Mr. J. Hardy on the Wild Cat in the Border Districts. 249 



which I received in a letter, dated 17th January, 1853, from 

 Mr. James Telfer, the poet, long school-master at Saughtree, 

 in Liddesdale. " Keilder," he informs us, " was, till towards 

 the middle of last century, a great place for Wild Cats, or, 

 as they are called, Wulcats. An old shepherd, John Hutton, 

 of Peel, who died only ten or twelve years ago, aged above 

 eighty, used to say that when he was a young lad the 

 Keilder herds very seldom went to their sheep without 

 seeing one or more Wulcats. And my own grandfather, 

 a shepherd, was once nearly worried by a Wulcat 

 in Keilder. The animal attacked him without provocation, 

 with the utmost ferocity, aiming at his throat ; and it was 

 not without both danger and difficulty that he (a tall, stout 

 man) overmastered it. He kepp'd it (in its spring) with his 

 arm, but was unable to shake it off ; he, however, managed 

 to get it to the ground, and to plant his knee upon it, and 

 then, with the help of his colley dog, he finished it. When 

 relating the circumstance afterwards, my grandfather always 

 said that if he had not had the dog to assist him, the Wulcat 

 would have worried him. It was a great, overgrown animal. 

 On being stretched on the ground after it was dead, it was 

 found to be, from its length and girth, bigger than the colley 

 — of course it would be shorter in the legs. My grand- 

 father died thirty years before John Hutton, and I think he 

 would be about eighty when he died. He died in 1805 or 

 1806. His encounter with the cat happened when he was 

 a young man. I am not sure whether he was herding or 

 hunting in Keilder at the time. Keilder, in former times, 

 was a sort of jungle of natural wood — there was a deal of 

 natural wood in it, John Hutton said, in his early days. 

 There is a certain part in Keilder called The Grewhound 

 Law. It is supposed to have got the name from its being 

 the only part in Keilder where, on account of the wood, it 

 was practicable to hunt with grewhounds." 



" Wulcat," or " Wullcat," is the name which the animal 

 carried in Berwickshire ; as also elsewhere in Scotland, vide 

 " Jamieson." A correspondent, who signs " R. P.," assures 

 us that by this name also it was known in Roxburghshire. 

 " As a proof of this, I may refer to a place, within a mile or 

 two of Jedburgh, called the ' Wulcat Yett.' I have referred 

 to several Jedburgh people, and all say that it is the correct 

 spelling of it. I remember what was to some rather an 

 amusing incident. One of the ministers of Jedburgh had 

 an intimation to make from the pulpit about a visitation or 



