The next resting-place seems to have been in the midst of the "Lang Whang"--a barren and bleak muir, which stretches eastward ten or eleven miles beyond Carnwath. Here an enclosure was effected by means of stakes and ropes, as the binding system had been found ineffectual, there being generally some method adopted by the fettered sufferers to relieve themselves. Within this enclosure these three hundred men stood or lay during a dark and a rainy night, without fire, and with very scanty provisions; whilst the demons on the outside of the enclosure lighted up fires of the heath, and of some peats which were found ready dried in the neighbourhood, and spent the night in roasting all manner of barn-door fowls, pigs, and even sheep, which they had captured as they passed along. Refreshment of a spirituous character was not denied them; and their songs, and their blasphemies, and their insulting language, "rose up in the midst of the wilderness" as Govan expresses it--"to the throne of the Most High, calling for vengeance in the day of retribution, on the head of the oppressor."
"This," continues he, "is a second morning, and a cold, and a gloomy, and a dreadful one it is. Clavers and his attendants are galloping up from Carnwath, where they have been spending the night in jollification wi' the laird; and we are just about to renew our dismal march. My leg is exceedingly troublesome; but, as we advance but slowly, I make a shift to get on. One man died last night raving mad; and another, I much fear, has put an end, with his own hand, to an unendurable existence. O Lord, give me strength to bear whatever thy wisdom sees meet to inflict!"
From the Lang Whang, the Grass Market was reached on the succeeding evening, and, after being united with two hundred prisoners from Stirling, they were all marched from the Grass Market; and, after some seasonable refreshment, ordered by the humane and kind-hearted Duke of Monmouth, into the Greyfriars' Churchyard, there to abide--from the month of June to that of December following--all the peltings of the pitiless storm, without a sufficiency of food, and entirely without covering.
Men of Scotland, was there ever anything like this? Can the remembrance of such atrocities ever be obliterated? Can century upon century, as they slowly roll on their course, ever place these events, and this event in particular, beyond the range of your interest? We read with horror of the scaffold and the guillotine; but what immediate death could equal in atrocity their protracted sufferings? Friends have they, indeed, within these walls, but they cannot, or but seldom, and at great risk, obtain an entrance. Many are disposed to supply the houseless prisoner with couch and covering, but they only supply additional means of debauchery to the ruffian soldiery. The chambers of the _many dead_ are defiled and rendered pestilential by the presence of the _many living_. Death, in ordinary circumstances, is a boon to this. Winter approaching--(nay, has arrived)--the sleety shower plashing over the Castle--the whirling drifts, eddying about, amongst, and beneath the tombstones--the wild, long, endless night, to which succeeds no dawn of comfort--no warm chamber--no invigorating and cheering meal. Oh, honest and fearless shades, tell us all! how did you stand it? How was it that you did not sell your remaining strength as dearly as possible?--that you did not rush like tigers upon your guards, and perish whilst rending them with your teeth and nails? But ye are silent as becomes ye; so I must apply to honest John Govan's MS.