"Babylon", also called "The Bonnie Banks o' Fordie" or "The Banks o' Airdrie" (Child 14,[1]Roud 27) is an English-language folk song.
Mr. Motherwell gives a version under the title of Babylon; or, the Bonny Banks o' Fordie;[2] and Mr. Kinloch gives another under the title of The Duke of Perth's Three Daughters. Previous editors have attempted to find a local habitation for this tradition, and have associated it with the family of Drummond, of Perth. As a legend exactly similar is current in Denmark, this appears a bootless quest.
An outlaw comes upon three sisters in the woods. He threatens each one in turn to make her marry him. The first two refuse and are killed. The third threatens him with her brother or brothers. He asks after them and discovers that he is the brother. He commits suicide.
The artist Charles Hodge Mackie contributed the woodblock illustration By the Bonnie Banks o' Fordie to The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Winter, published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in 1896.[16] He had painted an oil on board sketch of this subject while in France in the summer of 1894. The woodblock composition was subsequently worked up as an oil painting which was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1897.[17]