Mountains of Stories

On the moor between Galashiels and Peebles, there is an old carved stone signalling the "Cheese Well". 

It's a wee spring, clear, cold water gurgling up from a gravel bed under the heather, running over red-brown pebbles, and racing down the hill. 

I drank a toast to the fairies, because the Cheese Well was where people left gifts for them. There were fairies all over Scotland, living in the springs and the old woods. They seem to have been good spirits, so long as you kept them happy, so I wished them well with my toast. 

 

The Three Brethren have a story to tell, too

These moors are full of stories. There are the very old stories, of fairies and of stone circles on the hilltops, of the people who cut a living space out of the ancient Caledonian forest, and found trout in the streams and deer to hunt and eat. They would have felt blessed by the soft rolling countryside and the fertile alluvial soils of the valleys. 

Then there were the stories of the Romans, for their roads and camps are all about the moors. I met an elderly man with clear blue eyes who had been given a book on the Roman roads of Scotland '...fur Faither's Day. I'm no a reader, but I'm doing four pages each day before breakfast.' The legionaries, and their camp followers, meeting, loving, fighting, and listening to the stories of the Scots who lived in what was then, too, the Border between civilisation and the barbarians. (I've always been on the side of the barbarians… ) 

Later, the small, dark Scots and their small, dark cattle trudged along the Drove Roads to the trysts at Falkirk (I'll pass through there in a few days) and Crieff. These travellers must have told tales as they walked, about the bull that won a good price in the auction, and the drinking and celebrating that went on into the wee hours. Or about the ghost of a long-dead drover who visited them as they slept, delirious with hunger, wrapped only in a cloth plaid, on the heather. 

And then I reach Traquair, and my dad tells me a story from his school days about trekking across the Pentlands to this pub, the welcome beer, and the droll comment he made to his headmaster. In Peebles, on the next day, my cousin tells me that the big hotel on the hill, the Peebles Hydro, was the meeting place for respectable young middle-class men and women; her friend's parents met there. 

Like all stories, these get better as they grow older. As they are more often told, they become another foundation stone in one's personal culture, the stone-phrases passed on to the next generation, and the next (I'll be telling these tales to my grandchildren). 

These mountains are full of stories.