These stones are mentioned by Sara Maitland in her book "Gossip
From The Forest - The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and
Fairytales" in her chapter on Purgatory Wood. She relates their
dark history as a a non-native spruce plantation and
associations with Pugatory Burn which marked the western
boundary of a nearby leper colony. "The track I took into the
Purgatory Wood meets the Southern Upland Way as it climbs up
from New Luce, and a single path crossed the Purgatory Burn and
runs eastward to Laggangairn ... and then beyond it to the
Laggangairn standing stones - the last vestiges of a Bronze Age
stone circle, carved with eighth century christian graffiti left
by the pilgrims to St Ninians shrine at Whithorn" Apparently the
native people of St Kilda had developed a genetically inherited
elongated big toe that let the men cling more easily to the
cracks in the rocks. On one side of the island is the Mistress
Stone where marriageable men had to balance on one leg - on the
edge of a 300 ft drop - to prove their a