ver it on whoever would dare to remove
it, for two hundred years ago a curse could break bones or "ryve the
saull out of ye."

Two years after John Brughe suffered at Edinburgh, the quiet of the
usually peaceful valley of the Devon was broken by the clatter of
cavalry and the skirling of the pipes, as Montrose, having in his usual
brilliant fashion outwitted Baillie, marched through, burning and
plundering as he passed, leaving Muckhart, Dollar, and, above all,
Castle Campbell, the lowland hold of the detested Argyles, heaps of
blackened ruins, a march which was to end in the bloody Battle of
Kilsyth, that "braw day" when, as the Highlander with grim humour
remarked, "at every stroke I gave with my broadsword I cut an ell o'
tamn'd Covenanting breeks." When Chambers says[8] that "the
Covenanting army marched close upon the track of Montrose _down
Glendevon_, at the distance of about a day's march behind," he, of
course, means down the Devon valley, and not down Glendevon proper,
since it is pretty certain that Montrose, in making his descent from
the north, entered the low country not by Gleneagles, but by the
south-east end of the Ochils. Glendevon Castle--originally built, it
is supposed, by the Crawfords[9] in the sixteenth century--thus escaped
the fate which befel Castle Campbell[10] and Menstrie House, and other
places in the Devon and Ochil district at this time, when the fierce
strife was not merely between cavaliers and Covenanters, but quite as
much, and specially during the Devon valley march, between the Ogilvies
and Macleans on the one hand, and the Campbells and their friends on
the other. It is, however, impossible, to say whether the Keep, which
has been in the possession of the Rutherford family since 1766, was
actually at this time in the hands of the Crawfords, and, indeed, the
traditions regarding its ownership are so vague--one of them assigning
it to the Douglases--that, in the absence of authentic records, it is
impossible to make any really satisfactory statement regarding its
origin and history.

{195}

Some years later the parish of Glendevon came prominently before the
public in connection with the deposition and excommunication of its
doughty true-blue Presbyterian minister, the Rev. William Spence, M.A.,
though it was not till he had been removed from his living that the
really romantic part of his career began. He had graduated at St.
Andrews in 1654, and after some years of schoolm