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Amongst the flying, broken rabble that represented all that was left of the Covenanting army after the disastrous business of Bothwell Bridge, a dismounted Borderer, with one or two other stout hearts by no means disposed even now to give up the day, continued still to strike fiercely at Claverhouse’s pursuing troopers. But their efforts to stem the tide of disaster were utterly without avail, and the Borderer, zealously protesting and struggling, was at length swept off the field by a wild panic rush of the fugitives. Missing his footing on the broken ground as the flying mob pressed on to him, the Borderer fell, and, hampered by the bodies of a couple of wounded and exhausted countrymen, ere he could again struggle to his feet, the horse of more than one spurring rider had trampled over him, and he lay disabled and helpless, at the mercy of any dragoon who might chance to ride that way.

“‘The Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger,'” groaned the Covenanter. “‘He hath made my strength to fall; the Lord hath delivered me into their hands, from whom I am not able to rise up.'”

“Aye!” whimpered a wounded man who lay partly across the Borderer’s legs. “‘The Lord was as an enemy; He hath swallowed up Israel.’ And I’m thinkin’, ‘gin He send nae help, and that sune, we’re no muckle better than deid men. Eh! weary fa’ the day I left my ain pleugh stilts, an’ my ain fireside.”

“Na, na, freend. He that setteth his hand to the plough, let him not look back,” answered the Borderer. “‘Gin I win oot o’ this, I trow I’ll ‘hew Agag in pieces before the Lord,’ or a’s dune. We will yet smite the Philistines, destroy utterly the Amalakites! Aye! smite them hip and thigh, even from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof!”

This fiery Borderer, Ringan Oliver by name, a man of gigantic strength and great courage, a strong pillar of the Covenant, was a native of Jedwater, where he and his fathers before him had for generations occupied the small holding of Smailcleuchfoot. From the turmoil of the disastrous flight after the battle of Bothwell Bridge, and from the close search of the pursuing soldiers, Ringan Oliver did eventually escape, sore battered, and not without much difficulty and danger, and for many a month thereafter he lay in hiding; caves, holes in the moors, and dripping peat hags, were his shelter, heather and ferns his bed, many a time when the hunt waxed hot. And in 1680, hearing of the return from Holland of the outlawed Hall of Haughhead, he speedily joined that noted Covenanter, hiding with him, “lurking as privily as they could about Borrowstounness and other places on both sides of the Firth of Forth”; and he was with Hall and “worthy Mr. Cargill” when “these two bloody hounds, the curates of Borrowstounness and Carriden, smelled out Mr. Cargill and his companion,” and sent to the Governor of Borrowstounness that information which led to the death of one of the three Covenanters. Mr. Cargill and Ringan Oliver got clear away from the house at Queensferry where Colonel Middleton, single-handed, tried to arrest them, but Hall, severely wounded in the head, was taken, and died before he could be carried even so far as Edinburgh.

For some years after this we have no record of Ringan’s doings; possibly part of the time he spent on his farm at Smailcleuchfoot. In 1689, however, he was with General Mackay at Killiecrankie. And again, as at Bothwell Bridge, sorely against his inclination he experienced the horrors of headlong flight in company of a broken rabble. Reaching Dunkeld in an exhausted condition early in the following morning, he and a few comrades found shelter in the house of a friend. But as they sat, about to fall to on a much needed meal, down the little street came the “rat-tat-tat” of a drum, and past the window swaggered an unkempt Highland drummer, halting at intervals to hurl defiance at all Whigs, and a challenge to them to fight the famous Highland champion, Rory Dhu Mhor. And this is something after the fashion of what Ringan and his weary comrades heard drawled out with fine nasal whine: