It was a written agreement in which one man promised loyalty and service to another, usually someone more powerful. The wording varied, but the idea was fairly plain: I will stand with you, advise you, help you, and serve you. In return, the other man might offer protection, influence, money, land, or the security that came from belonging to a powerful following.

These were not necessarily agreements between equals. A small laird attaching himself to a great Border lord knew exactly what that lord’s name could mean. If there was a dispute over land, an enemy at the gate, or a feud gathering around him, he was no longer standing alone.

Historically, Galloway was a much older region of southwestern Scotland, with an identity that reached back centuries before today's county boundaries. Its heart lay west of Dumfries, stretching toward the Irish Sea.

My own ancestors were living in Dumfriesshire and Annandale, along the eastern edge of this Galloway world. People crossed these landscapes constantly. They married across parishes, crossed rivers, and carried stories. And this corner of Scotland gave those stories plenty to work with. To the south lay the Solway, with its dangerous tides and broad stretches of mud and sand. Inland were wooded glens and hills that could disappear into mist. Long before anyone called these stories “folklore,” generations of people were already living among them.

According to that account, John, Jean, and Patrick crossed the Atlantic in a sailing vessel, and the voyage did not go smoothly. Unfavorable winds prolonged the crossing to three months. Before they reached America, their water and provisions ran short. Patrick supposedly left Ireland wearing a new pair of buckskin breeches that fit him tightly. After three months at sea, with food running short, the breeches were considerably looser when he stepped ashore.

The High Street was laid out with long, narrow burgage plots running off it. Over time, access lanes developed between and through these plots—the ancestors of the closes we recognize today. The closes grew organically as medieval property behind the High Street was divided, occupied, and increasingly built upon.

But the stone buildings and stairs are much later. The west-side excavation uncovered a tenement built in the late 1500s, complete with cellar floors, a corbelled cellar roof, and a turnpike stairwell—a spiral stair contained within the building. Archaeologists date that stair as part of the late-16th-century tenement complex. It wasn’t originally the big open flight of steps we experience today; it was part of the house itself.

Each morning almost certainly began before sunrise. Apprentices unlocked heavy wooden shutters, swept the shop floors, unpacked newly printed books arriving from the city's presses, balanced ledgers recording customers' purchases, and prepared orders for delivery throughout Scotland. Lawyers stopped in before court to obtain recently published legal treatises. How cool! Ministers searched for new sermons and theological works. Students browsed educational texts while country gentlemen visiting the capital carried books home to estates scattered across the kingdom. Throughout every day, Andrew watched ideas move from printers to readers, gaining an education that reached far beyond the simple mechanics of selling books.

For the young man who had left the quiet fields of Dam only weeks before, Parliament Close had become an entirely different kind of classroom.

“For families living in the southwest Border country — particularly in Dumfriesshire and the old Marches — the suffering carried a different texture than it did in the crowded burghs of Edinburgh or Aberdeen. Here, survival depended almost entirely on the land itself. Crops failed. Livestock weakened. Trade slowed. Entire communities found themselves trapped between old feudal obligations, political uncertainty, and the harsh realities of subsistence living. For Border families such as the Carruthers of Holmains and their surrounding kin networks, the crisis arrived during a time when the region was already carrying centuries of instability behind it.”

“These dynasties shaped much of the western Border world during the late medieval and early modern periods. Their towers, estates, and influence stretched across the surrounding countryside, tying together neighboring lands through both cooperation and violent rivalry. The Maxwells rose into one of the dominant noble houses of southwestern Scotland.”

They belonged to a cadet branch of the powerful Johnstones of Annandale, a family whose influence stretched across Dumfriesshire for centuries. Corheid itself lay only a short distance from Breconside and formed part of a network of Johnstone properties that included Lochhouse and neighboring estates.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, James Johnstone the younger of Corheid had married Janet Douglas, linking the Border Johnstones with one of Scotland's most distinguished noble families. Their children inherited far more than land.

They inherited a world shaped by clan loyalty, legal tradition, and generations of service to the Scottish Crown.