This little ballad, or song, was very well known in the last years of the seventeenth centnry. The first stanza was made by Ramsay the beginning of a song of his own (Poems, Edinburgh, 1721, p. 80). The most important document relating to Bessy Bell and Mary Gray is a letter written June, 1781, by Major Barry, then proprietor of Lednock, and printed in the Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 11, 108, 1822. "When I came first to Lednock," says Major Barry, "I was shewn in a part of my ground (called the Dranoch-haugh) an heap of stones almost covered with briers, thorns and fern, which they assured me was the burial place of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray. The tradition of the country relating to these ladys is, that Mary Gray's father was laird of Lednock and Bessie Bell's of Kinvaid, a place in this neighbourhood; that they were both very handsome, and an intimate friendship subsisted between them; that while Miss Bell was on a visit to Miss Gray, the plague broke out, in the year 1660; in order to avoid which they built themselves a bower about three quarters of a mile west from Lednock House, in a very retired and romantic place called Burn-braes, on the side of Beauchieburn. Here they lived for some time; but the plague raging with great fury, they caught the infection, it is said, from a young gentleman who was in love with them both. He used to bring them their provision. They died in this bower, and were buried in the Dranoch-haugh, at the foot of a brae of the same name, and near to the bank of the river Almond. The burial-place lies about half a mile west from the present house of Lednock."
Major Barry's date of 1666 should be put back twenty years. Perth and the neighborhood (Lednock is seven miles distant) were fearfully ravaged by the plague in 1645 and a year or two following. Three thousand people are said to have perished. Scotland escaped the pestilence of 1665-66.
Bessy Bell was made into a nursery-rhyme in England (see Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes, 1874, No, 484).
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