Cuurcu or Sr. Joun toe Barrisr, Danry. 75 
an office not hereditary, but tenable only during the lifetime of an 
individual, it would be quite otherwise; and it appears to me that 
no subsequent descendant would be at all entitled to credit the 
family with the continued use of a distinction valid only during 
the lifetime of an ancestor. The real gist of the question then 
comes to be, that, in this peculiar combination of private and pro- 
vincial arms, do we find a test of the period when, and the individual 
by whom, this aisle was erected, and, is that tradition about the 
erille being three hundred years old a fact, and not a fancy ? 
According to the evidence adduced, the erection of the aisle 
must have fallen within the lifetime of the Justiciar, and if the 
view be adopted, that the lion rampant represents the undiffer- 
enced arms of Home, then its erection must be further limited to 
the lifetime of the Justiciar’s first wife, Juliana. We may well 
believe that by way of reconciling both theories, Sir John rose to 
the humour of the situation, and impaled a cognizance appropriate 
alike to his wife, as a Home, and to the Province. So far as, in 
its severe simplicity, the style can be any guide—the aisle 
might just as well have been erected in the 16th as in the 17th 
century, and I trust that some of the members of the Society nay 
be able to throw light on so interesting a topic. 
I need scarcely remind the members of the Society that one 
ereat source of interest, not only in the church—now, alas! no 
more—but in the entire group of residential and other buildings 
associated with it, known in medieval times as St. John’s Clachan, 
was the fact that it lay on the great, and, in these early times, the 
only, highway of communication between the central districts of 
Scotland and its far south-west extremity, Wigtonshire. It was, 
indeed, a kind of half-way house to all those gentle or semple, 
royal or plebeian, who had occasion to traverse the wild and moun- 
tainous district, called the southern highlands, a journey by no means 
without peril of many kinds, from Nature in her wildest moods to 
the not less real dangers of an ever lawless and unsettled state of 
society. We may well believe that if the full romance of that 
road could be told in the varied incidents befalling the countless 
thousands who traversed it, the narrative would far outvie the 
most stirring of Chaucer’s tales. More especially was this the 
route undeviatingly followed by the Scottish Kings in the pilgrim- 
ages they so frequently made to the shrine of St. Ninian ; and not 
by kings only, but nobles and ecclesiastics of every rank and 
