Living out on the high moor at Craigenputtock Farm, Dumfries in 1828 was Jane Welsh with her new husband Thomas Carlyle.
“I had gone with my husband to live on a little estate of peat bog that had descended to me all the way down from John Welsh the Covenanter, who married a daughter of John Knox. It was sixteen miles distant on every side from all the conveniences of life, shops, even post-office. Further, we were very poor, and further and worse, being an only child, and brought up to great prospects, I was sublimely ignorant of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar and very fair mathematician. It behoved me in these astonishing circumstances to learn to cook! no capable servant choosing to live at such an out-of-the-way place, and my husband having bad digestion, which complicated my difficulties dreadfully. So I sent for Cobbett’s ‘Cottage Economy,’ and fell to work at a loaf of bread…”
Robin A Crawford 