The Berwickshire fairies were either a quiet lot or they lived among a too matter-of-fact population, for their memorial has almost vanished. The banks of Fosterland Burn, a contributory to a morass called Billy Mire in the Merse, ‘were’ says the late Mr. George Henderson, ‘a favourite haunt of the fairies in bygone days, and we once knew an old thresher or barnsman, David Donaldson by name, who, although he never saw any of those aerial beings, constantly maintained that he frequently heard their sweet music in the silence of the summer midnight by Fosterland Burn, by the banks of Ale Water, and on the broom-clad Pyper Knowes.’ In the last resort another authority asserts that ‘they used to come out from an opening in the side of the knowe, all beautifully clad in green, and a piper playing to them in the most enchanting strains.’ They once attempted, but failed, to abstract the shepherd’s wife of little Billy when in childbed; and they were detected loosening Langton House from its foundations in order to set it down in an extensive morass called Dogden Moss, in the parish of Greenlaw, but were scared by the utterance of the holy name.’ In one of Mr. Henderson’s MSS. I also find that some curiously formed eminences on the banks of the Whitadder, near Hutton Mill, called the Cradle Knowes, were in old times a scene of revelry for the light-footed fairies.  (Denham 148-149)