For about two miles the road climbs upwards, a long hot walk in summer time.  You reach the summit at a place where four ways meet, beside the toll of Fairmilehead.  The spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and aspect.  The hills are close by across a valley:  Kirk Yetton, with its long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on this side with wood and tilled field running high upon their borders, and haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and variegated with heather and fern.  The air comes briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the elevation and rustically scented by the upland plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its mate.  At certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream together in the same field by Fairmilehead.  The winged, wild things intermix their wheelings, the sea-birds skim the tree-tops and fish among the furrows of the plough.  These little craft of air are at home in all the world, so long as they cruise in their own element; and, like sailors, ask but food and water from the shores they coast.

Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but once a distillery of whisky.  It chanced, some time in the past century, that the distiller was on terms of good-fellowship with the visiting officer of excise.  The latter was of an easy, friendly disposition, and a master of convivial arts.  Now and again, he had to walk out of Edinburgh to measure the distiller’s stock; and although it was agreeable to find his business lead him in a friend’s direction, it was unfortunate that the friend should be a loser by his visits.  Accordingly, when he got about the level of Fairmilehead, the gauger would take his flute, without which he never travelled, from his pocket, fit it together, and set manfully to playing, as if for his own delectation and inspired by the beauty of the scene.  His favourite air, it seems, was ’Over the hills and far away.’  At the first note, the distiller pricked his ears.  A flute at Fairmilehead? and playing ’Over the hills and far away?’ This must be his friendly enemy, the gauger.  Instantly horses were harnessed, and sundry barrels of whisky were got upon a cart, driven at a gallop round Hill End, and buried in the mossy glen behind Kirk Yetton.  In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl was put to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for the back parlour.  A little after, the gauger, having had his fill of music for the moment, came strolling down with the most innocent air imaginable, and found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by his arrival, but none the less glad to see him.  The distiller’s liquor and the gauger’s flute would combine to speed the moments of digestion; and when both were somewhat mellow, they would wind up the evening with ‘Over the hills and far away’ to an accompaniment of knowing glances.  And at least, there is a smuggling story, with original and half-idyllic features.