Joseph Train,
supervisor of excise at Dumfries, to whose unwearied industry I
have been indebted for many curious traditions and points of
antiquarian interest. It was Mr. Train who brought to my
recollection the history of Old Mortality, although I myself had
had a personal interview with that celebrated wanderer so far
back as about 1792, when I found him on his usual task. He was
then engaged in repairing the Gravestones of the Covenanters who
had died while imprisoned in the Castle of Dunnottar, to which
many of them were committed prisoners at the period of Argyle's
rising. Their place of confinement is still called the Whigs'
Vault. Mr. Train, however, procured for me far more extensive
information concerning this singular person, whose name was
Patterson, than I had been able to acquire during my own short
conversation with him. [See, for some further particulars, the
notes to Old Mortality, in the present collective edition.] He
was (as I think I have somewhere already stated) a native of the
parish of Closeburn, in Dumfriesshire; and it is believed that
domestic affliction, as well as devotional feeling, induced him
to commence the wandering mode of life which he pursued for a
very long period.
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