Janet's married life unfolded during another difficult chapter of Scottish history. The monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660, but religious conflict did not disappear. Southwestern Scotland became one of the centers of Covenanting resistance, with conventicles—unauthorized Presbyterian religious meetings—held in fields, homes, hills, and isolated gathering places. The Johnstones were drawn into the administrative world surrounding these events.

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.

Who was William Carruthers of Breconside?

No surviving document has yet identified his parents.

No surviving charter places him within the principal Carruthers line.

Yet, just as importantly, no surviving record places him within any other Carruthers family.

Where one strategic marriage connected the Chalmers family to the Johnstones, the Douglases, the Lockharts, and ultimately to Scotland's royal bloodlines.

“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.”

“The name “Devil’s Beef Tub” is believed to have emerged during the violent frontier years of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when reiving families used the hollow as a temporary hiding place for stolen cattle. Raiding parties moving through the Borders could drive livestock into the concealed basin where the animals remained hidden among the hills until pursuit faded. In Border country, cattle were wealth. A successful raid could determine whether a family survived winter or collapsed into poverty. Livestock theft became deeply embedded within frontier life along the Anglo-Scottish marches where centralized authority remained weak and survival often depended upon kinship alliances, mounted mobility, and retaliation.”

Historic Environment Scotland identifies the central structure as the original late sixteenth-century tower, although later owners altered it extensively. During the eighteenth century a semi-octagonal stair tower was added, Victorian owners inserted larger windows and domestic wings, and the roofline was lowered from its original height. Even so, the north and east walls preserve much of the original tower built by the Johnstones over four centuries ago.