Chapter One

Chapter 1

Prelude

"Once you have lived on the land, been a partner with its moods, secrets, and seasons, you cannot leave. The living land remembers, touching you in unguarded moments, saying, "I am here. You are part of me."

Ben Logan, The Land Remembers

[1]

February is dreich-cold, damp, and blustery-in the Lammermuir Hills and the coastal lowlands of East Lothian, Scotland, lending the land a gray skeletal starkness during the scarce daylight hours. I'm chilled to the bone. The rawness pervades everything, inside and out. From my promontory on Doon Hill, the northeastern face of the Lammermuirs, the inland sweep of the coastal plain lays a mile off and 500 feet below me. Dunbar sits at the nexus.

Oliver Cromwell, like all southern invaders of Scotland, knew the strategic importance of the place. The bleak, rolling moors atop the 1,400-foot-high shoulders of the Lammermuirs had blocked invading armies for centuries, forcing their advance up the coast to Dunbar, despite the Dunglass and Pease Deans that dissected the plain only miles away near the small village of Cockburnspath. There, a handful of soldiers could stymie an army trying to cross the deep, steep-faced rocky ravines. But the Scots were too busy arguing religion during the spring of 1650 to seize the advantage, allowing the English lord commander's New Model Army of 16,000 soldiers uncontested entry into the country's heartland. Preliminary skirmishes ensued from Edinburgh eastward into East Lothian as the Presbyterian Scots mobilized an army of 27,000 troops led by Lord Leslie and a committee of military officers and Covenant presbyters.

By late summer, Cromw