The sentiment which has been stirred by the Dumfriesshire County Council's condemnation of the smithy at Gretna Green as an obstruction and a danger to motorists is founded on a widespread misapprehension for which novelists are largely responsible. They have woven a romance about Gretna Green and its village blacksmith and smithy which will probably last for all time. The per-tenacity with which the popular mind clings to the belief that the Gretna weddings were celebrated by a blacksmith is very remarkable—for it is absolutely erroneous. Sir James M. Barrie, in his younger days, in a magazine article on Gretna, had a jibe at the "mythical smithy," an! Sir Herbert Maxwell, im a sober historical' volume. has dismissed the idea of a blacksmith as "a popular mistake." Yet in vain.
During the 103 years of Gretna's greatness (1753-1856), the most notable of the high priests were old. drunken Joe Pasley, who was turn smuggler, farmer, fisherman and tobacconist: David Laing, who was a pedlar; his son Simon, who was a weaver; Simon Beattie, who kept the toll-bar: and John Murray. who succeeded him in' that occupation. As to loci—the marriages were sometimes celebrated in the toll-house, sometimes in the village inn at Springfield, known as the King's Head, or in the rival inn on the other side of the road, and after 1826.in the more aristocratic Gretna Hall, which to a large extent superseded the marrying shops at Springfield. Thomas Little, who opened the rival inn at Springfield, had emblazoned over his door the words "Gretna Wedding," and depicted a bridegroom in magnificent regimentals holding the hand of a blushing bride standing before an anvil, while a blacksmith was performing the ceremony. He admitted in 1843 that his signboard was "all wrong," adding as an explanation, "We know that our best customers, the English, whom we want to attract and please, have taken such a notion into their heads." This signboard, it is asserted, was the start of the myth of the blacksmith.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.