Records of a Family of Engineers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 237 pages of information about Records of a Family of Engineers.

Records of a Family of Engineers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 237 pages of information about Records of a Family of Engineers.

{4b} Ibid. pp. 158, 299.—­[R.  L. S.]

{4c} Working farmer:  Fr. laboureur.

{7a} This John Stevenson was not the only ‘witness’ of the name; other Stevensons were actually killed during the persecutions, in the Glen of Trool, on Pentland, etc.; and it is very possible that the author’s own ancestor was one of the mounted party embodied by Muir of Caldwell, only a day too late for Pentland.

{7b} Wodrow Society’s Select Biographies, vol. ii.- [R.  L. S.]

{9a} Though the districts here named are those in which the name of Stevenson is most common, it is in point of fact far more wide-spread than the text indicates, and occurs from Dumfries and Berwickshire to Aberdeen and Orkney.

{12a} Mr. J. H. Stevenson is satisfied that these speculations as to a possible Norse, Highland, or French origin are vain.  All we know about the engineer family is that it was sprung from a stock of Westland Whigs settled in the latter part of the seventeenth century in the parish of Neilston, as mentioned at the beginning of the next chapter.  It may be noted that the Ayrshire parish of Stevenston, the lands of which are said to have received the name in the twelfth century, lies within thirteen miles south-west of this place.  The lands of Stevenson in Lanarkshire first mentioned in the next century, in the Ragman Roll, lie within twenty miles east.

{54a} This is only a probable hypothesis; I have tried to identify my father’s anecdote in my grandfather’s diary, and may very well have been deceived.—­[R.  L. S.]

{91a} This is, of course, the tradition commemorated by Southey in his ballad of ‘The Inchcape Bell.’  Whether true or not, it points to the fact that from the infancy of Scottish navigation, the seafaring mind had been fully alive to the perils of this reef.  Repeated attempts had been made to mark the place with beacons, but all efforts were unavailing (one such beacon having been carried away within eight days of its erection) until Robert Stevenson conceived and carried out the idea of the stone tower.  But the number of vessels actually lost upon the reef was as nothing to those that were cast away in fruitless efforts to avoid it.  Placed right in the fairway of two navigations, and one of these the entrance to the only harbour of refuge between the Downs and the Moray Firth, it breathed abroad along the whole coast an atmosphere of terror and perplexity; and no ship sailed that part of the North Sea at night, but what the ears of those on board would be strained to catch the roaring of the seas on the Bell Rock.

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Records of a Family of Engineers from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.