As the village is to the north of the station, and Cairntable to the south, it will save time, if there is no need to pay a visit to the Black Bull or the Eglinton Arms, at once to take to the hill. On leaving the station on the south-side, turn to the left 300 yards or so, and follow a little stream a short distance beyond a lade which is in connection with the iron-work, and you will find in the second bend of the stream a curious phenomenon in the shape of a boiling (bubbling) well; the water rising up so strongly as to make the sand appear to boil over. After taking a drink, make through the moor for the middle of the wall to the left, which follow, keeping close to it. After the wall has been passed keep straight on till well up the shoulder of the hill; make then, through the heather, in a south-easterly direction for the nearest small cairn. After passing this keep in the same direction among some large stones, which were probably meant to commemorate some event, at the time considered sufficiently important, but the knowledge of which is now gone, as there are no distinguishing marks or hieroglyphs to be found on them. They are too small to have been used in Druidical worship, as some have supposed. And now you reach a very good footpath. From this the ascent is easy, the path being strewn here and there with small bits of breccia or pudding rock, which enters largely into the composition of Cairntable. Here are to be found small pieces of quartz minutely mixed with sandstone, and nearly as hard as granite. It formerly supplied for many a long year the millstones used in the parish for grinding oats.
The summit is reached in about an hour and a half, 1944 feet above the level of the sea, crowned with two immense piles of stones, and there is great need for some tradition to account for these, as in the case of the perhaps still larger cairn on the sister hill of Tinto. Would the members of the Antiquarian or Archæological Society please make a notice of this, and tell us if they were not meant to commemorate the defeat of some Annandale thieves who used to infest the district?
Before beginning to take in the surroundings we recall to our mind that at the end of the twelfth century all around us was a forest, as we learn from a charter granted to the monks of Melrose by the Grand Steward of Scotland; and that this was so is abundantly plain from the names of many of the farms, from the trees found in the moss (entire hazel nuts being also found in it), and from small clumps and detached trees of birch and mountain ash still to be seen on the braes and by the side of the ravines.