NEWARK TOWER

THE
SCOTT COUNTRY

Described by John Geddie
Painted by E. W. Haslehust, R.B.A.

BLACKIE & SON LIMITED
LONDON AND GLASGOW

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

KELSO: THE RIVER TWEED AND ABBEY RUINS

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,

Linlithgow Palace on the western and “Wolfs Crag” on the eastern boundary of Lothian. Fife, on the 6 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 7 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 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,

But while he knew by heart the whole Borderland, and had explored its chief river from where

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, 9 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 10 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, 11 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 12 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.

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, 14 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,

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”. 16 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”.

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 18 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 19 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, 20 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”.

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:

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 22 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:

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 23 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—

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:

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

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

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

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 27 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 28 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.

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

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 30 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 31 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 32 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:

BEMERSYDE HOUSE

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”. 34 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 35 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 36 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,

MELROSE ABBEY: CHOIR AND NORTH TRANSEPT

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 38 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 39 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

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:

of the vaulted roof, where

and of the pillars, with their clustered shafts, that

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 40 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,

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 41 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

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 42 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

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, 44 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

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 46 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—

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 47 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

and to the “embattled portal arch”

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. 48 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.

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—

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”.

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 51 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:—

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, 52 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 53 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:—

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 54 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.

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.

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 56 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 57 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 58 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 59 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 60 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 61 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 62 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.

NEIDPATH CASTLE

As Pennecuik sang two centuries ago:

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 64 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 65 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 66 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, 67 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

Transcriber’s Notes

• Research into publication date and location determined that this book is in the public domain.
• Corrected a few palpable typographical errors.