THE BORDER COLLIE MUSEUM

Statue by Currie, of James Hogg with his sheepdog, Hector,
at St. Mary's Loch, southwest of Selkirk in the Borders of Scotland.
(Photo by Ellie Green.)

(In September 2006, the editor of these pages and her husband were in Scotland and visited the two Hogg memorials:
the one above, at St. Mary's Loch, and the one at Hogg's birthplace in the village of Ettrick.
If you would like to see photos of these two memorials, please click here.)

"Without the shepherd's dog, the whole of the open mountainous land in Scotland would not be worth a sixpence. It would require more hands to manage a stock of sheep, gather them from the hills, force them into houses and folds, and drive them to markets, than the profits of the whole stock were capable of maintaining."

--James Hogg, 1824, from The Shepherd's Calendar

James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd

Part I: Shepherd & Farmer by Carole L. Presberg, ed.

Like no other literary figure, James Hogg, known as "the Ettrick Shepherd", had an appreciation of the role played by the shepherd's dog in the sheep industry in Scotland. The above is most often quoted by modern writers as a measure of the sheepdog's worth, but throughout his writing Hogg indicated that he had a very high opinion of the usefulness of this type of dog, and once said:

"A shepherd may be a very able, trusty, and good shepherd, without a sweetheart--better, perhaps, than with one. But what is he without his dog?"

And who knew better than he?

James Hogg was born the second son of Robert Hogg and Margaret Laidlaw in the parish of Ettrick in the Borders of Scotland in 1770. In his Memoirs of the Author's Life, Hogg said "my progenitors were all sheepherders of this country. My father, like myself, was bred to the occupation of a shepherd." His ancestors had been small farmers, but by the time of the poet's birth their fortunes had declined. His father became a dealer of sheep and a drover, but when the price of sheep dropped drastically, he went bankrupt and became a tenant farmer.

Hogg's mother was renowned as a ballad teller and was 40 when he was born. She brought her children up on the tales of the countryside where they lived. James hired as a cowherd at the age of 7, taking for his half-year wages, a ewe lamb and a new pair of shoes; and he had then "an excellent dog". By the time he was 15 he had served dozens of farms as shepherd, and at the age of about 20 he became herd to the Laidlaws of Blackhouse in the Yarrow Valley, and served them for 9 years.

Mr. Laidlaw was like a father to Hogg, and the educated world in which his family lived was opened to his young hired shepherd. It was during this time that Hogg began to write poetry when out with his flock whenever he found some spare time. He was greatly influenced by Burns, whose poems he first became acquainted with in 1797, the year after Burns died. Apart from brief periods of employment in Dumfriesshire, and the five years he lived in Edinburgh pursuing his literary career, Hogg spent his entire life as a farmer and shepherd in the valleys of Ettrick and Yarrow. In 1820, when he was 50 years old, Hogg married Margaret Phillips, and for the remaining fifteen years of his life lived in the Yarrow valley.

Left, an engraving of James Hogg by W.T. Fry after a painted portrait by William Nicholson, 1781-1844.

While the name of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, may be familiar to most people interested in sheepdogs, and they have undoubtedly seen the quote that opens this article many times, how many are acquainted with James Hogg the literary figure or with the bulk of his writing? In her introduction to A Shepherd's Delight: A James Hogg Anthology, Judy Steel says: "The range of Hogg's work never ceases to amaze me. Poet and songwriter--he himself wished to be seen as the heir to Burns--he was also a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. His enthusiasms spilled over into music (he played the fiddle and the flageolet) and into sport...[and] in the Hawick [Scotland] Public Library [are] two volumes of his plays."

Although he continued to pursue a pastoral life at the same time as his literary career, Hogg's farming and financial ventures were never very successful. He was better at writing about the land than making a living from it, and sheepdogs were very often favorite subjects. In a letter to Blackwood's Magazine dated February 22, 1818, Hogg tells a story about Sirrah, a sheepdog he owned while working as herd for Mr. Laidlaw:

"I was a shepherd for ten years on the same farm, where I had...about 700 lambs put under my charge...at weaning-time. As they were of the...black-faced breed, the breaking of them was a very ticklish and difficult task. I was obliged to watch them night and day for the first four days, during which I had always a person to assist me. It happened one year, that just about midnight the lambs broke and came up the moor upon us, making a noise with their running louder than thunder. We got up and waved our plaids, and shouted, in hopes to turn them, but we only made matters worse...and by our exertions we cut them into three divisions.

"I called out [to my dog] 'Sirrah, my man, they're away'...but owing to the darkness of the night, and the blackness of the moor, I never saw him at all...I ran here and there, not knowing what to do, but always at intervals, gave a loud whistle to Sirrah, to let him know that I was depending on him...We both concluded, that whatever way the lambs ran at first, they would finally land at the fold where they left their mothers, and...we bent our course towards that; but when we came there, we found nothing of them.

"My companion then bent his course towards the farm...and I ran away westward for several miles, along the wild track where the lambs had grazed while following their dams. We met after it was day...but neither of us had been able to discover our lambs, nor any traces of them...We had nothing for it but to return to our master, and inform him that we had lost his whole flock of lambs.

"On our way home, however, we discovered a body of lambs at the bottom of a deep ravine...and the indefatigable Sirrah standing in front of them, looking all around for some relief, but still standing true to his charge...When we first came in view of them, we concluded that it was one of the divisions of the lambs...But what was our astonishment, when we discovered that not one lamb of the whole flock was wanting! How had he got all the divisions collected in the dark is beyond my comprehension. The charge was left entirely to himself from midnight until the rising of the sun; and if all the shepherds in the Forest had been there to have assisted him, they could not have effected it with greater propriety."

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