People

While kindly and unassertive in manner, the people were hearty talkers and saluted anyone they knew fifty yards away. There are traditions of dialogue carried on across Gareloch in the early morning calm. A man had walked from Peaton to Cove seeking tobacco and, finding none and wishful to secure a satisfactory smoke, held on across the moor. From the steep descent above Clachan he saw the blacksmith standing outside the smithy door. "Put an iron into the fire!" he roared, and, after a call at a small shop, appeared at the smithy with half a pound of tobacco and three pipes. One of these he filled and smoked three times, then, with an emphatic "Hech!" and hitch up of his trousers, took his way again. This smith was the last of an old family line, had a well-selected bookcase, and never touched liquor except at the first shoeing of a horse when he did not fail to exact the customary treat. He excelled in bacchanalian ditties and, when local politicians called, he chanted in time with the clink of the hammer, "Wha the deil hae we gotten for a King".

In the troublesome times of the later Stuarts, Roseneath furnished a place of refuge for many people from the east of Scotland. A man named John Salter, who became a tenant in Cursnock and died there, was generally regarded by the parish folk as John Balfour of Burley, conspicuous in the assassination of Archbishop Sharp, who escaped to the continent of Europe but returned under an assumed name. He is said to have been very reserved in his habit and manner, a feature which was not kept up by Andrew and Tibbie Salter, his descendants. Some of their sayings and doings had a survival in the parish talk of the nineteenth century.