James Hogg was born in 1770, claiming the same birth-date as Robert Burns (25th January), and lived and worked most of his life in the Scottish Borders. He attended school only briefly, mainly because when he was seven, his father, tenant farmer Robert Hogg, was declared bankrupt, and the young James took work as a cow-herd to supplement his family’s income. There were two main strands to Hogg’s early cultural experience: folk traditions and religion. The family were church-goers and his father was an elder, while his mother was steeped in the oral tradition, relating to her children folk tales and songs of kings, knights and supernatural beings.

As a young man Hogg worked as a shepherd in Selkirkshire and Dumfriesshire, becoming interested in literature in his early twenties, when he attempted writing songs and poems, some of which were published in The Scots Magazine. He moved to Edinburgh in 1810 to pursue a career as a full-time man of letters, after having published poetry and non-fiction while maintaining his day-job as a shepherd. However, in 1813 he returned to Selkirkshire, where he lived and worked in the Duke of Buccleuch's Altrive Farm in Yarrow. He continued to publish regularly while maintaining a contentious relationship with the Edinburgh literati, including his friend and some-time mentor, Walter Scott.

Many of Hogg's stories and poems appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, or Maga as it was affectionately known, and he is often associated with the Blackwood's 'Noctes Ambrosianae' series of satirical sketches, which featured such ‘fictional’ characters and aliases as Christopher North (John Wilson) and the Shepherd (Hogg). The popularity of these sketches, perhaps more than his own work which was often snubbed by critics, secured his contemporary fame. Moreover, his fame lay not with his stand-alone talent, but also with his reputation as the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ – the self-educated son of the rustic Borders and successor to Burns’s ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, appealing to popular notions of original genius. Recent years have seen an appropriate resurgence of interest in Hogg’s work, initiated by twentieth-century re-readings of his most renowned novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).
Hogg continued to write, publish and farm until his death in 1835. He was buried in Ettrick Churchyard, appropriately next to his grandfather, Will o’ Phaup, who is reputed to have been the last man to converse with the fairies. Hogg’s widow and family put up a small stone, which was replaced twenty-five years later by the present memorial, raised by supporters of his work. His best memorial, however, is his poetry and fiction, through which he, his traditions and innovations live on.