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Title: The Scott Country - Beautiful Scotland
Author: Geddie, John
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Scott Country - Beautiful Scotland" ***
[Illustration: NEWARK TOWER]
THE
SCOTT COUNTRY
Described by John Geddie
Painted by E. W. Haslehust, R.B.A.
[Illustration: (uncaptioned)]
BLACKIE & SON LIMITED
LONDON AND GLASGOW
Blackie & Son Limited
_50 Old Bailey, London_
_17 Stanhope Street, Glasgow_
Blackie & Son (India) Limited
_Warwick House, Fort Street, Bombay_
Blackie & Son (Canada) Limited
_Toronto_
BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND
The Heart of London.
Dartmoor.
Canterbury.
Oxford.
Bath and Wells.
In London’s By-ways.
The Peak District.
Winchester.
The Thames.
The Cornish Riviera.
Shakespeare-land.
Cambridge.
York.
The English Lakes.
BEAUTIFUL SCOTLAND
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs.
Edinburgh.
The Scott Country.
The Shores of Fife.
_Printed in Great Britain by Blackie & Son, Ltd., Glasgow_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing Page
Newark Tower _Frontispiece_
Kelso Bridge 5
Smailholm Tower 12
Roxburgh Castle 16
Branxholm Tower 21
Dryburgh Abbey 28
Bemersyde House 33
Melrose Abbey 37
Abbotsford 44
Traquair House 48
Ashestiel House 55
Neidpath Castle 62
[Illustration: KELSO: THE RIVER TWEED AND ABBEY RUINS]
THE SCOTT COUNTRY
[Illustration: THE SCOTT COUNTRY]
Where—and what—is the “Scott Country”? Edinburgh—his birthplace, the
centre of his literary and legal activities, the scene of _The Heart of
Midlothian_ and of the _Chronicles of the Canongate_, his “own romantic
town”—might surely claim to enclose, if not the kernel, an essential
part of the interest that surrounds the fame and the name of Sir Walter.
Around it, between the Pentlands and Lammermoors and the sea, is
territory immortally associated with the life and the works of the
“Master of Romance”—Lasswade and Roslin, Borthwick and Crichton, “Goblin
Ha’” and Prestonpans,
“Auchendinny’s hazel glade
And haunted Woodhouselee”,
Linlithgow Palace on the western and “Wolfs Crag” on the eastern
boundary of Lothian. Fife, on the strength of its possessions of
Dunfermline, Falkland, St. Andrews, and other storied sites, might put
forward a title to be ranked as a province of the Scott Country. So
might Perthshire, by virtue of the “Fair City” and its “Fair Maid”, and
joint ownership, with Stirling and Dumbarton, of entrancing scenes on
Loch Katrine, Loch Ard, and Loch Lomond. Forfarshire also, wherein is
placed the best remembered of the passages in _The Antiquary_, and even
the distant Orkneys and Shetlands, have felt the touch of the Wizard’s
wand.
Nor, in the briefest survey of the lands of Scott Romance, can one
overlook the crumbling castles and the rugged shores once ruled by the
“Lord of the Isles”; or the banks of the Clyde and Douglas Water; or the
opposing shores of the Solway; or Redesdale and Teesdale, Gilsland and
Triermain. The Peak District, Sherwood Forest, and the Marches of Wales;
Kenilworth, and Woodstock, and even London streets themselves might
tender a case for inclusion; while, looking farther afield, one is
reminded that the genius of Walter Scott has cast its spell over the
Ardennes and Touraine, Switzerland, Constantinople, and the Palestine of
the Crusades.
These are, for the most part, merely excursions of a spirit whose
abiding home or favourite haunt was the Valley of the Tweed and its
encircling hills. Edinburgh itself, where there are so many rival
memories, does not recall the author of _Waverley_ so instantly and
intimately to our thoughts and affections as Abbotsford; and the triple
Eildon, rather than Arthur’s Seat, is the “high place” of the Scott
cult. If he brought a new glory to the Border Country, it was the Border
Country that “made him”, as a man still more than as a writer; and he is
the most typical, as he is the most honoured, of its many famous sons.
The greatest as well as
“The last of all the Bards was he
Who sung of Border chivalry”.
The pull of the blood has in this instance proved more potent than that
of birth and early environment; although Walter Scott was from his
childhood, at Sandyknowe and Kelso, familiar with Border scenes, as well
as steeped in Border lore. At a later stage in his growth, lame as he
was, with Shortreed and other congenial companions he tramped the glens
and climbed the hills and hill-passes of Tweedside, gathering and
storing as he went its history and romance for the delight of future
generations,
“Giving each rock its storied tale,
Pouring a lay for every dale,
Knitting, as with a moral band,
His native legends with his land,
To lend each scene the interest high
Which Genius beams from Beauty’s eye.”
But while he knew by heart the whole Borderland, and had explored its
chief river from where
“Tweed, Annan, and Clyde
A’ rise in ae hill-side”,
to where it enters the sea, under the time- and war-battered walls of
the ancient town of Berwick, there were parts of the Tweed and its
tributaries that he knew better than others. There is, in the eyes of
Scott devotees, an Inner Circle, a “Holy of Holies”, of the Scott
Country, and, fortunately for the pilgrim to these shrines, its centre
lies where the main lines of road and rail, like those of
river-drainage, converge around the meeting-place of Ettrick, Gala, and
Leader with Tweed—under the shadow of the Eildon Hills and beside those
two “miraculous” products of the hand and brain of man—Melrose Abbey and
Abbotsford House. The creative art, in prose and verse, of the Great
Magician was not often exercised on the chief stream higher up than
Neidpath and Manor, or, at farthest, “Merlin’s Grave”, beside
Drummelzier and under Tinnis. Nor did his genius much frequent the lower
courses of Tweed, below Kelso Bridge and Wark Castle, and the inflow of
the “sullen Till”, although here also are many scenes of beauty and
pages of story that might well have set his imagination afire. It seems
more at home, also, in the valleys of the Teviot, the Ettrick, and the
Yarrow than on the Leader, the Gala, and other northern affluents of the
Tweed. Accident and propinquity may have helped to determine his choice
of scene and theme; but old associations and affinities may have done
still more. The nearer the Border line of the Cheviots, the thicker are
footprints of the clan and national frays of old—of battles and
skirmishes in which Scott’s own ancestry took more than their share; and
the deeper and richer the soil of tradition in which he delighted to
delve. To the Teviot, the Borthwick, and the Ettrick—to Branxholm and
Harden, Rankleburn and Newark—he was drawn by the call of the blood of
his father’s race; an equal tie bound him to the Jed, the old home of
his mother’s kin, the “hot and hardy Rutherfords”; while Yarrow, the
heart of his Forest Sheriffdom, is also the core of its ballad poetry.
It has to be remembered, also, that the period of Scott’s greatest
literary output was also the period of failing physical powers, and that
journeys through his beloved Borderland had to be more and more
circumscribed to beaten paths of easy access.
It was by Kelso Bridge, beside where the wand of the Wizard Michael
Scott “bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone”, that, in the fresh
morning of youth, the spell of the great Border river first fell on
Walter Scott. His kinsfolk lived in the neighbourhood; and several of
them are buried in the Abbey Aisle. His great-grandfather and namesake,
the Jacobite “Beardie” who had fought at Killiecrankie, had occupied a
house in the Coalmarket; his kindly Aunt Janet resided in what is now
called Waverley Lodge; his uncle, Captain Robert Scott, a lover and
collecter of books, had his home at Rosebank, which he bequeathed to Sir
Walter, who—“his poverty not his will consenting”—sold this house of
many memories, along with “thirty acres of the most fertile land in
Scotland”.
Only a few miles away, beside the stark and far-seen old keep of
Smailholm, was the farm of Sandyknowe, leased from Scott of Harden by
his grandfather Robert Scott, to which, between the ages of three and
eleven, the little boy from Edinburgh came annually for holidays.
Everyone remembers the lines that record the impression made on his
youthful mind by his “barren scene and wild”—by the tall, grey,
weather-beaten tower looking down from its rock upon the lone lochan,
and out and away over many scenes of Border romance to “the distant
Cheviots blue”; and of the legends of foray and strife that were told in
the boy’s wondering ears by the “aged hind”, and that took shape
afterwards in “The Eve of St. John” and other tales of the Master.
What more natural than that young Walter, “become rather delicate from
overgrowth” and threatened with permanent lameness, should be sent,
while twelve or thirteen years of age, to his Kelso relatives for
change, outdoor freedom, and recruitment? He went to the Grammar School
as pupil, and even for a time as usher, under the Rector, Lancelot
Whale, from whom are drawn some of the traits of “Dominie Sampson”. He
delighted his master by his recitation of the “Speech of Galgacus”, and
beguiled his school companions from their lessons by his tales of old
romance. He read, in the arbour of his aunt’s old-fashioned garden, or
under the ancient elm that still survives, Bishop Percy’s _Reliques_,
the identical copy of which is in Kelso Library. Among his fellow-pupils
were the Ballantynes, James and John, a fateful conjunction, for out of
a hint dropped in a talk with the elder of these old schoolmates grew
the _Scottish Border Minstrelsy_—the first two volumes of which were the
earliest issued from the Kelso “Ballantyne Press”, in 1802—and much else
of note in Scott’s career and fortunes. A biographer may well say that
it was “here he began to gather up his intellectual gains and make his
friendly conquests”. Kelso gave bent and direction to his genius.
Like Smailholm, Kelso was “meet nurse for a poetic child”, for here join
two “superb rivers”—Tweed and Teviot—each bringing down, from a hundred
sources, its treasure of ancient story. As we have said, the beauty and
romance of Tweedside do not begin in this neighbourhood. They are the
endowment of the main stream from its tap-root to the sea.
Berwick-upon-Tweed, for centuries a cause of contention between the
Kingdoms, was at one time regarded as separate and apart from
each—“England, Scotland, and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed”. Since the
fifteenth century, however, it has territorially belonged to England,
although situated on the north bank of the river. Its Edwardian and
Elizabethan walls—the former recently placed, along with the venerable
Bell Tower, the symbol of Berwick Liberties, under the protection of the
Board of Works as a national relic and for preservation against the
attacks of vandalism—enfold a sheaf of history. Few places have been the
scenes of more furious sieges and merciless captures. Its bridge of
fifteen arches, built before the Civil Wars and upheld for centuries
from State funds, connects the town with Tweedmouth and Spittal to the
south, although it is of small account, as a bond of union and means of
traffic, compared with its upstream neighbour, the Royal Border Bridge,
which carries the railway lines between England and Scotland.
[Illustration: SMAILHOLM TOWER]
A mile or two higher up, but still into tide-water, flows in the
Whitadder, which with its tributary, the Blackadder, comes out of the
recesses of the Lammermoors to drain the fertile Merse, passing on its
way many scenes that must have tempted Sir Walter to make its valley the
stage of one of his romances. His fancy may have played with the idea.
But beyond an occasional allusion, or the dispatch of one or two of his
characters through it, in hot haste for some other arena of action, he
never specifically annexed this heritage of the Humes and earlier Lords
of Dunbar and Merse to the “Scott Country”, though some have attempted
to identify Cranshaws Castle or Wedderlie with Ravenswood. Wedderburn
recalls the “Seven Spears”. Polwarth and Marchmont, Ninewells and
Nisbet, Kimmerghame and Langton, Edrington and Hutton, Chirnside and
Bunkle, Duns and Greenlaw, are names steeped in the spirit of Border
poetry as well as noted in local and national annals. The valleys in
which lie Abbey St. Bathans, on the Whitadder, Priestlaw, on the Faseny,
and Longformacus, on the Dye, seem to beckon for an interpreter of their
almost forgotten stories; while that of the mysterious “Edinhall”, on
Cockburn Law, the largest and most southerly of Scottish “brochs”, is
wholly lost. At Ellemford, James IV was brought to a halt, in the futile
“Raid of Ellem”; and his descendant Charles I came to a turning-point in
his fortunes when he was faced by the Covenanting Host, encamped on Duns
Law. From Haliburton, hard by the “Blackadder Rings”, Scott derived one
line of his descent. Yet this region of the Merse serves at most only as
a background in his Border Romance.
Higher up the main stream, beyond Paxton, and Horncliffe, and Horndean,
one comes to Ladykirk, whose fine old sixteenth-century church is said
to have been founded and dedicated to the Virgin in gratitude for an
escape from drowning in the Tweed. Behind it is Swinton, the home of an
ancient and knightly family from which Sir Walter was descended, on his
mother’s side. Over against it are the “castled steep” and “flanking
walls” of Norham, the guardian of England and of the heritage of the
Prince-Bishops of Durham, to the siege of which “Mons Meg” has travelled
in her day—the scene, too, of quarrels and of conferences, at one of
which Edward I decided between the rival claims of the “Competitors” for
the Crown of Scotland.
At Tillmouth and Twizell Castle, where the Till brings down waters—Glen
and Bowmount, Breamish and College—drawn from both skirts of Cheviot,
one is close to ground yet more closely bound to the tragedy of the
Kingdoms and to the genius of Scott, for near here is Ford Castle, where
the Scottish King is supposed to have dallied too long with Lady Heron;
the bridge across which he allowed the English van to cross and attack
him on flank; and the hill-slope of Flodden, down which, in 1513,
“From his mountain home
King James did rushing come”—
to meet disaster half-way, and to fall in the midst of the flower of his
nobles and of his kingdom.
At Coldstream, Longshanks crossed the Tweed on the fatal enterprise of
invading and subduing Scotland; Leslie, on his way to join Cromwell at
Marston Moor, and Monk on the march to proclaim Charles II in London.
Wark Castle, in which, according to tradition, the Order of the Garter
was instituted—with Carham beside it, where, at a much more distant
date, a generation before Macbeth, Malcolm II, King of Scots, won a
victory that brought the boundary of his realm in permanence to the
Tweed—stands within easy reach of Kelso. So also, on the opposite or
Scottish bank, does Birgham, the soil on which William the Lion and the
Scots prelates disowned the supremacy of the English Church, and where
was signed the Treaty for that projected marriage of the heirs of the
two Kingdoms—Prince Edward and the Maid of Norway—which, but for evil
chance, might have united them without the intervention of three
centuries of desolating war.
But it is at Kelso Bridge, below the meeting of Tweed and Teviot, that
we come fully within the circle of the Magician’s charm—where every
stream and wood and glen seems to take light and colour from the
imagination of Walter Scott. The scene has been admired and praised by a
host of poets and travellers before and since his time. Burns looked
down upon it from different points of view and owned himself
“enchanted”. It has been extolled by, among others, James Thomson, of
the _Seasons_, who was born at Ednam Manse on the Eden Water, only two
or three miles away, and by Thomas Pringle, Scott’s fellow-pupil at
Kelso and the first editor of _Blackwood_, who sang, from the South
African veld, of “Bonnie Teviotdale and Teviot’s mountains blue”. The
parent river makes a wide sweep, and, with its bold wooded banks, seems
to embrace and protect the houses of the little market town, in the
midst of which rise the ruined western towers and a fragment of the nave
of the renowned Tyronesian Abbey. The place, standing so perilously near
the English border, was guarded on the south and on the north by two
great strongholds. Of Roxburgh or Marchmont Castle, on the narrow ridge
between Tweed and Teviot, only a few walls, rising a few yards above the
sod, remain. Its history would fill a volume. But one remembers chiefly
that James II of Scots—he of the “Fiery Face”—was killed by the
explosion of a cannon, while directing attack upon it from the farther
bank of the Tweed, leaving the country, as was so often its fortune
under the Stewart Dynasty, to the hazards of a long minority. On the
town of Roxburgh—which once, as one of the “Four Burghs”, was a leader
in the path of municipal and commercial progress—a more sweeping fate
has descended; not a stone has been left above another on a site upon
which for long was held “St. James’s Lammas Fair”.
[Illustration: ROXBURGH CASTLE]
Hume Castle, Kelso’s other bulwark—or, if it happened to be in the hands
of an enemy, its thorn in the flesh—stands on high ground to the north,
where its square-set form, now reduced to a shell, can be seen from all
parts of the ground that lies between the Lammermoor and Cheviot. But
the town had strength within itself in its great Norman Abbey Church,
built for purposes of war as well as of prayer. It was founded by that
zealous abbey- and cathedral-rearer, David I, the son of Canmore and of
Saint Margaret; and its head, as a mitred abbot who acknowledged only
the jurisdiction of the Holy See, held a position that gave him a
precedence, much envied and much resented, over the superiors of the
neighbouring religious houses of Jedburgh, Dryburgh, and Melrose. It was
endowed with rich benefices and wide territories, but its wealth and
glory all vanished in the storms of the Reformation, or, more ruthless
still, of the English invasions and the Civil Wars.
A large part of the Abbey heritage has passed to the Kers, of the ducal
house of Roxburghe, whose stately seat, Floors Castle, planned by
Vanbrugh and completed by Playfair, commands from its terraces one of
the widest and loveliest views upon Tweed. Of the Kers of Cessford, who
had feuds with the rival branch of the Kerrs of Ferniehirst, as well as
with the Scotts and other neighbours, it has been said that they had a
genius for fighting on the winning side: “When the power of the
Douglases on the Border began to crumble, they became Crown vassals, and
their fortunes mounted rapidly. They won new lands, and held, and still
hold, the old. They kept a hawk’s eye on the wild tracts of moor and
pasture and peat bog, where even in the old days of foray there was, as
Dandie Dinmont said, ‘mair stabling for horses than change-houses for
men’, and where now all is utterly abandoned to the curlew and the
sheep. But they moved their household gods, and extended their bounds,
from the Bowmont to the Kale, from the Kale to the Teviot, and finally
from the Teviot to the Tweed.” Their ruined castle of Cessford stands in
a lonely place, on a slope overhanging a little side-glen of the Kale
Water, some eight miles from Floors. The roof is gone, and all about is
bare and deserted. A few sapling ashes grow in the crannies of the
stone, but time has riven the thick walls which Surrey, in 1523, found
so hard to breach, and has thrown down the grand old Crow Tree that
stood so long beside Habbie Ker’s stronghold. Long before this the
family had flitted to a warmer nest, and had feathered it with the
spoils of Old Roxburgh Castle and of Kelso Abbey.
Scarcely less than Melrose and Abbotsford are Kelso and Floors the
centre of a sanctuary of Border romance; and over the scene the forms of
Hume Castle and Smailholm Tower seem to keep sentry-watch and to “shift
places mysteriously, like the triple heads of the weird Eildons, as if
they were pacing guard upon the hilltops”. In the setting of the picture
revealed from these vantage-grounds are—along with places already
noted—the hanging woods of Stichell and Newtondon; Nenthorn, Hendersyde,
Mellerstain, Makerstoun; beyond Teviot, the rich woodlands of
Springwood, Woodendean, and Sunlaws; the darker pine trees around the
hunting seat of Bowmont Forest; the folds in which lie the “Gypsy
capital” of Kirk Yetholm, the ancient Kirk of Linton, Eckford of the
Douglases and Crailing of the Cranstons; the hills of Hounam and
Morebattle; and, behind all, the soft blue line, rising high in Great
Cheviot and sinking away towards the west, of the chain that divides the
kingdoms, with peeps here and there of Haddon Rig, and Ruberslaw, and
Dunion, and Minto Crags, and Penielheugh, crowned by its Waterloo
monument, with other scarce less famous Border heights.
While, above the junction, the ascending valley of the Tweed holds its
way westwards, so that the water-sheds of its northern tributaries are
in common with those of streams flowing to the Forth and the Clyde,
Teviotdale keeps throughout a line that is parallel with the Marches of
the Kingdoms, from which its main channel is nowhere more than a dozen
miles away as the crow flies. It follows that there is more of hazard,
and with this more of romance, crowded into its annals than perhaps into
those of any other area of like extent. It is sprinkled over with
battlefields and with peel towers, most of them now in ruin; every dale
has been the scene of a fray, and every burn has a song or ballad tacked
to its name. These Middle and West Marches were a centre of power and
action, first of the House of Douglas, and then of the “Bauld
Buccleuch”. The “Good Sir James of Douglas” kept the peace of this
troubled frontier for the Bruce; his son, the “Knight of Liddesdale”,
expelled the English from Teviotdale, and was killed while hunting in
Ettrick Forest; his grandson, the first of the Douglas Earls, also
chased out the invaders and brought back spoils from the English side;
his great-grandson, the second Earl, captured Percy’s pennon at
Newcastle, and was slain at Otterburn, while riding home by the road of
Redesdale and the Carter Bar with his prey; while it is of a later
descendant, “Earl Tineman”, captured at Shrewsbury by a later Hotspur,
that the canny saying is quoted in _The Fortunes of Nigel_: “Poortith
(poverty) takes away pith, and the man sits full still who has a rent in
his breeks”.
[Illustration: BRANXHOLM TOWER]
A Scott of Buccleuch accompanied James V when he hanged Johnnie
Armstrong of Gilnockie and all his company at Carlenrig near Teviothead;
and the “rank reiver’s” reproach, given in one version of the ballad,
was not without edge:
“Now haud your tongue, Sir Walter Scott,
Nor speak o’ reif and felonie;
If ilka man had his ain coo,
A richt poor clan your name would be.”
It was from Branxholm, on the Teviot above Hawick, that another Scott of
the name—generation after generation were Walters—rode forth to rescue
“Kinmont Willie” from prison in Carlisle. The Minstrel’s tale, in the
_Lay_, opens at and returns again and again to Branxholm Ha’; it was at
the Tower Inn, at Hawick, where the Duchess Anne of Buccleuch and
Monmouth held her receptions, and that the greatest of all the Sir
Walters parted from his guests the Wordsworths.
It is a land dedicated to the achievements of Douglases and Scotts, but
that resounds also with the deeds of Elliots and Armstrongs, and of
minor and broken clans, Turnbulls and Rutherfords, Cranstouns and
Olivers. It has its rich endowment of beauty as well as of history.
Around the keep of Branxholm, which from the deep bank overhanging the
stream has often defied its enemies, have gathered buildings of more
recent date and a screen of ancient trees. Below it is the Tower of
Goldilands, where a marauding Scott was hanged at his own gate, and here
comes in from the left the Borthwick Water. As Leyden has it:
“Where Bortha hoarse, that loads the meads with sand,
Rolls her red tide to Teviot’s western strand,
Through slaty hills, whose sides are shagged with thorn,
And springs in scattered tufts the dark-green corn,
Towers wood-girt Harden, far above the vale”—
Harden, the cradle of the branch of the Scotts from which the author of
the _Lay_ was descended; the “mountain home”, hidden in its narrow glen,
to which the “Flower of Yarrow” was brought by “Auld Wat”—“a wide
domain, and rich, had purple heath been grain”.
At the town of Hawick, Teviot meets Slitrig, coming from the wild bounds
of Liddisdale. All roads in Teviotdale seem to lead to Hawick, the
capital of its trade as well as a centre of its history. Proud as its
citizens are of the leading position of the burgh in the tweed and
hosiery manufacture of the South of Scotland, and of the undiminished
importance of its great lamb and sheep fairs, they are prouder still of
the prowess of its sons in the dark days that followed Flodden, and in
other scenes of Border strife. Scott was familiar with its story, as
with the streets and with the steep hills that surround this stirring
little metropolis of industrial and pastoral life; and allusion has
already been made to the literary and legendary memories attached to the
site of the Tower in which the Douglases of Drumlanrig entertained their
guests and protected their rights. From the parish church of St. Mary,
since often rebuilt, the heroic Ramsay of Dalhousie was carried away by
the Knight of Liddisdale, to be immured and to suffer a lingering death
in the Douglas hold of Hermitage—
“Did ever knight so foul a deed?”
An older memorial of the past of Hawick is the Motehill, on which
justice was dispensed, and an outlook kept for enemies, in times beyond
the range even of tradition. The great “Hawick Tradition” of the capture
of the standard of the English marauders at Hornshole is kept green by
the annual ceremony of the “Common Riding”, when Hawick is to be seen in
its gayest and most jubilant mood. The words and tune of its slogan of
“Teribus ye Teriodin” are supposed to have descended to it from heathen
times, and to have originally been an invocation to the gods of the
early Saxons and Norsemen—Thor and Odin. The defiant spirit of these
warriors of old seems still to ring in the chaunt sung by the Cornet and
his men as they ride round the marches in the beginning of June:
“Teribus ye Teriodin,
Sons of heroes slain at Flodden,
Imitating Border Bowmen,
Aye defend your rights and Common.”
A few miles up the Slitrig is Stobs Castle, an ancient seat of the
Elliots, which became a military centre during the Great European War;
and there are many other places of note and fame on the once hazardous
way, now followed by the railway, that leads across the hills to the
head-streams of the Liddel and thence to those of the North Tyne, or to
the “Debatable Land”, the Solway, and Carlisle. Another crowd of warlike
memories and of pastoral and woodland charms awaits those who, from
Hawick, or from the old Douglas seat of Cavers, lower down Teviotdale,
explore the Hobkirk valley, or pass over the skirts of Ruberslaw into
Rule Water—to Bonchester and to Hobkirk, where Thomson planned his
_Seasons_, and to Southdean, where the poet spent his early years, and
to the Carter Bar and the Border.
A few miles below Hawick, past Hornshole and past Denholm, the
birthplace of John Leyden—the poet, the Oriental scholar, the friend of
Scott, whose “brief and bright career” closed too soon in the Malay
East—below “dark Ruberslaw” and the Dunion, which interposes its
round-backed form between the “mining Rule” and the “crystal Jed”, and
more directly under the Minto Crags and the Chesters moors, lies one of
the loveliest bits on Teviot. Haughs and dells, green hills and wide
sweeps of river spread around the fragments of Fatlips Castle, whose
owner, a Turnbull, dwelt
“Mid cliffs from whence his eagle eye
Full many a league his prey could spy”;
and around Minto House, the home, since the Union, of the Elliots, a
race great in law and in war, in song and in statecraft, with whom,
through their descent from “Gibbie with the Gowden Garters”, a daughter
of Harden, Sir Walter could “count kin”. Jed Water and Ale Water come in
from south and north, farther down, and here, too, every foot is famous.
The “Minstrel” sings of scenes, on the track of William of Deloraine,
“good at need”, among them
“Ancient Riddel’s fair domain,
Where Aill, from mountains freed,
Down from the lakes did raving come;
Each wave was crested with tawny foam,
Like the mane of a chestnut steed”.
The inflow of this turbulent stream is below the fine old
tree-surrounded Ancrum House. It is overshadowed by Penielheugh and by
the ridge of Lilliard’s Edge, across which the main road from Carlisle,
that has followed the course of the Teviot almost from its source, toils
painfully over to the valley of the Tweed. On a day in 1545, Ancrum Moor
“Ran red with English blood,
Where the Douglas true and the bold Buccleuch
’Gainst keen Lord Evers stood”—
a victory to which, according to traditions, “fair Maid Lilliard”
contributed manfully, until, like a hero of “Chevy Chase”, she “fought
upon her stumps”.
Jed Water is still more charged with the history and legends of the
past. Much of it, including Jedburgh Abbey, is the patrimony of the
branch of the Kerrs represented by the Marquis of Lothian, whose modern
seat, Mount Teviot, lies opposite Jedfoot, while the ancient home of the
family, Ferniehirst, begins to run to decay. It would take many pages to
do justice—even “Jeddart justice”—to Jedburgh, whose townsfolk, armed
with their “Jeddart staves” and to their slogan of “Jeddart’s Here!”
were in the front of the Border Wars. Its Abbey, founded by David the
Saint, who placed here Augustinian canons from Beauvais early in the
twelfth century, is still, in spite of having been seven times burned,
the stateliest and the best preserved of the mediæval religious houses
of the Scott Country. The site of the Royal Castle, where in the “Golden
Age” of the Borders Alexander III held court after his second marriage,
has disappeared under public buildings; but the house in the Backgate is
pointed out where Mary Queen of Scots lay sick to death after her
perilous ride to Hermitage, as well as the lodging in the Castlegate
occupied by Prince Charlie on his march into England.
His road lay over a shoulder of Carter Fell into Redesdale, where runs
what is still the only way across the hills for wheeled traffic in the
sixty miles between Wooler, on the Till, and Riccarton, on the Liddel,
although the Romans built over the Cheviots paved roads, one of which
descended into the head of Kale Water, and, from the site of the old
Border Trysts at Pennymuir, ran straight as a ruled line to the camp of
Newstead, under Eildon. From end to end these hills are deserted, except
by the shepherd and the sportsman. Along the “wild and willowed shore”
of Teviot and of Jed, the “glaring balefires blaze no more”. The race of
the mosstroopers—of “John o’ the Side” and “Christie’s Will”, the
“Laird’s Jock” and “Hobbie Noble”—is long extinct. But there are still
to be found fine products of the soil, of the type of the stalwart
tenant of Charlieshope. The Border spirit may have run into
manufactures, and pastoral and arable farming, and Kirk and State
contentions, but anyone who fancies it is dead should attend a “Common
Riding”, or an otter or fox-hunt, or a game of curling or of hand- or
foot-ball in these parts; or a meeting or parting of Hawick “Teeries” or
of “Jedburgh callants”. He will doubt no more.
Dryburgh Abbey is less than ten miles distant from Jedburgh, in a
straight line. But there are marked features distinguishing it from its
Teviotdale neighbour as well as from the Abbeys standing below and above
it on Tweedside—Kelso and Melrose. It was planted in its corner of
Berwickshire by baronial and not by kingly beneficence, its founder
being the great Hugh de Morville, in David’s time Constable of Scotland
and Lord of Lauderdale, whose tomb is near the site of the high altar.
It was smaller in size and less richly endowed than the other three, but
is not less generously invested with historic and legendary interest.
Its fate and condition are not dissimilar, for like the others it was
many times burned and ravaged in the Border wars, and was afterwards
abandoned for centuries to neglect and decay. These Tweedside monastic
houses have now fallen upon happier times; for, apart from the reverence
they have gathered from the past, and not least from their association
with Sir Walter Scott, they have lately become national possessions,
through the generosity of the Duke of Roxburghe at Kelso, of the Duke of
Buccleuch at Melrose, and of Lord Glenconner at Dryburgh. The
Præmonstratensian Abbey on the bend of the Tweed under Bemerside Hill
differs from its rivals in respect that it has preserved more of the
monastic buildings and less of the church. Of Dryburgh Abbey
Church—apart from the north transept, of which more has to be
said—little is left beyond the gables of the south transept and of the
west front, the latter pierced by a five-light window, surmounting some
ruined walls, and the foundations of piers. But the chapter house—St.
Modan’s chapel—is extant, and its vaulted roof covers interesting
architectural and archæological details, while of the cloisters,
sacristy, fratery, and other domestic buildings of the “White Friars” of
Dryburgh there are considerable remains, clad in ivy and overhung by
immemorial yews and other trees. Enough survives to indicate a structure
of much grace and beauty, showing a great range of styles from
Romanesque to Later Pointed, and built of a local reddish sandstone
which, as at Melrose, has weathered into a rich and harmonious variety
of colour.
[Illustration: DRYBURGH ABBEY: THE TOMB OF SIR WALTER SCOTT]
It is, however, in its situation and in its happy blending with its
immediate surroundings that Dryburgh is chiefly distinguished from its
compeers. It is secluded from the world, on the margin of the wide
stream; hidden among woods and overlooked by hills. To reach it you have
to circumvent rivers and climb up and down steep braes. The easiest way
of approach is by crossing Lessudden Bridge, from the south bank of the
Tweed above the tower of Littledean. This was the road followed by the
“bold Baron” of Smailholm, whose tower and Beacon Hill, and the standing
stones on the moor of Brotherstone, look down from the eastern and
northern skyline on the scene
“Over Tweed’s fair flood, and Mertoun’s wood,
And all down Teviotdale”.
By Mertoun’s wood, the screen of Dryburgh from gales blowing from the
sea, and now the property of Lord Polwarth, a Scott of the Harden blood,
the way winds to the Abbey precincts, overshadowed by the great trees
that surround Dryburgh House. Naturally the feet first seek the tomb of
Sir Walter in St. Mary’s Aisle. The story of how the best beloved of the
sons of the Border came to be laid under this fragment of the north
transept and choir—a well-preserved piece of elegant First Pointed
work—is itself a romance. His grandmother on the father’s side, Barbara
Haliburton, was the daughter of a Merse laird, who was owner of part of
the lands of Dryburgh, including the Abbey ruins. She became his
inheritor; but before then Robert Haliburton had lost his lands through
unwise speculation. David Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan—brother of
Lord Chancellor Erskine and of Harry Erskine, the brilliant wit and
pleader—who has left the impress of his eccentric mind on the colossal
statue of Wallace which stands, “frowning towards England”, above his
suspension bridge for foot passengers crossing the Tweed from St.
Boswells, became possessor of the ground; and, through Lady Scott,
obtained a promise from the author of _Waverley_ that he should be
buried in this kindred earth. Lady Scott died in 1826, and Buchan in
1829, while Sir Walter himself was not laid here until 26th September,
1832. In his fragment of “Autobiography”, Scott records how he had come
to his own again in this twice-hallowed spot; and, with a touch of
prophecy as well as pathos, he wrote: “And thus we have nothing left of
Dryburgh, although my father’s maternal inheritance, but the right of
stretching our bones where mine may perhaps be laid ere any eye but my
own glances over these pages.” Nowhere—not even in Melrose—could the
Wizard rest more tranquilly than in this scene where nature and art, the
present and the past, and life and death seem to be brought into perfect
accord.
The funeral cortège, coming from Abbotsford, crossed the Tweed and
Leader at Leaderfoot, and climbing, past Gladswood, by a road with which
Scott was familiar, halted where he had often halted, and where
multitudes have halted since, at a bold and sharp elbow of the path,
raised three hundred feet above the river, whence an unrivalled view can
be had into the heart of the Scott Country. Immediately below, across
the stream, on a peninsula of land washed on three sides by the Tweed,
is Old Melrose, a spot which had gathered sanctity many centuries before
the mediæval abbeys rose in the valley. Here a mission station of the
Christian faith was planted from distant Iona; and hence, probably,
travelled Aidan to convert heathen Northumbria and to found Lindisfarne
and Hexham; here dwelt, as first abbot, his companion Eata, and also
Boisel, who gave his name to St. Boswell’s opposite, and to whom came
for instruction Cuthbert, a shepherd lad who had been reared at
Wrangham, near Brotherstone, and had tended his flock and seen visions
in the Lammermoors. From “Mailros”, the bald promontory—its very name
attests the tongue in which the Celtic founders spoke—St. Cuthbert’s
body in its stone coffin floated downstream on its many wanderings by
water and land; and, as related by Bede, the hermit Drithelm was wont in
winter to break the ice on the river, and, standing up to the neck in
the water, recite his prayers. Although it was abandoned before the
“Sair Saint” brought to the neighbourhood and to Scotland the first
monks of the Cistercian Order, some of the prestige of Old Melrose must
have clung to the name and been transferred to the Religious House on
the new site, the ruddy walls of which can be descried, sheltering at
the foot of the Eildons, across the fields on which, long before the
coming of the Columban missionaries, the Romans planted the
expeditionary camp and permanent station of Trimontium, that have only
lately yielded their secrets to the spade.
This Bemerside Hill is a “Mount of Vision” from which all the chief
shrines and high places of the Scott Country can be surveyed, at least
with the mind’s eye. Abbotsford itself, if not in actual view, can be
mapped into the scene by direction and position. Out of sight, directly
under the brow of the hill, is the ancient square fortalice, with later
buildings attached, and grounds stretching down towards the Tweed, where
Haigs have been resident for seven centuries. They were benefactors of
Melrose when Alexander III was king, and when Thomas the Rhymer was
their neighbour and wellwisher, and uttered the prophecy that has so
mightily helped its own fulfilment:
[Illustration: BEMERSYDE HOUSE]
“Betyde, betyde, whate’er betyde,
Haig shall be Haig of Bemersyde.”
Sir Walter Scott was a later friend of the family, and was often a guest
in the beautiful rose-garden below the mansion. A grateful nation
bestowed the house and manor on the late Field-Marshal Earl Haig, who
now lies at rest close by Sir Walter at Dryburgh. The whole scene and
surroundings seem to be touched by the spirit of prophecy and of poetry.
On the hills opposite stood the “Eildon Tree” and the “Eildon Stone”;
and beyond these, on Abbotsford property, the reputed “Rhymer’s Glen”,
where “True Thomas” encountered the Queen of Faëry, although the tryst
may well have been at Huntlywood, behind Brotherstone, on the Eden
Water, and near Corsbie Tower, the ruined “Castle of Avenel”. As has
been said, Drithelm and Cuthbert were visionaries, so were Boisel, the
second Abbot of the old, and Waldave, the first Abbot of the new
foundation; and centuries before the time of the Seer of Ercildoune they
dreamed dreams and saw things not of this world and far into the future.
According to popular belief, of like gifts was “Auld Michael”, whose
words “cleft Eildon Hills in three”. The last and the greatest of these
“Wizard Scotts” is he who sleeps with his fathers in St. Mary’s Aisle.
When descent is made into the valley of the Leader, one is still in the
land of enchantment. The ivy-covered “Rhymer’s Tower” is a few miles up
the glen, and on the way, under the Black Hill of Earlston, are
Drygrange and the “Broom o’ the Cowdenknowes”. Near by, at Mellerstain,
lived and sang Grizel Baillie, who was Grizel Hume; and in the Kirk of
Legerwood is the monument of that other Grizel, who, in the dress of a
highwayman, saved her father’s life by holding up the King’s officer
carrying the writ for his execution. Higher up Leader are Carolside,
and, in a side glen, Auld Thirlstane, the seat of “Auld Maitland”, and
Spottiswoode, the home of Alicia Spottiswoode—Lady John Scott—writer and
composer of “Bonnie Annie Laurie” and other thrilling Scots lyrics. The
new Thirlstane—it is hundreds of years old—is in the centre of
Lauderdale, beside the venerable Royal Burgh of Lauder, the last of the
municipalities in the land to retain its old burghal rights and customs.
Many are the hill-forts and camps that look down on the now peaceful
scenes through which the road—a favourite tourist coach route—passes on
its way from the crossing of the Lammermoors to the Tweed; and among
them are Channelkirk where Cuthbert heard the summons of the Heavenly
Host, and Edgarshope, by which the message of fire that told of the
crossing of the border by the English bands, was wont to be passed on to
Soutra Edge, near by the Hospice of the Red Friars, to which, and not to
Faeryland, Thomas retired from the world, when he followed the
mysterious Hart and Hind up Leaderside.
Not less richly furnished with the relics of eld and with the charms of
modern cultivation is the parallel vale of the Gala, the nursery of the
“Braw Lads”. The “Shirra” often traversed it on his way by Midleton Moor
to his home and sphere of jurisdiction on Ettrick and Tweed, upon which
the stream, road, and railway debouch a little below the mill lades and
chimney stalks of the town of Galashiels, and almost opposite to
Abbotsford. On the links and bends of the Gala, and its side glens of
the Heriot, the Armit, and the Luggate, are many places of historic
note—Crookston, of the Borthwicks, for example; Stow—the “Stowe of
Wedale”, of Arthurian and mediæval fame; Bowland, like Eildon Hall, on
the farther side of the Eildons, a possession of the House of Buccleuch;
the ruined “broch” on the Bow Hill, facing, across the valley, a similar
structure which, with the termination of that ancient and mysterious
line of earthworks, the “Catrail”, occupies the crown of Torwoodlee, of
the Pringles; finally, Buckholm Hill and Tower, looking over the roofs
of the busy seat of tweed manufactures to Gala Hill and Gala House of
the Scotts. “Gala Water, Buckholm, Torwoodlee”, were among the last
audible words murmured by the dying “Border Minstrel”.
Between “Leader howms” and Gala Water runs the little stream of the
Allan or Alwyne through the “Fairy Dean”. Lovers of Scott will not pass
it by, because, apart from the loveliness of its succession of
wood-embowered haughs, it leads to a spot where three ruined peel
towers—Hillslap, Colmslie, and Langshaw—stand not many bowshots apart,
memorials of the time when the smaller lairds had to bind themselves
together by a “bond of manrent”, for protection against their more
powerful neighbours; and the first of these has been identified, with
some sanction from Scott himself, as the “Glendearg” of the Glendinnings
in _The Monastery_ and _The Abbot_. Near the bridge which crosses the
Tweed at the “Pavilion of Alwyn”, and the “groves of noble Somerville”,
was the scene of the misadventure of Philip, the Sacristan, at the hands
of the spirits, and of Mysie Happer, the daughter of the miller of the
Halidome. The dairy farm of the “monks of St. Mary’s” was on Allan
Water; up it led the “girth-gait” which they often followed on the way
to Soutra Hospice. True Thomas’s rhymed sayings cling to this
countryside like—in Father Philip’s phrase—“burrs to a beggar’s rags”.
The region between Leaderfoot and Galashiels was part of the original
patrimony of the Cistercian Abbey; all the way, but especially where
Gattonside, set on its hillside and surrounded by its famous orchards,
“beiks in the sun”, one sees, in glimpses or in full view,
[Illustration: MELROSE ABBEY: CHOIR AND NORTH TRANSEPT]
“Where fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose
And Eildon slopes to the plain”.
In drawing near to Melrose, especially if one crosses at Leaderfoot, and
approaches by the village of Newstead and over the site of the Roman
camp, one feels there is something to be said for Dorothy Wordsworth’s
disappointment on coming first into near view of the Abbey. It stands
back from the river—perhaps because the river has left it—and apart from
the hills. It is in the fields outside of the village, the streets of
which come to its gate and stop there; and it is surrounded by walls,
which interrupt and deform proportions seriously injured by the loss of
its central tower. Melrose—“the light of the land, the abode of saints,
the grave of monarchs”—is a glorious fragment, more beautiful, perhaps,
in detail than in general effect, in ornament than in design; and
memorable even more for its legendary and literary associations than for
its actual history. The monastery dates from the same abbey-building
reign as its rivals on Tweedside; but architecturally the church belongs
to another horizon. Of the original Norman fabric that stood on the site
scarcely a trace remains. It was swept away during the descent upon it
of Edward II in 1322, and what remained must have perished under the
equally destructive assault of Richard II in 1385. Between these two
dates, a building arose, represented by the eastern end of the nave with
its flying buttresses and by adjoining parts of the choir and transepts,
that may be regarded as a monument of the piety and the gratitude of
Robert the Bruce, whose heart, brought back from the Paynim lands to
which the “good Sir James” of Douglas had carried it, is buried in the
Abbey. The work of rebuilding was continued for nearly a couple of
centuries longer; and it is evident that the highest art and
craftsmanship the age could produce were employed in construction and in
ornament, which, owing to the fineness of grain of the red sandstone
employed, remains in wonderful preservation. It is doubtful whether it
was completed before the tempests of the Tudor invasions and of the
Reformation fell upon it, and the monks were put to flight. It has not
been definitely ascertained how far the long nave extended to the
westward, or what was the plan of the monastic buildings, of which and
of the cloister only a few fragments are left on the northern side of
the church. The presbytery, with its much extolled “east oriel” window,
was probably among the later additions, and is one of the finest
examples of Perpendicular Gothic extant. Scott would have us view it
when the moon is shining “through slender shafts of shapely stone, by
foliaged tracery combined”, and to imagine that
“Some fairy’s hand
’Twixt poplars straight the ozier wand,
In many a freakish knot, had twined”.
But even more wonderful and beautiful to many eyes is the great
Decorated window of the south transept that lightens the aisle in which,
as is fabled, the Wizard Michael sleeps with his magic books beside him.
Familiar are the lines in which Sir Walter, a constant pilgrim to this
shrine, chants its praises—of its cloister garth:
“Nor herb, nor floweret, glistened there,
But was carved in the cloister-arches fair”;
of the vaulted roof, where
“The key-stone that locked each ribbéd aisle
Was a fleur-de-lys or a quatrefeuille”;
and of the pillars, with their clustered shafts, that
“With base and with capital flourished around
Seem’d bundles of lances which garlands had bound”.
It must have been a labour of love to frame this marvellously carved
casket, in which are laid the ashes of kings and prelates. Here rest the
chiefs of the once mighty House of Douglas, and, not far away, of the
English Warden who desecrated their tombs and was overtaken and slain at
Ancrum Moor; among minor clans “Ye race of ye House of Zair”—Kerrs and
Pringles; and, later in date but of the same stubborn and trusty Border
stuff, Tom Purdie, the reclaimed poacher and faithful watchdog and
factotum of the Laird of Abbotsford. The prayer of John Morvo, inscribed
on the wall of the south transept,
“I pray to God and Marie baith
And sweet St. John keep this haly Kirk frae skaith”,
has not been fulfilled. To other bludgeonings of fate was added its
conversion into the parish church in the seventeenth century. Walter
Scott helped to rescue it from vandalism and neglect; and he continues
to be the guardian spirit of the “dark Abbaye”.
Not less than in the days of the monks is the adjacent town of
Melrose—“Kennaquair” the residence of the antiquarian Captain Cuthbert
Clutterbuck—an appanage of the Abbey, out of which indeed it has partly
been built. One looks in vain for the “Druid Oak”, which existed only in
Scott’s fancy. But Melrose has its market cross and market place, and
does a modest business with the country round. Its chief source of
prosperity, however, is in its situation and its associations; it may be
called the capital of the “Scott Country”. Abbotsford is little more
than a couple of miles away. The road to it passes Darnick Tower, a red
keep festooned with greenery, the stronghold of one of the lay vassals
of the Abbey; and skirts, in the grounds of the Hydropathic
Establishment, the “skirmish field” on which was fought in 1526 the fray
between the Scotts and the Kerrs of the Douglas faction that gave rise
to a long feud between the clans. Scott, it may be noted, speaks of the
scene, when
“Cessford’s heart-blood dear
Reeked on dark Elliot’s Border spear”,
as if it had taken place beside the ruined Kerr stronghold of Holydean,
on the southern side of the hills beyond Huntly-burn and the “Rhymer’s
Glen”, and thus near to the pretty village of Bowden, which sits under
the lowest of the three Eildons, and looks down into the valley of the
Ale and towards Cavers Carre and Lilliesleaf.
The fields and woods sloping down from Bowden Moor and Cauldshields
Loch, on the left of the way from Melrose to Abbotsford, are part of the
possessions which Sir Walter gathered together between 1811, when he had
to give up Ashestiel, and 1824; and they still belong to his
descendants. The nucleus of the property was the little farm of Cartley,
or Clarty, Hole, on the Tweed a little above the inflow of the Gala. It
lay almost opposite to the site of the plum trees that, according to a
story of Border foray much cherished in Galashiels, gave to that town
the burghal arms and the slogan tune of “Soor Plooms”, the favourite
bagpipe air of Scott’s Kelso uncle. On the strength of a tradition that
there was here a crossing-place of the monks, Abbotsford got its new and
ever memorable name. A modest cottage, which forms part of the west
wing, gradually grew with the growth of the owner’s fame and fortunes,
until, at the end of fourteen years, by addition and reconstruction,
mainly all of Sir Walter’s own devising, it had become the stately
baronial mansion, adorned with turrets, corbels, and crowsteps, that
challenges the eye by its form and size as well as by its history. Into
it the author of the _Waverley Novels_ may be said to have built his
fancies, his aspirations, and his ambitions; and here he counted on
spending the evening of his days in well-earned rest, surrounded by his
children and his friends, and by the love and admiration of his fellow
countrymen. Hardly had this “poem in stone and lime” been brought to
completion when an untimely frost blasted his hopes, and with unimpaired
courage, but with gradually failing strength, he turned to a task,
greater than any that ever fell to his namesake the “michty Michael”,
and worked unremittingly, with hand and brain, for another seven years’
term until he came back for the last time to Abbotsford, a spent and
broken man, to die. Sadder far his return than his departure a year
before in quest of health, when
“A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,
Nor of the setting sun’s pathetic light
Engendered, hung o’er Eildon’s triple height”.
It brought the last touch of tragedy and of heroism to the closing scene
of that noble life—to the passing of the marvellous power, the warm and
generous heart, the gallant spirit that was Walter Scott. He enjoyed,
however, many happy days in Abbotsford; it is associated more with his
triumphs than with his misfortunes. Here he trod his fields, delighted
“to call this wooded patch of earth his own”, entertained literary
celebrities like Washington Irving, Maria Edgeworth, and the
Wordsworths, held almost feudal receptions of his retainers and
neighbours, talked and walked with his familiars—Lockhart, Skene,
Cranstoun, the “beloved Erskine”—and with his “ain folk”, and planned
and wrote his novels. Tweed sings a blither as well as a fuller strain
since he dwelt by it.
Into the house, he built material more substantial than his hopes. Scott
had the antiquarian temper and taste; and like Burns’s Grose, and his
own Oldbuck, he gathered about him “a routh o’ auld nicknackets”, many
of them the free-will offering of admirers. In this way the door of the
old Edinburgh Tolbooth—the “Heart of Midlothian”—came into his
possession, along with the ponderous lock and key over which “Daddie
Ratton” had held charge. Sculptured and inscribed stones from the High
Street and Canongate houses have also found their way here; while within
the house has been collected a museum of Border antiquities, along with
portraits, and personal souvenirs and relics, gathered from all corners
of the land. The house has been left “very much as in Sir Walter’s
time”; and a constant stream of pilgrims visits it. In the library are
relics of Napoleon, of Prince Charlie and Flora Macdonald, of Nelson and
Wellington; in the drawing-room, among other famous pictures, is
Raeburn’s portrait of Scott; in the armoury, memorials of Rob Roy,
Montrose, Claverhouse, and Archbishop Sharpe, and the keys of Loch Leven
Castle, while on the walls are blazoned the escutcheons of “ye Clannis
and men of name quha keepit ye Scottish Marches in the days of auld”.
But more impressive than any of these things are the chair in which
Scott sat to write or dictate and the pen that in his hand was as a
magician’s rod.
The way from Abbotsford to Selkirk, by the valleys of the Tweed and
Ettrick, past Fawdonside and Lindean, was a familiar one to the
“Shirra”. He had legal and other county business that carried him often
during a third of a century to the head town of his Forest Sheriffdom;
and inclination went hand in hand with duty, for the road led to Ettrick
and Yarrow, to “Sweet Bowhill” and to
“The shattered front of Newark’s towers
Renowned in Border story”.
[Illustration: ABBOTSFORD]
Selkirk—the old “church of the shielings”, which, in the days when David
I and his successors hunted in the forest of Ettrick, served the royal
sportsmen for their orisons—narrowly missed being the seat of an Abbey.
A colony of Tyronesian monks were settled in it more than eight
centuries ago, but were removed, “for convenience”, to Kelso. The
“Souters of Selkirk” have since given themselves to war, to shoemaking,
and latterly to tweed manufacture. But the town has not neglected
poetry, and bards of later date have been born and have sung in it,
since Burns and Scott drew the “birse” across their lips. It is set well
above the vale of the Ettrick, at the gate of the Haining policies; and
its public buildings are gathered around the triangular market-place, in
which stands a statue of Sir Walter in his sheriff’s robes. In the Free
Library is hung the Flodden Standard brought home by the survivors of
that day of disaster, when “the Flowers o’ the Forest were a’ wede
awa’”.
In 1645 Montrose was resting, with his cavalry, in Selkirk, his infantry
encamped at Philiphaugh, on the other side of Ettrick, when David Lesley
crept up on him from Melrose, in the mist of a September morning. In two
or three hours the fruits of nine brilliant victories were lost, and the
great captain was a fugitive speeding across Minchmoor to Traquair,
where, the door being shut on him, he passed on to Clydesdale and the
Highlands. There have been many romantic crossings of Minchmoor, and
meetings and partings at “Wallace’s Trench”—part of the old Catrail or
Picts’ Dyke—and at the Cheese Well. Walter Scott accompanied his friend
Mungo Park—whose statue stands near his own in the streets of
Selkirk—when Park was starting on his African journey. They separated on
the ridge above Williamhope, where, as has already been told, Sir
William Douglas, the “Flower of Chivalry”, was slain by his cousin the
Earl of Douglas, in revenge, it is said, for the most unchivalrous deed
of the starving to death, in Hermitage Castle, of Sir Alexander de
Ramsay. Across this high moor between Yarrow and Tweed came James V,
with five belted earls, to the meeting with the “Outlaw Murray”, lord of
Hangingshaws, and Newark, and Philiphaugh and other lands on Yarrow. The
king’s message ran—
“Bid him meet me at Permanscore,[1]
And bring four in his companie;
Five earls sall come wi’ mysel,
Good reason I suld honoured be”.
Permanscore is a hollow of the hill, “where wind and water shears”, and
here, three hundred years after the “Outlaw’s” time, the “Shirra”
assembled and conducted “a perambulation of the marches” in a case of
disputed boundaries.
Carterhaugh—the meadow on which faithful Janet met “Young Tamlane”, and,
by holding him through all his grisly transformations, rescued him from
Fairy-land—lies in the fork between Ettrick and Yarrow. Behind it is
Bowhill, at the time when the _Lay_ was written the favourite seat of
the Buccleuch family; and the “Duchess’s Walk”, along the right bank of
the Yarrow, is named from the lady who suggested to Scott the “Goblin
Page” as an episode of the _Lay_. It leads to where
“Newark’s stately tower
Looks out from Yarrow’s birchen bower”,
and to the “embattled portal arch”
“Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
Had oft rolled back the tide of war”.
Within the deserted walls, the widowed Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth
is pictured as listening to the tale of the Last Minstrel. Local
tradition has it that in the courtyard the Irish prisoners who
surrendered at Philiphaugh were massacred; another story asserts that
they were slaughtered on “Slainmenslee”. Newark was a royal hunting-seat
in the fifteenth century; and its possession carried with it the
Hereditary Sheriffdom of the Forest, which with many things else in this
country came to the House of Buccleuch.
Over against Newark is Foulshiels, the birthplace of Mungo Park.
Broadmeadows and Lewinhope and Tinnis are higher up the stream, which
here runs between steep wooded hills, cloven by narrow side glens and
with spaces of rich haughland on its margin. Yarrow burrows under banks
of birch and hazel, or overshadowed by fine forest trees. The vale is
“strewn with the sites of the tragedies of far-off years, forgotten by
history, but remembered in song and tradition”; it is “the very
sanctuary of romantic ballad-love. Its clear current sings a mournful
song of the ‘good heart’s bluid’ that once stained its wave; of the
drowned youth caught in the ‘cleaving o’ the craig’. The winds that
sweep the hillsides and bend ‘the birks a’ bowing’ whisper still of the
wail of the ‘winsome marrow’, and have an undernote of sadness on the
brightest day of summer; while with the fall of the red and yellow leaf
the very spirit of ‘pastoral melancholy’ broods and sleeps in the
enchanted valley. Always, by Yarrow, the comely youth goes forth only to
fall by the sword, fighting against odds in the Dowie Dens, or to be
caught and drowned in the treacherous pools of this fateful river;
always the woman is left to weep over her lost and lealful lord.” No
strict identification of ballad sites and origins is possible; but the
story of the “Dowie Dens” has become associated with Tinnis bank and
with Deucharswire, beside Yarrow Kirk; and is said to be founded on the
slaughter in 1616 of Walter Scott of Oakwood by the kin of John Scott of
Tushielaw, with whose daughter, Grizel, Oakwood had contracted an
irregular marriage.
[Illustration: TRAQUAIR]
A group of authentic memories gather around Yarrow Kirk and Manse, and
the bridge which carries a crossroad over the hills to Ettrick. A
succession of cultured pastors have dwelt here, including Dr. Rutherford
the grandfather of Scott, two generations of Russells, and the late Dr.
Borland. By an unfortunate fire, in the spring of 1922, the restored
church was destroyed, together with the memorials placed in it of Sir
Walter, of Willie Laidlaw, his friend and amanuensis, of Wordsworth, and
of the Ettrick Shepherd, all of them residents or visitors on Yarrow and
worshippers in this secluded fane. In a field close by is a stone carved
in rude Latin minuscules to the “Sons of Liberalis, of the Dumnogeni”, a
relic of post-Roman times. Above Yarrow Kirk, the valley widens until it
becomes spacious enough to hold the clear mirror of St. Mary’s Loch; the
hills become bare and green and smooth, and over the ridge on the right
comes the road from the Tweed by Paddyslack and Mountbenger to the
Gordon Arms. It was from this road that Wordsworth, in good company,
caught his first, and his last, glimpse of Yarrow—
“When first descending from the moorlands
I saw the stream of Yarrow glide
Along a bare and open valley,
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.
When last along its banks I wandered,
Through groves that had begun to shed
Their golden leaves upon the pathway,
My steps the Border Minstrel led.”
Hogg farmed, unsuccessfully, Mountbenger, before he removed across
Yarrow to Altrieve, where he spent the last year of his life and where
he died. In his youth he had herded sheep on Blackhouse heights, where
looking down on the ruined peel on the Douglas burn are the stones that
mark the place where the “seven bauld brethren” fell, in their pursuit
of “Lord William and Lady Margaret”. The escaping lovers lighted down at
this “wan water”.
“‘Hold up, hold up, Lord William,’ she said,
‘For I fear that ye are slain.’
‘’Tis naething but the shadow of my scarlet cloak
That shines in the water so plain.’”
But it was his “heart’s bluid”, and the pair were buried together in St.
Mary’s Church, whose deserted graveyard is set on a shelf of Hendersyde
Hill, overlooking the loch, and fronting the dome of Bowerhope Hill.
On the banks of a burn which flows into Yarrow a little below where it
issues from the loch is Dryhope Tower. “Auld Watt” of Harden came to it
to bear away Mary Scott, the “Flower of Yarrow”, and part of the
provision for their housekeeping was the spoils of the “first
harvest-moon”. Half-way along the shore of St. Mary’s, at Cappercleuch,
pours in the Meggat Water, a stream that drains some of the highest
ground in the Southern Uplands. It was a favourite royal hunting-forest
in 1529, when James V came this way intent on the extirpation of the
Border thieves; and fate threw in his path Cockburn of Henderland, whose
tower was near Meggatfoot. The hollow and waterfall of the “Dowglen” are
shown where his lady sought shelter, while “they broke her bower and
slew her knight”; the spot, with names inscribed, can be seen in a
little clump of wood beside the ruined peel to which she bore him on her
back and dug his grave:—
“And thinkna ye my heart was sair
When I laid the mools on his yellow hair;
And thinkna ye my heart was wae
When I turned aside awa to gae”.
Unfortunately for tradition, the fact is on record that Cockburn of
Henderland, like his neighbour Scott of Tushielaw, was tried and
executed at Edinburgh. James Hogg would have made small ado about
brushing such obstructions out of the way of romance. His statue stands
at the head of St. Mary’s Loch—the presiding genius of the scene. The
road up Yarrow, passing through the woods of Rodono, holds out beyond
it, by the Loch of the Lowes and Chapelhope to Birkhill, and then, under
the “Grey Mare’s Tail” and White Coombe, down Moffatdale. But the seated
figure of the burly Shepherd, wrapped in his plaid, faces “Tibbie
Shiels”, the rendezvous of generations of thirsty fishers and poets, on
the narrow space between the lochs, and looks towards the hills up which
the crossroad climbs steeply, making for Ettrick. It was at this famous
hostelry that Hogg gave his classical order, after a hard night’s
drinking with Christopher North and other congenial company, “Tibbie,
bring in the Loch!” “He taught the wandering winds to sing”, reads the
inscription on his monument; and the strong song of the winds that blow
down Ettrick accompanies the traveller as he climbs over by the
Packman’s Grave, descends to Tushielaw and, turning upstream at
Crosslee, follows the valley to the Shepherd’s birthplace and grave,
beside Ettrick Kirk. This out-of-the-world nook in the hills—for the
road up Ettrickdale comes to an end a few miles higher, under Ettrick
Pen—may be reckoned the heart of pastoral Scotland. The thoughts and the
talk of the inhabitants are absorbed in sheep—except what may be
reserved for sport, and “auld farrant tales”, and church affairs. Around
the Shepherd rest many of his own kin and kind: farmers and herds,
lairds and tenants, reivers, smugglers, and gypsies—and in this strange
mixed company, “Boston of Ettrick”, of the “Fourfold State”, the great
preacher and Covenanting divine.
The Castle of Thirlstane, on Ettrick, stands a little below the kirk,
with a fragment of Gamescleuch Tower facing it on the opposite bank.
Thirlstane belonged to the “Ready, aye Ready” Scotts, until it went by
marriage to its present possessors the Napiers. Tushielaw was another
hold of the clan, and here dwelt Adam Scott—“King of the Thieves”, and
“King of the Borders”—the father of Mary, the “Forest Flower” of the
“Queen’s Wake”—until his rival from Holyrood came and “justified” him,
says legend, on the Doom Tree at his own door.
Across the water from Tushielaw “Rankleburn’s lonely side” leads far
into the hills. Rankleburn is the traditional first home of the Scotts
in the basin of the Tweed, although Kirkurd in the Lyne valley might put
in an earlier claim. They are even said to have drawn their name and
their chief title from this deserted glen, high up which lies Buccleuch,
now marked only by the foundations of a chapel wall. Scott of Satchells,
who wrote the family story in halting rhyme, in 1686, tells how a
wandering Scott from Galloway, in the remote days of Kenneth II, seized
a hunted buck by the horns, swung it on his shoulders and brought it to
the king:—
“And for the buck thou stoutly brought
To us up that steep heugh,
Thy designation ever shall
Be John Scott of Buck’s cleuch”.
Neither at Gilmanscleuch, nor on the Deloraine burn, nor at the Dodhead
have the men of the type of Jamie Telfer, who, “steady of heart and
stout of hand, once drove their prey from Cumberland”, left any trace of
themselves in standing walls. A reminiscence of old forest times
survives in such names as Hindhope and Hartwoodmyres; the shell of an
ancient peel guards, at Kirkhope, the “Swire Road” across the “Witchie
Knowe” from Yarrow to Ettrick Bridgend; and Oakwood has something more
substantial to show in the shape of the red keep which local legend
insists was built by the redoubtable Sir Michael Scott himself, although
its foundations must have been laid centuries after his date. Enough for
us that it was in the keeping of “Auld Watt” of Harden.
“Wide lay his lands round Oakwood Tower
And wide round haunted Castle Ower.”
At Oakwood we are back again beside Selkirk, and at Selkirk we are near
where, each skirting the grounds of Sunderland Hall, Tweed and Ettrick
meet, and where we can resume our course up the larger stream. With the
delightful section of the Tweed between The Rink and Elibank, Walter
Scott had many close ties. The right bank, and part of the left, were
within his jurisdiction as Sheriff, in which office he succeeded his
friend, Andrew Plummer of Sunderland Hall, in 1799. But even earlier he
made familiar acquaintance with the district, on angling and walking
excursions, and had visited the Russells and “Laird Nippy”, at
Ashestiel. The Rutherfords of Fairnilee—the old house in which was born
Alison Rutherford, the author of the popular version of “The Flowers of
the Forest”, stands roofless and deserted, but a new mansion has risen
in its neighbourhood—were of his kin. He was a welcome guest also with
the Pringles of Yair, whose home, bound about by the woods and hills, is
across the river, with the “sister heights of Yair”, otherwise known as
the “Three Brethren”, as background. It may be remembered that it was
with a son of “the long-descended lord of Yair”, Alexander Pringle of
Clovenfords, that in later days he went over the field of Waterloo.
Clovenfords was the nearest point of his Sheriffdom to town, and it was
convenient for him to take up occasional residence there. Leyden had
been schoolmaster in the village, which stands high above the rocky den
of the Caddon, on the Peebles and Galashiels road, a mile from the
“bonny bit” of Caddonfoot. While raising grapes and other fruit it
piously preserves the memory of the author of _Marmion_ in the form of
an effigy set up before the door of the inn, where, besides Scott,
William and Dorothy Wordsworth and other famous travellers have
sojourned.
[Illustration: ASHESTIEL: SCOTT’S FIRST HOUSE IN THE BORDER COUNTRY]
In 1804, Scott found it convenient to take a lease of Ashestiel; and
that leafy cover became his home for the next seven years. It is within
a couple of miles of Clovenfords and Caddonfoot. Under Caddonlee, where
William the Lion waited with his bands from the Highlands and the
Lothians, until he was joined by the Forest men on his ill-fated
invasion of England, Tweed is crossed by a single wide arch to where
“Glenkinnen’s rill” and glen open a short cut, oft traversed with the
“Yair boys”, to Yarrow. Near the Peel burn is a knoll shaded by oak and
birch—the “Shirra’s Knowe”—where part of _Marmion_ is said to have been
written. The house, much changed since Scott’s day, turns its front and
two extended wings away from the Tweed; but its most attractive aspect
is perhaps that towards the river. The little stream, that with its
hoarse roaring in spate used to keep the great author, then just
blossoming into fame, from his sleep, still tumbles through the garden.
His armchair, which came back from Abbotsford after his death, and the
window through which his favourite dogs sprang in or out at his call,
are still shown. In these Ashestiel years he saw the last volume of the
_Minstrelsy_ through the press, published the _Lay_, completed _Marmion_
and _The Lady of the Lake_, edited Dryden, and began but laid aside
_Waverley_. His legal work was not absorbing, and he had time, aside
from literature, for following the hounds, “burning the water”, making
raids into the Forest, and holding convivial meetings with his friends.
They were perhaps the happiest, if not the most brilliant, years of his
life.
At Elibank, a couple of miles above Ashestiel, we leave Selkirkshire and
enter Peeblesshire. The bare grey walls of the old castle of Gideon
Murray, of the Black Barony branch of the name, a lord of Session and
trusted Councillor of James VI, stands well above the tree-line, against
the background of the hills, and commands a wide view of Upper and Lower
Tweeddale. History, in this region, arranges itself in strata, with the
oldest at the top—by the river margin are road and rail, farms with
their fertile haughs, and the houses and tweed-mills of Walkerburn and
Innerleithen; fragments of peels and bastiles of the fighting times when
Thornielee and Holylee were onsteads of the monks or of the king’s
forest vassals, are perched on the ridges, or hide in the folds or
“hopes” of the hills, on whose summits are found the forts and cairns of
a still earlier day. The outposts of the Moorfoots come to the left bank
of the river, and behind them are the broad shoulders of Windlestraelaw;
while over against them are steep outliers of Minchmoor—Elibank, Bold
and Plora Laws. “Juden” Murray’s tower is of feudal date and aspect.
Scott tells the story of how Young Harden, son of Auld Watt and the
“Flower of Yarrow”, and presumably a personable young man, was captured
by the owner of the tower and was about to be hanged, when the more
politic lady pointed out that she had three ill-favoured daughters to
dispose of, and the prisoner was happily married to the youngest and
plainest, “Mucklemou’d Meg”. An injudicial proceeding; but not more so
than the transaction by which Murray’s neighbour, Lord Traquair, had the
President of the Court of Session carried off from Leith Links, by a
Border freebooter, Christie’s Will, and kept in a dungeon of Hermitage
Castle, until a case was decided in Traquair’s favour. Doubt has been
thrown on both stories, and in particular it has been objected that
Gideon Murray, whose descendants, the Lords Elibank of to-day, are
established at Darn Hall on Eddleston Water, had only one daughter, that
her name was Agnes, and that, although she married Young Harden, the
alliance was with full consent of all parties concerned.
Lee Pen and Kirnie Law stand sentinels at the entrance of Leithen Water,
up which the houses of Innerleithen straggle for a mile or more, along a
road which runs across into Lothian, by the Piper’s Grave, the Heriot
Water, and Carcant. It is a way by which Walter Scott, walking or
driving, has often reached Tweedside, and he would note in passing
Leithen Hopes, where his friend Hogg was once a herd laddie, and on the
lower slope of the Pen, south of Lee Tower and above the village, the
beginnings of the new “Spa”. The topographical resemblances of “St.
Ronan’s” to Innerleithen are not very close; and Sir Bingo Binks, Lady
Penelope Penfeather, Dr. Quackleben, and other types in Scott’s solitary
attempt at a satiric portrayal of the social manners and humours of his
own day, are not of local growth. One looks in vain, also, for a
“Cleikum Inn” nearer than Peebles. Yet the spirit of Meg Dods pervades
the place, the inhabitants of which eagerly accepted the identification
and “recognized some of the characters as genuine portraits”. They have
even adopted the device, on the inn-sign, of “St. Ronan and the Devil”
as the burgh arms.
Geologists—who, “knappin the chucky stanes to pieces wi’ hammers”,
reminded Meg of “sae many stane masons run daft”—still frequent the
locality, along with anglers and tourists; for at Thornilee, as well as
across Tweed at Grieston and the Glen, are celebrated beds of
fossiliferous rocks. The bridge is not far above the pool—the
“Droon-pouch”—from which the body of the young son of King Malcolm the
Maiden was drawn by the Innerleithen people, in gratitude for which its
church was made a “Sanctuary” with privileges equal to those of Stow and
of Tyninghame. On the farther side is the entrance to the valley of the
Quair, and the woods surrounding the venerable form of Traquair House.
Its claim to be “the oldest inhabited house in Scotland” applies
specifically to its western wing, which is said to date back fully nine
centuries. However this may be, the antique character of Traquair is
written on its outward features as well as inscribed in its record. It
passed through the hands of a succession of royal favourites, of whom
the last was James III’s musician and “familiar shield-bearer”, Rogers,
who was among those hung over Lauder Bridge by the jealous nobles,
before it came into the possession of a branch of the Stewart Earls of
Buchan. The Traquair Stewarts have been of mixed reputation; but the
tradition of loyalty to the cause of their Royal kin now clings to the
house and is symbolized in the great Bear Gateway—the prototype of that
of the “Barons of Bradwardine” in _Waverley_—which is not to be opened
until a Stewart King comes again this way.
Like the house itself, all its surroundings breathe of the poetry and
romance of the past. For was it not behind Plora Craig that “Bonnie
Kilmeny gaed up the glen”? Are there not some scrogs of birch left by
the waterside of the much besung “Bush aboon Traquair”? Were not the
dwelling of Willie Laidlaw, and the scene of “Lucy’s Flitting” in the
upper valley, in which stands the lordly mansion of Lord Glenconner—“The
Glen” _par excellence_? And above all, is it not by the road along the
Quair that one “turns aside to Yarrow”?
In the nine miles between Innerleithen and Peebles the full current of
Tweed winds through a country brimfull of beauty and story. Whether the
road followed upstream be that on the right or that on the left bank,
one passes the ruins of ancient strongholds and modern country-seats,
set among trees and lawns—on the south side, after Traquair, Cardrona,
Kailzie, Haystoun, and Kingsmeadows, and on the north Glenormiston, the
two Horsburghs, and Kerfield—and, behind these, high hills of grass and
heather, Lee Pen, Dunslair and the Makeness Kips, over against the
Glenrath Heights and the Dun Rig, from which on a clear day can be seen,
it is said, the Calton Hill in Edinburgh and the Isle of May. The little
country-town of Peebles is in a level space where Eddleston Water, side
by side with rail and highway, meets Tweed; and from time immemorial it
has been a resort of royalty, a place for pastime and
relaxation—“Peebles for pleesure!”—and, in a modest way, for trade. It
had a reputation for sanctity, also, in witness whereof there are the
remains of the two mediæval churches—those of St. Andrew and of the Haly
Rude. The house of the Archdean of Glasgow is represented by the
Lodging, in the High Street, of the Dukes of Queensberry, now become a
public library, whose name, the Chambers Institute, recalls the fact
that the founders of the publishing house of Chambers were born in a
humble cottage in one of the cross streets. Peebles has outgrown the
limits marked by the fragment of the town wall, and has spread
northwards to the foot of the hills, where on Venlaw—part of its lost
patrimony—it has public walks and a “Hydro”; while it has crossed, by
the handsome stone bridge, to the southern bank of Tweed; whence a
branch railway follows the course of the river to Broughton, on the way
to Clydesdale.
A mile out of the town, to the west, is Neidpath Castle, the most
commandingly and romantically situated, and, in spite of the yawning
gaps made in its walls by Cromwell’s cannon, the best-preserved—Traquair
excepted—of the strongholds of the olden time on Tweed. The river is
here constricted by the bare cairn-strewn ridge of Caidmuir—once Peebles
Common—on the south, and by the Edston heights on the Neidpath side, and
has cut a deep ravine through which has drained the great lake that once
filled upper Tweeddale. The water swirls around rock and boulder below
the castle base; and the screen of trees, whose destruction by that
“degenerate Douglas”, Old Q., provoked Wordsworth’s indignant sonnet,
has been partially restored. Access to the lofty thick walled double
tower, still partly occupied, is by a gateway and courtyard; and over
this outer portal are the arms of the early owners—the strawberries of
the Frasers of Oliver Castle, from whom are descended the Frasers of the
North; and the goat’s head of the Hays of Yester, who here entertained
James VI, defied the Commonwealth, and were created Lords of Tweeddale.
Afterwards the castle and lands came into the possession of the
Douglases of Queensberry, and they now belong to the Earl of Wemyss and
March. From the window, now built up, over the arch, as has been sung by
Scott and by Campbell, the dying “Maid of Neidpath” looked forth to
watch the return of her undiscerning lover. Still discoverable is the
casement in the Justice Room of the tower, out of which wrong-doers were
hung after summary trial.
[Illustration: NEIDPATH CASTLE]
As Pennecuik sang two centuries ago:
“The noble Neidpath Peebles overlooks
With its fair bridge and Tweed’s meandering crooks”.
But it overlooks much else; and a short distance above it there open up,
to right and left, the subsidiary vales of the Lyne and the Manor. The
former comes from the “Cauldstaneslap”, in the heart of the Pentlands,
and passing on its way, at the meeting with the Tarth, Drochil
Castle—built as a retreat by the Regent Morton, who was shortened by a
head with a guillotine of his own contriving before he had time to
complete his work—enters Tweed below the remains of the great Roman Camp
of Lyne. The Manor Water draws its springs from the neighbourhood of
Yarrow. Once it was defended by eight strong peels, only one of which,
Barns—where Mr. John Buchan has laid the scene of his “John Burnet of
Barns”—stands erect. Posso Craigs, where the Stewart Kings bred their
falcons, and the sites of St. Gordian’s Kirk and Cross and of “Macbeth’s
Castle” can be pointed out. But Manor’s chief memorials are the grave
and the cottage of David Ritchie, the prototype of the “Black Dwarf”,
the “recluse of Meiklestane Moor”. Scott, as a young visitor to Manor
with Adam Ferguson, received an impression which never left him when the
deformed and eccentric being, who built his own hut with its doorway
three feet high, took him into its arcana, and locking the door and
seizing his hand, asked him earnestly: “Hae ye the pooer?”—the power of
divination!
The “Thieves’ Road”, by which the Border reivers made their way into
Lothian, strikes athwart the hills enclosing the valleys of Manor and
Lyne, descending to the Tweed from the slopes of the Scrape to the woods
of Dawick. Veitches were succeeded in this sheltered place by Naesmiths,
whose fortunes were built up by an indefatigable seventeenth century
lawyer known as “the Deil o’ Dawick”. It boasts possession of the oldest
larches in Scotland, brought hither on the suggestion of Linnæus, though
the honour is disputed by Kailzie lower down Tweed. Across the river is
another fine wooded domain—Stobo—whose ancient church preserves a Norman
doorway, a saddle-back tower, and a “jougs”; while, from the hills
behind, this level strath seems to be menaced by the fragments of Tinnis
Castle, set, like a robber tower on the Rhine, on the summit of an
almost inaccessible rocky spur. It is believed to have been the original
hold of the Tweedies of Drummelzier, a race whose fabled descent was
from a Tweed water-nymph, and whose conduct towards their neighbours,
the Veitches of Dawick and the Geddeses of Rachan, sadly belied the
motto on their tomb at Drummelzier Church—“Thole and Think”. Hard by
that edifice at the meeting of the Powsail and the Tweed, and not far
from the ruined castle of the Hays of Drummelzier, is another grave of
which tradition has much to say—that of “Merlin the Wild”, who
prophesied on the spot the Union of the Kingdoms.
Beyond Drummelzier and Broughton, an estate and parish which in the
eighteenth century belonged to two historical personages of dubious
repute—“Secretary Murray” of the ’45 and M‘Queen of Braxfield,
Stevenson’s “Lord Justice Clerk”—the Tweed is found to have dwindled
almost to the dimensions of a moorland burn, enclosed among smooth brown
“hills of sheep”. Smaller streams pour down in headlong course on either
hand; and there are not wanting places of historic and literary note by
the river banks and in the tributary valleys. Every burn and haugh has
its story of old feuds, in which Frasers and Tweedies, Hunters and
Murrays, Scotts and Hays, and other clans of Upper Clydesdale have had a
part; and “forts” and “rings” and “chesters” are plentifully sprinkled
on the hill-tops. They are especially rife on the heights looking down
on the Holms water, which comes from the grassy and heathery folds of
Culter Fell and Cardon, and, after joining the Broughton burn, falls
into the Tweed below Rachan. For in this neighbourhood, by the “Pass of
Corscrine”, ran for a time the frontiers of the Kingdom, as fixed
between Edward I and Edward Baliol. Like many other old families of the
district, the Geddeses of Rachan, “chiefs of the name”, passed out of
the Upper Tweed in poverty and litigation. The like fate, or worse,
befell the Murrays of Stanhope, whose representative, after the laird
who lost his head in the ’45, was the “Judas” of the Rebellion, for whom
Scott’s father showed his contempt, by flinging out of the window the
cup from which his caller had partaken of tea in George Square. The fact
that they claimed to have received their lands, “for a Bow and a Broad
Arrow, when the King comes to hunt in Yarrow”, from Malcolm Canmore did
not prevent the Hunters from parting with the estate of Polmood, after
one of the longest lawsuits in the annals of even the Scots law.
Stanhope and Polmood have streams tumbling down to Tweed from the
heights of Dollar Law and Broad Law, 2800 feet above sea-level; and on
the opposite, or right bank, above the fragment of Wrae Castle, which
once belonged to the Tweedies, is the site of “Lincumdoddie”, where
dwelt “Willie Wastle’s wife”, whose face, according to Burns’s song,
“wad fyle the Logan Water”, which runs by it. Beyond the Kinkledoors
burn is the “Crook Inn”, beloved by the many anglers who have sought
sport and recreation in this solitude among the hills, where, besides
Tweed itself, there are many wild side streams—Hearthstane, Menzion,
Fruid, and Fingland; Glencraigie, Glenbreck, and Glencor—frequented by
brown and yellow trout. But, chief of all, there is the Talla, which,
from its springs in lonely Gameshope, rushes down the rocks at Talla
Linnfoot, and rests in the two-mile-long reservoir of the Edinburgh
Water Company, before joining the Tweed at Tweedsmuir Church, nearly
opposite the scant remains of Oliver Castle, where the Frasers first
planted themselves on Tweedside.
The Frasers had fled the scene long before the Hunters and the Hays, the
Geddeses and the Tweedies, and other families have succeeded and
followed them in their flight. Few, and set far apart, are houses and
“bields” of any kind, on the lonely road that keeps high up the hillside
above the valley floor, until, at “Tweed’s Well”, passing over into
Annandale, it parts company with the “Scott Country”.
Footnotes
[1]“Penmanscore” is the correct reading, though “Permanscore” is given
in the _Minstrelsy_.
BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND
This series of beautifully illustrated volumes has been re-issued in
handy size. It is an admirable record of what is most worthy of
attention in some of our fairest places. Each book contains 12
reproductions of original water-colour paintings by E. W. Haslehust,
R.B.A., in addition to descriptive text.
_Attractively Produced_ _Coloured Jacket_
_Descriptive Text by_
The Thames. G. E. Mitton.
Bath and Wells. Arthur L. Salmon.
The Peak District. R. Murray Gilchrist.
In London’s By-Ways. Walter Jerrold.
Winchester. Sidney Heath.
The Shores of Fife. John Geddie.
Heart of London. Walter Jerrold.
Cornish Riviera. Sidney Heath.
Loch Lomond. George Eyre-Todd.
Dartmoor. Arthur L. Salmon.
Edinburgh. John Geddie.
Canterbury. Canon Danks.
Shakespeare-Land. Walter Jerrold.
The Scott Country. John Geddie.
Oxford. F. D. How.
Cambridge. Noel Barwell.
York. George Benson.
English Lakes. A. G. Bradley.
Transcriber’s Notes
--Research into publication date and location determined that this book
is in the public domain.
--Corrected a few palpable typographical errors.
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