The Buchanites and Crocketford. 301 



drover and the long^-distance carrier, and the picturesque mail 

 coach. 



The opening of the coach road in 1800 was the breath 

 of Hfe to the Nine-Mile Bar ; the opening of the railway 

 between Castle-Douglas and Dumfries in 1859 was a blight. 

 The old trades faded away ; the shoemakers all disappeared, 

 the inns dwindled down to one. At the present day grass is 

 only kept from the doors by the diligent picking of the village 

 wives. The pd^ulation has shrunk to less than a hundred, 

 and only labouring work is to be had, and even that has 

 shrunk to almost vanishing point. Draining and dyking 

 may still provide a scanty livelihood. But the days of the 

 agricultural day-labourer are now few and evil. No youth or 

 maiden will stay in the village if work can be had elsewhere. 

 What, then, is to become of the village entity? Is it to 

 survive chiefly as a Home for the Retired, a place of seclusion, 

 and of withdrawal from the active business of life? 



If this is to be its fate the village has certainly some claim 

 to consideration, for it is phenomenally healthy. Old age is 

 its principal as it is its commonest complaint. The only 

 practitioners — and they were irregulars — who ever dabbled 

 in the therapeutic art in the early days of the village were 

 two Buchanites, whose lancet and whose diet, drink, and 

 ointment respectively wrought cures where the most skilful 

 physicians were baffled. But they are both dead. The only 

 " regular " doctor, " as jappin-looking a fellow as ever ye 

 saw," who ever practised in Crocketford until recent years, 

 is also dead. The moral seems to be : Don't practise medi- 

 cine or you'll kill yourself. The terrible cholera of 1832, 

 which made some jobbers in Dumfries desirous on the loth 

 October — a day when not a bullock was to be seen upon the 

 Sands — oi removing the market for the time being to the 

 Nine-Mile Tollbar, claimed only one victim in the village, 

 and he was a stranger. At that time the scare was so great 

 that painted boards were put up at all the entrances to 

 Kirkpatrick-Durham parish — " No Tramps or Hawkers 

 allowed within the Parish of Kirkpatrick-Durham." Before 

 the closing of the Crocketford lodging-house in iSgi there 

 occurred in it a smart little epidemic of typhus imported by a 



