Pringle wrote of his return to Glen Lynden (he called it that, though the name had not been gazetted and was later to refer only to the parish):

He and Margaret found that their beehive hut was now the kitchen of the ‘commodious farm-cottage of stone and brick with a stone chimney’, the first built in the Baviaans River sub-district. He revelled in furnishing his hut near William's house, ‘putting my desk and table together and manufacturing bedsteads, chairs and cutty stools’, he told Fairbairn, adding, in his usual mock-boastful style:

Though William had taken his place officially as leader of the settlement, Thomas seemed – perhaps due to William's ill-health – to have resumed his old role. His first surviving letter from Eildon was in reply to the Graaff-Reinet magistrate Stockenstrom on 9 May 1825, recording the three servants – Mortimer (long gone), Souness and Eckhorn – articled to party members, and stating that of the twenty, the seven males had paid deposits for a hundred acres (40.47 ha) each, the total now enlarged to some 8,000 morgen, an eighteenfold increase.