Covenanter Tour, Day 3: Battlesites

Today was the last day of the Covenanter tour. The weather cleared, giving way to low, fast-flying clouds with broad bars of sunlight between.

We had a late start this morning because Pastor Quigley had to go to the doctor's office. He's been having troubles with his ear, and he went to have those sorted out. The delay was actually providential. One of the children in my church at home has been seriously ill, and this morning I felt a great burden for him and his family. While we waited for Pastor Quigley to arrive, I asked the team if we could pray for this child. We had a serious, heartening time of prayer. Just after we finished, Pastor Quigley arrived.

Our first stop today was Bothwell Bridge. On this site, 437 years ago today, a party of 5,000 Covenanters foolishly engaged a group of approximately 15,000 royalist soldiers in battle. The leader of the royalists offered the Covenanters a chance to make a military truce, but the Covenanters refused. They were poorly armed and had to resort to using dried peas as ammunition. Many of them were killed or captured, and taken to the Covenanters' Prison in Greyfriars, as we saw yesterday. At Bothwell Bridge, there's a stone memorial of the sort with which I was to become quite familiar by the end of the day: a four-foot tall rectangle, with an eight or nine-foot stone obelisk mounted upon it. The sides of the rectangle are carved with names, history, poetry, and Scripture in commemoration of those who died. While we stood beside the monument, Pastor Quigley quizzed us about the history we've learned over the past two days. Cars whizzed past on the highway, over the bridge where the battle was fought.

Next we drove to Hamilton, just the other side of Bothwell Bridge. In Hamilton, in the old church graveyard, there are several Covenanter monuments. One of them is to four Covenanters who were brutally killed. Their heads are buried in Hamilton, but their hands were sent to Lanark, where one of the National Covenants was signed, as an act of terrorization to those who had signed the Covenants.

After Bothwell and Hamilton, we drove out into the countryside, where we were to spend the rest of the day. We went to Drumclog first. Drumclog is a lonely spot, deep in the countryside, surrounded by deep green, rolling hills and open moorland. Wind-bent trees lined the ridges. We drove through pastures and fields. I saw a field that had just been mown, and it caught my eye as though it had been a living thing. Blue cloud shadows rolled over the short yellow grass so that the hillside shimmered like golden sand under water. The land seemed to be a tawny wave, running up toward the sky. The very air seemed to shimmer--cold and lonely, pale yellow-green and blue. A black raven skimmed low over the field, and the vivid colors rippled before my eyes.

At Drumclog, a conventicle was being held when a lookout on a nearby hill fired a warning shot: a party of royalist soldiers was approaching, ready to attack. The Covenanters stood their ground on the hillside and waited as the royalists approached. The hillside below the conventicle is a peaty bog. As the royalists galloped toward the Covenanters, they had to ride through this bog. Their horses became mired in the moss, and the Covenanters with pitchforks and sickles dragged the royalist soldiers off their horses and defeated them. Claverhouse, one of the cruelest of the men who persecuted the Covenanters, was almost killed at Drumclog.

When we went to Drumclog, we found the scene much the same: a broad hillside, open to the wind, seething with tall grass. Another stone obelisk stood on the spot where the conventicle was held. Turning with our backs to the obelisk, we looked down across the valley and over to the sheer, hog-backed hill on which the lookout had stood. The hill is wooded, but the valley around it is open pastureland. A lookout man could easily have hidden among the trees and seen the soldiers without being seen himself. As we stood there on the hill, cloud shadows rushed towards us across the pasture, like the shadows of galloping horses. The wind boomed in the grass and in a nearby oak grove.

We drove from Drumclog to a small, out-of-the-way restaurant. The restaurant was closed for kitchen renovations, but they allowed us to come inside to see the murals which commemorate the battle at Drumclog.

After Drumclog, the land became more wild. The rolling green hills heightened, broadened, sharpened, and grew into vast heights of brown heather and moss. Only a few trees grew in clumps in the valleys. Grey cliffs slashed through the dreary hillsides. As we drove higher, the day clouded over. Huge, dark clouds rolled over the crags, sending long streamers down through the narrow valleys. The land became proud and cold. Hard brown earth and hard grey stone towered over us. In a few places, sheep grazed in bleak pastures, like white kernels of wheat tossed onto hard ground. A cold wind battered the van, sending spits of frigid rain against the windows. Through my open window (I was sitting at the very back of the bus), I could smell the clear, cold wind. As we drove, the van bumped and leaped over ruts in the road. The last bench, right over the wheels, was more like an amusement ride than a seat. My arms flapped as though I was trying to fly. Brenda nearly tumbled off her seat.

Pausing on the roadside, Pastor Quigley pointed out the place where James Brown, a Covenanter, was shot beside his house. Staring down into a deep valley, we saw a small white house like a fleck on the brown moorside. Pastor Quigley told us, "They shot him there, and then they turned to his wife. 'What do you think of him now?' the dragoons, royalist soldiers, taunted. 'I thought much of him in life, but now I think far more that he is dead,' she replied." Pastor Quigley turned round to us all. "I could take you to ten or twelve villages in this area, and every one of them would have a monument to the Covenanters. Pastor Quigley drove us to Muirkirk, and in the cemetery there was a monument to the Covenanters, "who died for religious liberty". "See, these people got it right," Pastor Quigley said. "The Covenanters weren't fighting a civil battle, the way it said on the monument at Bothwell Bridge. They were fighting for the crown rights of Christ and for their right to worship Him as He had commanded. They didn't mind the king so long as the king did not usurp the rights of Christ." Pastor Quigley also took us to the place where Alexander Peden is buried. In the same cemetery are buried a boy shot while reading his Bible and a man shot while praying, both Covenanters.

We ate lunch at a roadside park in Muirkirk, with the town at our backs and the moors before us. Actually, a field with a few sheep was just across the road. Toby bleated at one particularly large and fuzzy ram, and the ram bleated bewilderedly back. John and Rachel hopped into the field to have Virginia take their picture with the sheep, but the sheep, alarmed by this fence-hopping performance and by the weird, two-legged creatures in flapping jackets, took off running. All Rachel came up with was a clump of ragged wool snagged in the stubbly grass. Most people sat on the little decorative stone bridge in the park, but some of us huddled in the van to eat. My orange dripped juice on the floor of the van, so I had to eat it standing outside in the thin rain.

After lunch we drove on into the moors. Pausing again, Pastor Quigley pointed out across a brown swell of moorland which fell away steeply from the road, which was by now hardly more than a narrow track. In the field, far away, we could see another white obelisk. "That's the spot where Cameron and four other men were ambushed and shot by dragoons," Pastor Quigley said. "They're buried just to the right of that monument." I stared down at the bleak scene. A few scruffy brown cattle grazed close to the fence. Behind them, the moorside tumbled down to the monument, fell steeply away, and rose again into yet another monotonous swell of grass, heather, and bracken. Dull greey and brown surged up to the dull grey sky, with the wind seething over all. Behind that hill, others rose, and on and on into the distance, until brown became grey, then faint blue, then lost, as though the hills had become one with the louering clouds. A bleak place to die.

We must've kept driving for an hour or two through the mountains. The moors slowly disappeared, to be replaced with thick, dark fir woods. Nothing could be seen through their shadow. The fir trees' long arms reached out toward the road, an endless succession of pointed trees, like soldiers lining the narrow way. The hillsides were lurkingly alive with their brooding darkness. Bracken covered the ground in open glens. Ferns dripped down the cuts that had been made to allow the road to pass through the hills. Dark water spurted out of the hillsides, foaming in white waterfalls over fir roots and fern leaves. The vast sweeps of hillside were covered with firtrees, like the spires of a city of cathedrals. Where the woods were made of pine, the darkness lifted somewhat. The ruddy pine trunks glowed darkly in the shadows, their writhen branches blocking out the grey sky. We drove over ancient, arched stone bridges, with dark grey water frothing beneath them. I was reminded of the Trollshaws above Rivendell. A strange stone spire poked out above the trees from a shoulder of rock. In a pasture outside Dalry, we passed a standing stone, jagged, like the stump of an old tree left to petrify in the field. We stopped briefly in Dalry, where the uprising against Charles II began, but there was no monument or any historical marker for the place. So we drove on.

In one field I saw a man riding an ATV toward a cluster of sheep. Streaking out ahead of him, turning the hundred or so white creatures back towards the ATV, was a black-and-white bundle of fur. As the sheepdog nipped the beasts' heels, the sheep skeined out, turning toward the man on the ATV.

At last we reached our destination: Wigtown. We drove down out of the hills. Wigtown sits up on a spur of land, but below it, to the east, its hill falls steeply, and there is a long, broad, flat bay. Above the bay on the other side, the hills (where we had just been) loom, their dark backs thrust up against the sky. Our first stop was the martyrs' monument, on the top of Wigtown's hill. Standing on the hilltop, we could look down onto the red and brown tile roofs of the town, clustered like clods of earth. Beyond that the broad bay opened: green pastureland blending seamelessly into the Solway Firth. A grey arm of the Atlantic shimmered like a sword, white where it touched the flat green land, turning grey far away on the northern horizon. To the east, beyond the arm of the sea, the hills rose, like huge waves, dark green, light-veined.

We drove down to the graveyard beside the old church. The ruins of one church stands beside the building of a slightly newer church. The graveyard itself is very old, many of the monuments unreadable. Yet here there is the monument to the two Margarets, Margaret Lachlane (63 years old) and Margaret Wilson (18 years old). As we stood around the grave, Pastor Quigley solemnly talked about the sacrifice that the Margarets made. We stood in absolute quiet for a long time. The wind boomed in the trees around the graveyard.

Both women were captured by dragoons and imprisoned for being Covenanters. Margaret Wilson's sister was also imprisoned, but the girls' father managed to find enough money to pay for her release. However, he did not have enough to release the other two women. Because the women would not deny Christ's crown rights, dragoons took them out into Solway Firth. They tied Margaret Lachlane to a stake far out in the ocean, and as the tide rose, she drowned. Then they gave Margaret Wilson the chance to recant. "Pray for the king!" they told her. She prayed for Christ's glory to be shown and for His power to be shown in the king's life. "See, look, she prays for the king!" her mother screamed from the bank. "I do not pray for the king, but for God's will to be done in the king's life," her daughter replied. The flat, tabletop monument in the graveyard commemorates her death for Christ's Crown and Covenant.

After the graveyard, we drove down to the place where the martyrs' stake stands. Since the time of the Margarets, the lay of the land has shifted. Though the place is out on that marshy bay of land, which could easily have been covered by the sea years ago, the sea today is some miles away. We climbed down the sheer hillside on which the town stands. Hemlock umbels bowed along the footpath, their delicate white flowers tossing on the wind. At the bottom, the land flattened out completely. A livestock gate at the bottom of the hill creaked as we entered the field. A board walk, raised above the level of the field, kept us from having to slog through the marshy ground. Pools of water glinted through tall green grass. Killdeer and seabirds piped and whistled far out over the muddy flats. Beyond the grass, miles away, I could just see the flash of the ocean, where it came level with the low land. Out in the field there stands a stone block, with a stone stake mounted on top of it, to mark the place where the Margarets were tied. Behind us on the hillside, the wind rose in the oak trees, like the crash of waves on the beac.h In their coveys among the trees, starlings chattered, and doves cooed softly from the eaves of houses on the hill. Away out on the pasture, skimming low over the grass and watery pools, swallows dipped and spun. Their purple wings flashed iridescently in the sunshine. Huge cloud shadows swooped over the field, streaking it grey and gold-green. Vivid ripples of color, shot through with the dancing pattern of the swallows. The wind sighed in the grass and spiderwort growing around the Margarets' stake. A lonely, lovely place.

We stood around the stake, and Pastor Quigley told us the story of the Margarets. After Margaret Wilson refused to pray for the king, she asked a passage of Scripture to be read. In his solemn voice, Pastor Quigley read Romans 8: "Therefore, there is now now condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit...." Tears welled up in my eyes. "After the reading of Scripture, Margaret sang a Psalm. Then the soldiers led her out to the stake. They held her head underwater until she drowned." Pastor Quigley raised his head and spoke seriously to us. "You may not have heard, but recently two American soldiers were captured and brutalized in Iraq by Muslim terrorists. The world tells us to beware of anyone who knows the truth. It lumps Christians and Muslims together because both claim to know the truth. 'Look what the Muslims did in the name of the truth! Beware of those Christians!', the world says. But there's one key difference. Muslims kill others for their faith. Christians die at the hands of others. Yet these women did not die for Christ. They were seeking to live for Him. That is why they went to the conventicles. Their challenge to us is not that we may die for Christ. I do not think that in our lifetime we will ever face that level of persecution. Their challenge to us is that we should live for Christ. When we meet them in Heaven, we may say to them, 'I know what your life was like. Not that I followed Christ to the point of death, but I lived my life just the way you did--without compromise, in the service of Christ.' Christ does not call us to die, but to live." He paused and stared at the stone stake. "This is our heritage," he said at last. "Ours in a general sense, but also in a very specific sense, as Reformed Presbyterians." The wind shivered through the grass around the standing stone.

We sang Psalms 118, 119 ("How shall a young man cleanse his way?"), 73C, 98A, and 116A. The wind whipped our voices. The words whirled away among the darting wings of the swallows.

We climbed the hill in silence.

Back in the car, we drove for another couple of hours. Though there were many sites yet to visit, Pastor Quigley chose not to go to them. "The map I'm using is marked with Covenanter sites. It's covered in little red dots," he said. But the day was late, and we'd had a late start.

We drove through more fir woods, then into a fertile pastureland. Many dark grey and green rivers flowed past the road. Foam flecked the water with vs like skeins of flying wild geese. The fir woods gave way to hardwood forests--oak, elm, maple. We drove by farms nestled in the flat valleys between steep hillsides. We drove under the tall stone arches of railroad bridges spanning narrow green valleys. Gold light flowed over the green fields and blue hills.

Suddenly, we came out of the mountains. Two last tall heads of stone, grey cliffs cut through their grey sides, stood on either side of the road. And there was the sea, spread before us beside a long, flat shore. We drove through the town of Givan, a town much like Ayr, and through others of the same sort, strung along the seashore. Glimpsing the sea between the houses, the sun on the water dazzled my eyes. To the west, the sky was black with clouds. The sea was deep grey, streaked blue and aquamarine where the wind ruffled it. The sun was moving toward the west. It flashed on the waves so that sun, water, and sky became a wall of shining silver glass.

We drove past the ruins of a red sandstone castle in a green field, with the dark hills behind. Finally, at about six-thirty, we stopped for supper at Monkton Lodge, a hotel and restaurant built beside the highway toward Airdrie. The people sitting at the front of the bus (Virginia, Missy, Rachel, Aaron, and John) had been singing silly songs for the past two hours from Wigtown. Mostly variations on, "And he threw it out the window/ The window/ The second-story window/ With a heidy-ho and a hefty throw/ He threw it out the window." Brenda, Matt, Michaela, Emily, Sarah, and I had sat at the back of the bus and suffered through this nonsense the whole way. Lucas asked the singers to stop at the restaurant, but they were still being silly as we filed into the dining area. The restaurant was a warm, homey sort of place with plain, wholesome food.

When the food came, it was delicious. I had a square beef-onion-mushroom pie, with thick crust. Afterward, Pastor Quigley ordered one huge sundae for each table (he was sitting with Sarah, Brenda, Toby, and Matt at another table; Lucas and Melissa were off in their own corner). We passed ours around, everyone taking a spoonful or two of the creamy cake-and-ice-cream.

We returned to Airdrie at about ten o'clock. Michaela wanted to watch the new "Pride and Prejudice", so Virginia and I settled down with her in the girls' room. Michaela tipped her cot up on its side so that we could lean against it. The movie was pleasant to watch with Michaela (who'd never seen it before), and Virginia (who put in funny comments every now and then).