's 

 elopement furnished a theme for the well-known 

 ballad of Johnnie Faa. 



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