Paterson, ROBERT, 'Old Mortality,' was born near Hawick, 25th April 1715, and served his apprenticeship as a stone-mason to an elder brother near Lochmaben. He married soon after 1740, and, renting a quarry for himself, took to carrying gravestones into Galloway. From about 1758 he neglected to return to his wife and five children, and for upwards of forty years devoted himself to the task of repairing or erecting headstones to Covenanting martyrs, wherever such had been buried. So Joseph Train wrote to Scott, who tells how about 1800 he himself met 'Old Mortality' at Dunnottar, engaged 'in the usual business of his pilgrimage.' From the old man's son, however, Train got a different story, without a hint of Cameronian zeal. Paterson died at Bankend, 29th January 1801, and was buried at Caerlaverock, where a monument was erected to him by the Messrs Black in 1869.
See the Introduction (1830) to Old Mortality, and Dr Crawford Tait Ramage's Drumlanrig Castle and the Douglasses (Dumfries, 1876).