Dule Tree - Dule Trees in Literature

Dule Trees in Literature

Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novel Guy Mannering features a "Justice Tree" at the Castle of Ellangowan. The corpses of murderers were gibbeted and eventually buried at crossroads so that their spirits would be "bound" there. The living took pains to prevent the dead from wandering the land as lost souls – or even as animated corpses, for the belief in revenants was widespread in mediæval Europe.

Weir of Hermiston, an unfinished novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, makes reference to a dule-tree.

A Scottish ballad, "The Wronged Mason," tells of one Lambert Lamkin who is hanged on the dule-tree of Balwearie Castle in Fife.

"The Dule Tree" was published in 2004 by Finavon Print in association with the Elphinstone Institute, to mark the end of Sheena Blackhall's residency as Creative Writer in Scots at the University of Aberdeen.

The Black Douglas (1899) by S. R. Crockett (1859–1914) has the line and let that wight remember that the Douglas does not keep a dule tree up there by the Gallows Slock for nothing.

Girvan was the site of the "Hairy Tree." According to legend, the Hairy Tree was planted by Sawney Bean's eldest daughter in the town's Dalrymple Street. The daughter was implicated with the rest of the family in their incestuous and cannibalistic activities and was hanged by locals from the bough of the tree she herself planted. According to local legend, one can hear the sound of a swinging corpse while standing beneath its boughs.

The 1844 edition of the Ayrshire Wreath contains the story of the Dule Tree of Cassillis and its last victims.