The night of April 13, 1596, was dark and stormy. All the Border burns
and rivers were in spate; the winds blew shrewd and chill through the
glens of Liddesdale, and sleet drifted down in the teeth of the gale.
The trees that grew so thick round Woodhouselee bent and cracked, and
sent extra drenching showers of rain down on the steel jacks of a band
of horsemen who carefully picked their way underneath them, on to the
south. Buccleuch was leader, and with him rode some forty picked men of
his friends and kinsmen, to meet some hundred and fifty or so of other
chosen men. Scotts, Elliots, Armstrongs, and Grahams were there, and
although Buccleuch had requested that only younger sons were to risk
their lives in the forlorn hope that night, Auld Wat o' Harden and many
another landowner rode with their chief. "Valiant men, they would not
bide," says Scott of Satchells, whose own father was one of the number.
Kinmont Willie's own tower of Morton, on the water of Sark, about ten
miles north of Carlisle, was their rallying point. Buccleuch had
arranged every detail most carefully at a horse-race held at Langholm a
few days before, and one of the Grahams, an Englishman whose countrymen
were not yet aware that the Graham clan had allied themselves to that of
the Scotts, had conveyed his ring to Kinmont Willie to show him that he
was not forgotten by his feudal lord.
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