though the resulting legal cases had the unintended effect of protecting the estates from forfeiture after William became involved in the 1715 rebellion. It was noted that father and son had been "thoroughly reunited by the common cause of retrieving their property", and Lag was eventually able to transfer the estates back to William in 1725. Death and posthumous legends Grierson of Lag was a byword for evil among the common Presbyterian folk in Annandale, who gravely asserted that he, like the other persecutors of the Covenanters, had intimate dealings with the devil, and that he was "partly in hell" before his death, in evidence of which they told that his saliva burnt holes where it fell, and his feet put into cold water made it boil. Lag died, aged 77, at his town house in Dumfries on 31 December 1733. He was buried two days later in the Grierson family burial plot in Old Dunscore Churchyard, the cost of the funeral being £240 Scots. A story was told that on the night he died a chariot surrounded by thunder clouds swept his soul away to hell. Another described how the horses pulling his hearse to Dunscore churchyard died of exhaustion on the way and a black raven flew down and settled on the coffin, flying away only at the moment of burial. The antiquary Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe claimed that the story regarding the horses was in fact true, and that his grand-uncle Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, a nephew of Lag's, had both attended the funeral and supplied the horses which subsequently died. Whereas the Presbyterian martyrologists had listed the names of those shot at the hands of Lag's men, the tales that grew up after his death became more lurid, and in later years locals pointed out a spot on Halliday Hill, near Lag Tower, where the Laird was said to have rolled Covenanters downhill in a barrel filled with spikes. Such stories may not be the stuff of scholarly history, but they vividly demonstrate the loathing and fear in which this man was held by those who were loyal to the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) and who hoped, sometimes schemed and even at times took up arms against the Stuart monarchy to achieve religious freedom. A satirical chapbook poem known as "Lag's Elegy", in which the Devil lamented the death of Lag, his