Amanda Scott | Legends

Border Wedding, Border Lass, and Border Moonlight all began with a legend from Scott family history…the legend of Muckle-Mouth Meg. Meg was Meg Murray, who was supposedly one of the homeliest women in the Borders. Legend perpetuated by Sir Walter Scott the poet, among others, was that the son of famous reiver Wat Scott of Harden was trying to steal cattle from one Jagan Murray, a neighbor, when he got caught. Murray supposedly gave Will Scott the choice of hanging or marrying Meg. So, that’s where I started. But the first thing I discovered in my research was that the man involved was not Will Scott of Harden. Negotiations for Will’s marriage to his wife Agnes are well documented as being long and amiable.

The discovery was no great shock to me, as I have done family history for years and learned long since that the best known anecdotes frequently don’t involve the people to whom they have been attached, or even that generation. So, I began looking for other possible couples in the line, and came up with another Sir Walter Scott 200 years earlier, whose wife was unknown. Lo and behold, the history of the Scottish Borders at the time he would have married was almost exactly the same as it was at the end of 16th century. The most powerful Border lord at the end of the 14th century had issued the exact same order to ‘end reiving’ that was issued in Will Harden’s time. It’s the kind of thing that gives historians goose bumps.

From there, I simply endowed Meg Murray with two sisters and a brother and marched on. My Wat Scott of Buccleuch and Rankilburn is based on the real Sir Walter Scott of that Ilk. Creating a love story between two people based on an incident where the woman was forced into marriage as much as the man was (and to a man who first said he’d rather hang, at that) provided a juicy challenge. I added a few more challenges of my own for the next two books in the course of the first. I’d love to hear from people who read the books or might be interested in reading them, and anyone else who might have comments to make.

Amanda Scott