B-roads and Graveyards

Yesterday, we left Glasgow and went down, passing by Moffat, to a tiny place called Ettrick, then up to Selkirk and further up to Edinburgh. The roads were very narrow, once we got off the motorway, winding through wood and over hills and through some very, very beautiful landscape, even if the roads made the rare traffic very nervous. Some pictures of the countryside and road:





My maternal ancestors (they emigrated in 1882) lived in Ettrick Valley, so we went down to the region and found Ettrick Water, Ettrickbridge, and Ettrick -- the church is about it. There were three buildings in Ettrick, and the church was the biggest.




And this is something neat. In pursuit of our ancestral history, we found that my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Richard Lees, was entitled "the Shepherd of Singlie." No internet search could tell us more about that. We weren't really expecting to find much, but on the road, we stopped suddenly to see this:



Also in our (read: Mom's) searches, we found out that the Leeses were buried in the Auld Kirkyard in Selkirk. Naturally, we stopped to see. We didn't really expect to find much. It was a lovely graveyard, though - many of the graves were so old that no words were legible.





And then, in the very end corner, after giving up hope at all, we found a lonely gravestone.




The Richard Lees named at the top is noted as "the late Shepherd of Singlie." He died in 1860. The grave commemorates quite a number of his descendants, the last of which died in 1900. Richard Lees is our only direct ancestor, though: the grave traces the line of the other son, the one who didn't emigrate to Canada. We think. A correction may be forthcoming.

So both discoveries, that of Singlie and that of the grave, were unexpected and rather exciting, and almost made up for the heck we had getting out of Selkirk and into Edinburgh. But I'm now in Edinburgh; today's explorations will wait for when my battery isn't dying.

...Scotland!