Bessy Bell and Mary Gray are “twa bonnie lassies”, is the subject of Child Balad No. 201. According to the ballad, Bessy and Mary were daughters of two Perthshire gentlemen, who in 1666 built themselves a bower to avoid catching a devastating plague. The girls were supplied with food by a lad in love with both of them; the lad caught the plague and gave it to them, and all three sickened and died. The words, except the first verse, are by Allan Ramsay.
The tune is an old air. According to Child the tune was well known in the “last years of the 17th century.” It appears in Orpheus Caledonius #25 (1725) and is in the first edition of The Dancing Master (1651) as A Health to Betty.* John Gay used the air and adapted the lyrics for The Beggar’s Opera in 1728.
According to a letter printed in 1781 in the Transactions of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland, Mary Gray’s father was the Laird of Lednock and Bessie Bell’s of Kinvaid. They were close friends and while Bessie was visiting Mary Gray (1666 according to this account) the plague broke out. They built a bower not far from Lednock house and retired there to avoid the plague. They lived there until they caught the plague from a gentleman who was in love with them both. They died in their bower and were buried in the Dranoch-haugh near the bank of the river Almond.
Child notes that the suggested date of the event in the 1781 letter should be earlier. Perth (which is 7 miles from Lednock) was struck by the plague in 1645. The epidemic lasted a year or two from that date. An estimated three thousand died. During 1665-6 there was no plague in Scotland. Their graves are supposedly known near Perth. The tradition has it that forbidden the cemetery of their ancestors, due to their death by plague, their bones are tossed over the wall onto the heath, where they will “biek forenent the sin” (bake under the sun).
Two similar hills near Omagh, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland were named after Bessy Bell and Mary Gray by Scottish immigrants who went to Ireland to make their passage to America. Sliabh Troim (‘mountain of elder’) is the original Irish name of Bessy Bell, also recorded as Sliab Toad. There also exist twin hills in Staunton, Virginia which were named after the girls by Scottish immigrants. Two adjacent volcanic cones in the Auckland volcanic field, New Zealand, (Otara Hill and Green Hill) were referred to by 19th-century European settlers as Bessy Bell and Mary Gray.
