More on Levellers/Roman camp...

We went, we saw, we think we found it! 
In follow up to this post this year’s Galloway Raiders 'birthday' trip (24th September) saw us go in search of Duchrae Bank Woods and the ‘Levellers/Roman Camp’ which is mentioned in The Dark o’ the Moon and Raiderland.

Here’s what we went looking for, described by Crockett:

You might play hide-and-seek about the Camp, which (though marked ‘probably Roman’ in the Survey Map) is no Roman camp at all, but instead only the last fortification of the Levellers in Galloway— those brave but benighted cottiers and crofters who rose in belated rebellion because the lairds shut them out from their poor moorland pasturages and peat-mosses.
Their story is told in that more recent supplement to ‘The Raiders’ entitled ‘The Dark o' the Moon.’ There the record of their deliberations and exploits is in the main truthfully enough given, and the fact is undoubted that they finished their course within their entrenched camp upon the Duchrae bank, defying the king's troops with their home-made pikes and rusty old Covenanting swords.

I’m still not sure if we actually found it (there’s more pictures HERE of what we think is the area) BUT we did come across the back of Little Duchrae on our walk. The excitement then was to experience Crockett’s childhood playground – while the trees may be newer, and/or certainly bigger if they date from 165 years ago – the views, especially the distant views, evoke the sights he grew up with from birth. And that, for me, was pretty exciting.

The following description from Raiderland/Dark o’ the Moon suggests that you can see it from Hollan Isle. I can neither confirm nor deny this, but we used that as a bearing from which to try and reach what we think is the ‘spot’.

'over the trees and hazel bushes of the Hollan Isle… [there is] a view of the entire defences of the Levellers and of the way by which most of them escaped across the fords of the Dee Water, before the final assault by the king's forces.
‘The situation was naturally a strong one—that is, if, as was at the time most likely, it had to be attacked solely by cavalry, or by an irregular force acting without artillery.
‘In front the Grennoch Lane, still and deep with a bottom of treacherous mud swamps, encircled it to the north, while behind was a good mile of broken ground, with frequent marshes and moss-hags. Save where the top of the camp mound was cleared to admit of the scant brushwood tents of the Levellers, the whole position was further covered and defended by a perfect jungle of bramble, whin, thorn, sloe, and hazel, through which paths had been opened in all directions to the best positions of defence.’ (Dark o’the Moon)
Such about the year 1723 was the place where the poor, brave, ignorant cottiers of Galloway made their last stand against the edict which (doubtless in the interests of social progress and the new order of things) drove them from their hillside holdings, their trim patches of cleared land, their scanty rigs of corn high in lirks of the mountain, or in blind ‘hopes’ still more sheltered from the blast.'

[NB Dark o the Moon is set in 1724 as the Levellers last stand happened then at the end of the period of unrest]


Whether we found it or not, we did in our adventure, come across the back view of Little Duchrae. But that’s another story (with pictures, coming soon.) 
Looks like the Levellers got here before us! (ha ha)