They kissed the walls of their houses.

They flung themselves on the ground and embraced the sod upon which they had walked in freedom.

They called their broken farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes, their pipers played the dirge for the dead.
Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which entered North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the wilderness about the headwaters of Cape Fear River.

Tradition indicates that these hillsmen sought the interior because the grass and pea vine which overgrew the innercountry stretching towards the mountains provided excellent fodder for the cattle which some of the chiefs are said to have brought with them.

These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible numbers, were in the Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years earlier.