Stobhall is on the left bank of the Tay, eight miles above Perth, in Cargill parish, and Cargill is a little further up. Balathy is opposite Cargill, and Kercock is higher up the river on the right bank. The local tradition, as given by Motherwell in his manuscript and his book, is that the butler of Stobhall had a leman both at Kercock and at Balathy. Upon an occasion when the butler had gone to Kercock, the lass of Balathy scuttled the coble, which he had left below, "and waited his return, deeming that her suspicions of his infidelity would be well founded if he took the boat without visiting her in passing." The butler took the boat without stopping at Balathy, and in her sight the weary coble sank. Local tradition in such cases seldom means more than a theory which people have formed to explain a preexisting ballad. The jealousy of the lass of Balathy has, in the ballad, passed the point at which confirmation would be waited for. She has many a time watched late for her chance to bore the coble, and she bores it 'wi gude will.'
St. 14 is a common-place which has been already several times noted.
The Rev. William Marshall's Historic Scenes in Perthshire, Edinburgh, 1879, p. 246, gives us a "modern" version of this ballad; that is, one written over in magazine style. This is repeated in Robert Ford's Auld Scots Ballants, 1889, p. 152. The Perthshire Antiquarian Miscellany, by Robert S. Fittis, Perth, 1875, p. 466, cites some stanzas from another ballad, composed by one James Beattie, journeyman-mason, but represented as having been taken down verbatim from the mouth of an old man. In these pieces the lass of Balathy has the name Jean, Jeanie Low (Low or Gow, according to Ford, p. 149).[foot-note]
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