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Many have been the terrible winters since those of which Hogg wrote, many the lives lost, and more, perhaps, the narrow escapes from what seemed certain death. In 1803 the frozen, deep-buried body of a man was found near Ashestiel, within what–but for the raging storm the previous night–must have been easy hail of his own cottage, where, sick with anxiety, his wife and little ones sat waiting his return from the hill. In that same storm a young shepherd, within sight of his own father, fell over a precipice near Birkhill, and, with spine hopelessly injured, lay helpless amongst the snow-covered boulders in a place inaccessible to the distracted father. A party succeeded in rescuing him, but rescue availed him little; he lay afterwards at home for several weeks unable to stir hand or foot, and in great pain, till death mercifully released him.

In 1825 came an on-fall so sudden and violent that scores of people who happened to be on journeys were compelled to remain for weeks wherever they had chanced to be when the storm broke. There was no possibility of getting away; except those in the immediate vicinity of large towns, all roads were completely blocked, and communication was absolutely cut off. The mails had ceased to run, and of course in those days the electric telegraph was unknown. Thus, many a man, the father of a family, was parted indefinitely from wife and children without possibility of allaying their anxiety for his welfare; many a commercial traveller passed week after week in some roadside inn, waiting vainly for the long-delayed thaw to enable him to communicate with his employer. And had country people in those days depended for their supplies on tradesmen’s carts, as is the custom now, many a family must have found itself in the direst straits ere the storm was half over.

Then a few years later came that memorable storm of 1831, of which men in Tweedsmuir still speak almost as if it were an event of yesterday. It was in the days of the old mail coaches, and the event which served to fix this storm indelibly in the public mind occurred on or near the old coach road from Dumfries to Edinburgh. The road runs past Moffat and up something like five miles of very heavy gradient to the Devil’s Beef Tub, ascending in that distance nearly nine hundred feet; from the Tub it crosses the lonely, desolate watershed which divides Tweed from Annan, then by easy slope drops past Tweedshaws and Badlieu, and so by Tweedsmuir and the old Crook Inn–with Broad Law upheaving his massive shoulder on the right–slips gradually into country less unkind in days of storm than are those bleak upper regions.

Snow had been falling all day on the 1st of February 1831, and the morning mail from Dumfries to Edinburgh was already late in reaching Moffat. Would “she” go on, would “she” risk the terrible drifts that even now must have formed nearer the bleak moorland summit? And the little knot of faithful admirers who, according to custom, daily assembled by one’s and two’s about the inn door at Moffat to wait the coming of the coach–their one excitement–agreed that “MacGeorge would gang on if the de’il himsel’ stude across the road.” MacGeorge was guard of the mail-coach, a fine, determined man, an old soldier, one imbued with abnormally strong sense of duty. Once before, for some quite unavoidable delay, the Post-Office authorities had “quarrelled” him (as he expressed it), and this undeserved blame rankled in the old soldier’s heart. It should not be said of him a second time that he had failed to get his mails through on time. So it came to pass that, in spite of rising gale and fiercer driving snow, in spite of earnest remonstrance from innkeepers and spectators, with “toot-toot” of horn away into the white smother, spectral-like, glided the silent coach. A mile from the inn she was blocked by a huge drift. That safely won through, a couple of miles farther she plodded on, slowly and ever more slow; and finally, in a mighty wreath, stuck fast; “all the King’s horses” might not have brought her through that. MacGeorge was urged to turn now, to make the best of a bad business and to go back to Moffat. The delay was unavoidable; no one could cast blame on him, for the worst part of the road was yet to come, and no power on earth could get the mails through that. But no! It was his duty to go on, and go he would.