In 1809, Thomas Carlyle left this village and walked eighty-four miles to Edinburgh to enrol at the university. He was thirteen. Out of that long road came one of the most quarrelsome, prophetic, and influential prose voices of the nineteenth century - the satirist of Sartor Resartus, the historian of the French Revolution, the gloomy seer Dickens read aloud to his family. Carlyle never let go of Ecclefechan. From his retreat at Scotsbrig he watched the Caledonian Railway being cut through the fields and complained to his Irish friend Charles Gavan Duffy about the potato blight blackening the soil and the navvies overrunning the lanes, drunk and noisy. He noted, with characteristic bite, that the Irish workers were the best behaved because they sent their wages home to their families. When he died in 1881, full of honours and offered Westminster Abbey, he chose instead to be carried back to the village churchyard. He lies there still.

Ecclefechan's other famous son went much farther than Edinburgh. Archibald Arnott was born in Kirconnel Hall on 18 April 1772, became a British army surgeon, and ended his career on a windswept South Atlantic rock attending the most notorious prisoner in Europe. Arnott was the doctor who cared for Napoleon Bonaparte through his final illness on St Helena. He sat by the dying emperor, conducted the post-mortem, and returned home to retire quietly in the Dumfriesshire village he had left as a young man. He was buried in the same churchyard as Carlyle. For a village this small to send out the philosopher who shaped Victorian thought and the doctor who closed the eyes of Napoleon is a statistical improbability that locals have always quietly enjoyed. The poet Janet Little, a contemporary of Robert Burns who published as 'The Scotch Milkmaid', was also born in the parish - a third life that reached well beyond the burn.

Lift your eyes from the High Street and Burnswark Hill flattens the horizon to the south. Its broad, table-like summit was a Caledonian hillfort - and in around AD 140 the Roman army arrived to besiege it. Archaeologists working the slopes have turned up lead slingshot bullets so dense and aerodynamic that one study likened their impact to a .44 Magnum. The Britons on top would have heard them whining out of the air before they saw the men who threw them. Two thousand years later, the hill still feels like a sentinel. Closer in, Hoddom Castle stands two miles from the village centre, and Robgill Tower - one of the pele towers thrown up along this border by the Clan Irvine - hints at the centuries of reiving and raid that shaped the whole of Annandale. Ecclefechan sits in a landscape that has been fought over, prayed over, and walked over for a very long time.

The village's modern fame travels on smaller currents. The Ecclefechan tart - butter, dried fruit, a little vinegar, baked in a pastry shell - was an obscure local sweet until late 2007, when Sainsbury's promoted it as an alternative to mince pies at Christmas and sold over fifty thousand packs in November alone. The Moray confectioner Walkers now puts a Walkers-tartan version on shelves across the UK. A blended Scotch whisky called The Fechan carries the silhouette of Carlyle's Arched House on its label. And long before either, Robert Burns - who knew this country well - left a song behind, The Lass O' Ecclefechan, just to make sure the name lived on in melody as well as on butter wrappers.