Grainger composed this march as a birthday gift for his mother in 1905, basing it on melodies and musical material from a Scottish "border ballad". The poem celebrates a bloody skirmish between two clans in 1593. In the march, Grainger sought to express the dare-deviltry of the cattle-raiding, swashbuckling English and Scottish "borderers" of the period as portrayed in collections of border ballads of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. --James Huff 05:55, 23 November 2008 (UTC) (from the program notes of The Claremont Winds, submitted with permission)