74 THE Brus INSCRIPTION AT ANNAN. 
myself, and possibly it may be a forgery. The two sorts of 
N RA and V U strike an outsider as fishy, and isn’t 
counte a funny form? And was Bruce de _ Brus? 
Anyway, the alleged history of the stone is as follows :—It 
is now here, and the property of my aunt, Miss Halliday. 
This place was built in the early part of the nineteenth cen- 
tury by my grandfather’s uncle, the Rev. Walter Stevenson 
Halliday. He possessed also the family property of Whinny 
Rig, in Annandale, which on his death passed to a cousin, 
and then, thanks to the re-marriage of a widow, out of the 
family. I have always been told that he brought this stone 
from Annan. 
‘“ My great-aunt fished up the other day a notebook, in 
which is an abstract taken from the Annan Observer of 
January 17th, 1861, of a lecture delivered by Mr W. D. 
Bruce of Schaw Park, Clackmannan, entitled ‘ The Ancient 
Lords of Annandale and the Last Campaigns of the last of 
them, King Robert Bruce.’ In the course of his prelection, 
which is pretty feeble stuff, “he had no doubt that the old 
inscription, ‘‘ Robert de Brus, Comiti de Carrick, et Senior — 
du Vale de Annan, . . . 1300,’’ which was on a stone in 
an old house in Butts Street, but now unfortunately removed, 
was in commemoration of the first charter.’ Someone has 
underlined this in red, evidently supposing it to allude to this 
stone. I can’t help thinking that Mr Bruce’s inscription is 
curious Latinity too! But it is a priori probable, I think, 
that the stone to which he referred is the same one as ours. 
Whether it is genuine is another matter. Garmon Jones, my 
assistant to be, and I went down in a fit of energy and copied 
our stone. The soft sandstone is in parts hopelessly disfigured. 
‘Robert de Brus Counte de Ca .. .’ is quite certain, and 
‘Ca/rrik ’ seems probable. The ‘i’ and a bit of the ‘k’ are 
there all right, and there is ample room for two ‘r’s.’ ‘ Et 
sent’ is quite certain; then come I/, which looks like a bad 
shot at a letter on the part of the mason, followed by a cer- 
tain U. The beginning of the next line is hopelessly defaced. 
There is something like the tail of an R, but very uncertain. 
D is uncertain, but very probable. VA certain. The next 
letter has a down stroke, and then there is a big hole in the 
r 
