Crossford Boat phantom armies on the River Clyde (1686)

Lanarkshire, 1686. The Covenanters were outlaws, and their meetings were illegal. The persecution had already reached Crossford. In 1684, James Muir of Crossford Boat, whose home was the ferry itself, was executed at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh. Archibald Stewart of Underbank, who farmed half a mile upstream, was hanged at Glasgow Cross on 19 March 1684. There was no bridge yet. That would come in 1793. The only way over the river was the ferry boat.

June and July. Many people gathered about the Crossford Boat, two miles beneath Lanark, especially at the Mains, on the water of Clyde. They came back for several afternoons.

Those who saw described showers of bonnets, hats, guns and swords. They covered the trees and the ground. Companies of men in arms marched in order upon the waterside. Companies met companies and went "all through other." Then they all fell to the ground and disappeared. Other companies immediately appeared, marching the same way.

The seers were precise. They told what locks the guns had, and their length and wideness. Whether the swords had small, three-barr'd or Highland guards. The closing knots of the bonnets. Black or blue. Afterwards, whenever they went abroad, they saw a bonnet and a sword drop in the way.

Patrick Walker was about twenty. He went three afternoons together. He saw nothing. But he could not miss what it did to others: "though I could see nothing, there was such a fright and trembling on those that did see, that was discernible to all from those that saw not."

A gentleman stood next to him. He scoffed: "A pack of damned witches and warlocks that have the second sight! the devil ha't do I see." Then his countenance changed. Trembling, he called out: "All you that do not see, say nothing; for I persuade you it is matter of fact, and discernible to all that is not stone-blind."

Walker never gives a number. In the text printed by Sir Walter Scott, two-thirds of the people present saw, and a third did not. The historian Mark Jardine, transcribing Biographia Presbyteriana, reads "two of the People that were together saw, and a third that saw not." Jardine sees a small circle of prophetesses, probably at a local prayer meeting, with crowds coming to watch them. The original printing has not yet been checked to settle it.

Walker wrote in the 1720s, about four decades on, appealing to the "many yet alive" who could witness it. No church or government record has surfaced. He took the seers' fear and consistent details as evidence. Scott, in 1830, used the story to show "the infectious character of superstition," tracing its first origin to "some uncommon appearance of the aurora borealis." He compared Walker to Partridge in Tom Jones, unafraid of Hamlet's ghost himself, yet shaken because "Garrick showed such evident marks of terror." Andrew Lang is reported to have described the Westland Whigs as excitable, full of fears and of Peden's prophecies. Most modern readers see social contagion. No one has accused Walker or the seers of fraud.

Scott carried the story to a wide audience, though he called its author "Peter Walker." The visions at Crossford Boat now stand beside other phantom armies of Britain, from Edgehill to Souther Fell. In 2024, a plaque in Crossford Parish Churchyard remembered James Muir and Archibald Stewart. The river still runs past the Mains.