Tibbie Tamson

There is a local tradition that Thomson, who lived in the Kirk Wynd in Selkirk, was a poor woman of weak intellect[1] who was treated with contempt in the town.

[5] Accordingly she was placed in a pauper's coffin of deal, which was dragged out of the town while her neighbours threw stones and insults,[4] and was buried on Foulshiels Hill at the point where the Selkirk commonlands joined the estates of Bowhill and Philiphaugh.

[2] This practice of the burial of those guilty of Felo de se at the meeting of parish or estate boundaries was found elsewhere in rural Scotland, with a well-known fictional example in James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1823).

[1] Thomas Craig-Brown, in his two-volume History of Selkirkshire (1886), stated that the stone had been placed there by Michael Stewart, a dyker in the service of the Duke of Buccleuch, who "reopened the grave that he might repair the indecent haste shown at her burial.

"[7] The 19th century essayist John Brown said that the "grave [was] known and feared the country round",[8] while in more recent times it has been described as "a memorial to the worst excesses of small-town unkindness".