When Andrew Chalmers entered Gideon Shaw's apprenticeship in 1683, he stepped into more than a bookseller's shop. Shaw's marriage into the prominent Cunninghame merchant family placed his household within an established network of Edinburgh merchants, guild brethren, and professional associates.

Andrew's apprenticeship therefore introduced him to one of the commercial and intellectual circles that helped define late seventeenth-century Edinburgh.

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.

“But inside these towers, daily life unfolded in ways both ordinary and deeply shaped by the instability surrounding the Borders. At the center of tower life stood the hearth. The great fireplace provided heat, light, cooking space, and gathering place all at once. Peat smoke drifted upward into timbered rafters darkened by generations of fire. Iron pots hung over open flames while women prepared oat bread, pottage, stewed meats, or whatever could be preserved through difficult seasons.”

“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.”