Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/143

Rh their own barn-like structure, a hideous post-Reformation Church. The back walls of the houses, thriftily built hard against the abodes of the dead, had their window-boles looking out on these silent neighbours through a screen of nettles, dockens, apple-reengie, and heather-reenge, as the fragrant southern-wood and showy hydrangea were called. To eastward the kirk hill dropped abruptly, to be imperceptibly lost in a long reach towards the open sea, across a wilderness of bent and sward, of heather and whin and broom, till it ended amid miles of golden sand, where the swish of the white crests as they broke mingled with the moan of the bar when the turn of the ebb brought in the rush of billowy foam to hide the mussel scaups and lagoons, dear to the flounder and the heron, the mussel-picker and the whaup (Oyster-catcher and Greater Curlew).

To westward the school hill sank to the trough of a wide valley which drained to nowhere in particular, but of old its countless lochans and forest of seggs and reeds must have been a paradise to the falconer and fowler. Tradition, indeed, made of it a royal forest in the palmy days of Falkland Palace. It was the favourite hawking ground and sporting estate of James V. (see "Exchequer Accounts," vol. vii.). How Petlethy, as it is called in the "Accounts," fell into the Crown is explained by an obscure episode of 1537, in which year Lady Glamis or Strathmore, of the hated Douglas line, was accused of plotting the King's death by poison and burned at the stake on the Castle hill of Edinburgh. Her son, a lad of sixteen, was left in prison and the estates forfeited, of which Petlethy formed a part. Here there was a fine old castle, built by the Mowbrays. The "Accounts" (1539-40) show frequent charges for household stuff carried between St. Andrews and Petlethy or Glamis by the "ferry of Dundee." After the death of the King, Glamis was restored to liberty and his estates. More precise historic links were few. Archbishop Sharp regularly journeyed by the kirk toon on his way to and from his rural retreat at Scotscraig, overlooking the estuary of the Tay, and that dear lover of a bishop, the great Samuel, trundled gravely past the old church in his progress northwards with the admiring Boswell. Out of the wilderness of marsh over against the kirk hill rose an artificial mound, on which stood for