|Returning{355} to the neighbourhood of Tweed, on the bank of a
little burn tributary to Biggar Water stands the village of Broughton,
reminiscent of Mr. "Evidence" Murray, the Prince's Secretary, who saved
his own life after the '45 by turning King's Evidence. Broughton House,
his old home, was burned to the ground about 1775, (a couple of years
prior to Murray's death on the Continent,) and the estate was afterwards
sold to the famous Lord Braxfield, the original of Stevenson's "Weir of
Hermiston." Higher up Tweed, on the farther bank, is Stanhope, in the
eighteenth century the property of Murray of Broughton's nephew, Sir
David Murray, who lost his all in the '45; and not many miles farther
up the river is Polmood, where the dishonoured uncle lay hid, and
was taken, in June 1746, losing thereafter more than the life he
saved--honour and the respect of his fellow men. "Neither lip of me nor
of mine comes after Mr. Murray of Broughton's!" cried Sir Walter Scott's
father as he threw out of window the cup from which the apostate had but
then drunk tea. And:--"Do you know this witness?" was asked of Sir John
Douglas of Kelhead, a prisoner after the '45, before the Privy Council
at St. James's, when Murray was giving evidence. "Not I," said
Douglas, "I once knew a person who bore the designation of Murray of
Broughton,--but that was a gentleman and a man of honour, and one that
could hold up his head!" {356}Of old, Polmood--the name, I believe,
means the "wolf's burn," or stream--was a hunting seat of Scottish
kings; In times more modern it was chiefly remarkable for an
interminable law plea which dragged its weary length along for forty
years and more, probably in the end with ruin to both parties to the
suit. Before coming to Polmood, however, we pass Mossfennan, sung of in
two ballads, one of the seventeenth century, the other (of which but a
fragment remains) of much more ancient date. On the roadside a
little further up is a sign-post that points dejectedly towards a
dilapidated-looking tree which stands solitary on the haugh below. Here,
says the legend on the post, was the site of Linkumdoddie, whereof Burns
wrote a song. But to find any point of interest in the scene, or in the
identity of Linkumdoddie or of the lady celebrated, t requires, I think,
that the gazer should be possessed of a most perfervid admiration of the
poet.
And now we begin to open up the wilder part of Tweed's valley, where not
so many years ago you might go a long way, and for miles see no human
being but a passing shepherd. It is different now, in these days when
motor-cars, leaving behind them a trail of dust as ugly as the smudge
of a steamer's smoke low down on the horizon, rush along what used to
be the finest of old grass-grown coach-roads, smooth as a billiard-table
and free from any loose metal--swept bare now to the very roots of the
stones by the constant air-suction of passing cars. But even now, in
the winter-time, when the rush of the tourist troubles no more, if one
trusts oneself in these wilds, there is a reward to be gleaned in the
fresh, inexpressibly _clean_ air, and in the sense of absolute freedom
that one gains. You have-left civilisation and its cares behind; here is
peace. And in the great hills lying there so solemn and still, black as
blackest ink where the heather stands out against the wintry grey sky,
or deep-slashed on their sides with heavy drifts of snow from the latest
storm, there is rest to the wearied soul and the tired {357}mind. And if
the day be windless, what sweeter sound can anywhere be heard than the
tinkling melody of innumerable burns blending with the deeper note of
Tweed? Nowhere in the world, as it seems to me, is there any scene where
Nature lays on man a hand so gentle as here in Tweedsmuir. It is all
one, the season; no matter if the air is still, or the west wind bellows
down the valley, life is better worth living for the being here. And
the glory of it, when snow lies deep over the wide expanse, and the sun
shines frostily, and Tweed, black by contrast with the stainless snow,
goes roaring his hoarse song seaward!
All burns up this part of the valley used to teem with nice, fat, lusty
yellow trout--Stanhope Burn, Polmood, Hearthstane, Talla and Gameshope,
Menzion, Fruid, Kingledores (with its memories of St. Cuthbert), and the
rest. Doubtless the trout are there still, but most of the burns are now
in the hands of shooting tenants, and the fishing, probably, is not open
to all as of old. Talla and Gameshope (of which more anon) are now the
property of the Edinburgh Water Trust Commissioners, and a permit from
them is necessary if one would fish in these two streams or in Talla
Reservoir.
Before reaching Talla, almost equidistant between the Polmood and
Hearthstane burns, but on the opposite side of Tweed, we come to what
used to be the cheery, clean little Crook Inn, standing in its clump of
trees. But its history of two hundred years and more as an inn is ended;
modern legislation has seen to that. And there is now on this highroad
between Peebles and Moffat--a distance of something like thirty
miles--not a single house where man and beast may find accommodation and
reasonable refreshment. It is not the so-called "idle rich" who are thus
handicapped; fifteen or sixteen miles are of small account to the man
who owns a motor-car. It is they who cannot afford the luxury of a car,
but who yet desire to be alone here with nature, or to fish in Tweed and
in such burns as may yet be fished, it is they who find themselves thus
left out in the cold. *
* Since this was written, the Crook has reopened its doors
as an inn. But they are not any longer content with the
homely word "inn"; the place asserts itself now in large
letters as the Crook "Hotel."
Of old, when the mail-coaches running between Dumfries and Edinburgh
came jingling cheerily along this smooth Tweed-side road, it was at the
Crook Inn that they changed horses. But I doubt it was not then a spot
so inviting as it certainly became in the 'seventies of last century.
Sir Thomas Dick Lauder speaks of it as it was in 1807 as "one of the
coldest-looking, cheerless places of reception for travellers that we
had ever chanced to behold.... It stood isolated and staring in the
midst of the great glen of the Tweed, closed in by high green sloping
hills on all sides.... No one could look at it without thinking of
winter, snow-storms, and associations filled with pity for those whose
hard fate it might be to be storm-stayed there." But Sir Thomas Dick
Lauder's visit in 1807 was paid in the month of November, when snow
hung heavy in the air, threatening the traveller with wearisome and
indefinite delay. And the hind wheels of his chaise collapsed like the
walls of Jericho as the postillion, having changed horses here, started
with too sudden a dash from the door of the inn; and Sir Thomas was
bumped most grievously along the road for some hundreds of yards ere
the post-boy (who perhaps had made use at the Crook of some far-seeing
device to keep out the cold) discovered that anything was amiss. Not
unnaturally the nerves of the occupants of the chaise were a trifle
rallied; no doubt the place then looked less cheerful than it might
otherwise have appeared. Forty years later, he writes that it had,
"comparatively speaking, an inviting air of comfort about it.... The
road, as you go along, now wears altogether an inhabited look, and
little portions of plantations here and there give an air of shelter and
civilisation to it." It was a cheerless place enough, no doubt, in the
Covenanting {359}days of the seventeenth century, when the dour hill-men
were flying from Claverhouse's dragoons, lurking in the black, oozing
"peat-hags," hiding by the foaming burns, sheltering on the wild moors,
amongst the heather and the wet moss. It was the landlady of this same
Crook Inn who found for one fugitive a novel hiding hole; she built him
safely into her stack of peats. There has been many a less comfortable
and less secure hitting place than that; and where could one drier be
found?
It was at the Crook that William Black makes his travellers in the
"Strange Adventures of a Phaeton" spend a night, and the fare to which
in the evening he sets his party down was certainly of the frugalest.
But when this present writer knew the inn in the 'seventies, it was
far from being only on "whisky and ham and eggs" that he was obliged to
subsist. It was then an ideal angler's haunt; and no more gentle lullaby
can be imagined than the low murmur of Tweed, and the quiet _hus-s-s sh_
of many waters breathing down the valley on the still night air.
A mile or more beyond the Crook, there is the Bield, also once an
inn "From Berwick to the Bield," is the Tweedside equivalent of the
Scriptural "From Dan even to Beer-sheba." It was here at the Bield
that the Covenanters thought once to trap Claverhouse; but that "proud
Assyrian" rode not easily into snares. On the hill above is the site of
Oliver Castle, home of the Fraser family, once so powerful in this part
of the Border--the site, I think, but nothing more.
And now, to reach that part of Tweedsmuir which more than any other
casts over one a spell, it is necessary to branch off here to the left
and follow the road shown in Mr. Thomson's charming sketch. Straight
ahead of you, as you stand by the little Tweedsmuir post-office, you
look up the beautiful valley of the Talla, where the steep hills lie at
first open and green and smiling on either hand, but gradually changing
their character, close in, gloomy and scarred, and {360}frowning, as the
distant Talla Linn is neared.
[Illustration: 0380]
But before you leave the little hamlet of Tweedsmuir--it can scarcely
be called a village--by the old single-arched bridge that is thrown
here across Tweed, where he roars and chafes among his rocks {361}ere
plunging down into the deep, black pool below, you will see on your left
a spire peering out over the tree-tops.
[Illustration: 0381]
That is the church of Tweedsmuir, on its strange, tumulus-like mound by
the river's brink. And here you will find:n the green grass, under the
clustering trees, the graves of some who fell for "The Covenant," one
headstone, at least, relettered by "Old {362}Mortality" himself. This
is the grave of one John Hunter; but doubless there are others, less
noticeable, who rest with him in this quiet spot, far from the world's
clash and turmoil, where no sound harsher than the Sabbath bell that
calls to prayer or the sighing of the wind in the trees, can ever break
the silence. Here is Hunter's epitaph:
[Illustration: 0382]
"When Zion's King was Robbed
of his right
His witnesses in Scotland put to
flight
When popish prelats and Indul-
gancie
Combin'd 'gainst Christ to Ruine
Presbytrie
All who would not unto their
idols bow
They socht them out and whom
they found they slew
For owning of Christ's cause I
then did die
My blood for vengeance on his
en'mies did cry."
And on a stone in another part of the churchyard--perhaps the grave of a
grandfather and grandchild--are the quaint words:
"Death pities not the aged head,
Nor manhood fresh and green,
But blends the locks of eighty-five
With ringlets of sixteen."
The old Session Records of this church are full of references to the
trembled times of the Covenant. Here are one or two entries, which I
quote from the Rev. W. S. Crockett's "Scott Country."' Mr. Crockett is
Minister of the Parish.--"No session kept by reason of the elders being
all at conventicles."
"No public sermon, soldiers being sent to apprehend the minister, but
he, receiving notification of their design, went away and retired."
"No meeting this day for fear of the{363} enemy."
HERE LYES JOHN HUNTER MARTYR WHO WAS CRUELY MURDERED AT COREHEAD BY COL.
JAMES DOUGLAS AND HIS PARTY FOR HIS ADHERANCE TO THE WORD OF GOD AND
SCOTLAND'S COVENANTED WORK OF REFORMATION 1688 Erected in the year 1726.
"The collection this day to be given to a man for acting as watch during
the time of sermon." And so on.--
[Illustration: 0383]
Sometimes it strikes one as strange, that passion for listening to
a sermon which is inherent in one's countrymen. It is but a sombre
pleasure, as a rule.
Talla, up to a recent period, flowed through a deep valley, whose bottom
for some distance was of a treacherous and swampy nature; its trout,
therefore, (in marked contrast to those of the tributary Gameshope,)
were dark-coloured and "ill-faured." I do not know that they are
anything else now, but there is not much of Talla left. A mile above the
church you come to a great barrier thrown across the valley, and beyond
that for three miles stretches a Reservoir which supplies distant
Edinburgh with water. Picturesque enough in its way is this Reservoir,
especially when all trace of man and his work is left behind, and
nothing meets the eye but the brown, foam-flecked water, and the hills
plunging headlong deep into its bosom. Even more picturesque is the
scene when storms gather on the far heights, and come raging down the
wild glen of Gameshope, swathing in mist and scourging rain-squall the
{364}deep-scarred brows of those eerie hills by Talla Linn-foot. What a
spot it must be on a wild December day, when blind ing snow drives down
the gullies before the icy blast!
This Reservoir has been stocked with Loch Leven trout. But the fishing
is not, and never will be, good. There is insufficient food; the water
is too deep, and except at the extreme head of the loch there are no
shallows where insect life might hatch out. The trout are long and lank,
and seldom fight well. Nor are they even very eager to rise to the
fly. Yet, it is true, some large fish have been taken. But they have a
suspiciously cannibal look, and I think an insurance company would
be apt to charge a very high premium on the chances of long life of
troutlings now put in.
I do not know where Young Hay of Talla lived. If his peel tower was
here, no doubt the site is now sixty or seventy feet under water, but
I cannot remember any traces of a building, or site of a building, in
pre-Reservoir days. Men born and brought up lang syne on the gloomy
slopes of Talla, might well be such as he, fierce and cruel, ready for
treason and murder, or any crime of violence.
"Wild your cradle glen,
Young Hay of Talla,
Stern the wind's wild roar
Round the old peel tower,
Young Hay of Talla.
"Winter night raving,
Young Hay of Talla,
Snowy drift smooring,
Loud the Linn roaring,
Young Hay of Talla.
"Winterhope's wild hags,
Young Hay of Talla,
Gameshope dark foaming,
There ever roaming,
Young Hay of Talla.
Night round Kirk o' Field,
Young Hay of Talla,
Light faint in the room,
Darnley sleeps in gloom,
Young Hay of Talla.
"Shadow by bedside,
Young Hay of Talla,
Noise in the dull dark,
Does sleeper now hark,
Young Hay of Talla?
"Ah! the young form moves,
Young Hay of Talla,
Hold him grim,--hold grim,
Till quivers not a limb,
Young I lay of Talla.
"Now the dread deed's done,
Young Hay of Talla,
Throw the corpse o'er the wall,
Give it dead dog's fall,
Young Hay of Talla."
Hay was one of two executed on 3rd January 1568 for the murder of
Darnley.
If you would gain a good idea of this part of Tweedsmuir, climb by the
steep, crumbling sheep-path that scales the Linn-side, till you reach
the spot where Mr. Thomson has made his sketch of the Reservoir. There,
lying on the heather by the sounding waters, or beneath the rowan trees
where blaeberries cluster thick among the rocks, you may picture to
yourself a meeting that took place by this very spot two hundred and
thirty-one years ago. On commanding heights, solitary men keeping
jealous watch lest Claver'se's hated dragoons should have smelled out
the place of meeting; below, where the Linn's roar muffles the volume
of other sounds, a company of blue-bonneted, stern-faced men, singing
with intense fervour some militant old Scottish Psalm, followed by long
and earnest {366}extempore prayer, and renewed Psalms; and presently
then falling into dispute as vehement as before had been their prayer
and praise.
[Illustration: 0386]
This was that celebrated meeting of Covenanters in 1682, of which Sir
Walter Scott, writing in {367}"The Heart of Midlothian," says: "Here [at
Talla] the leaders among the scattered adherents, to the Covenant, men
who, in their banishment from human society, and in the recollection of
the severities to which they had been exposed, had become at once sullen
in their tempers, and fantastic in their religious opinions, met with
arms in their hands, and by the side of the torrent discussed, with
a turbulence which the noise of the stream could not drown, points of
controversy as empty and unsubstantial as its foam." Dour men they were,
and intolerant, our old Covenanting forebears, ready at any moment to
"prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks."
Yet who can withhold from them his respect, or, in many points, deny
them his admiration?
If, as Sydney Smith has said, "it is good for any man to be alone with
nature and himself"; if "it is well to be in places where man is little
and God is great"; then assuredly it is well to be alone, or with a
friend "who knows when silence is more sociable than talk," up in the
great solitude by Gameshope Burn. Nowhere in Scotland can one find a
glen wilder or more impressive, nowhere chance on a scene which more
readily helps the harassed mind to slip from under the burden of worldly
cares. For half a mile or more from its mouth hut a commonplace, open,
boulder-strewn mountain burn, above that point the broken, craggy hills
fall swiftly to the lip of a brawling torrent, which drops foaming by
linn after linn deep into the seething black cauldrons below, lingers
there a minute, then hurries swiftly onward by cliff and fern-clad mossy
bank. Above each pool cling rowan trees, rock rooted, a blaze of scarlet
and orange if the month be September, but beautiful always at whatever
season you may visit them. Everywhere the air is filled with the deep
murmur and crash of falling waters; yet, clamber to that lonely old
track which leads to the solitary cottage of a shepherd, and around you
is a silence {368}almost oppressive, emphasised rather than broken by
the ill-omened croak of a raven, or by the thin anxious bleat of a ewe
calling to its lamb from far up the mountain side.
[Illustration: 0388]
A mile past the shepherd's substantially built little house--it had need
be strong of frame to stand intact up here against the winter storms--on
your left is Donald's Cleuch, reminiscent of the Reverend Donald
Cargill, a hero of the Covenant, Minister of the Barony Church in
Glasgow in 1655, who was {369}afterwards deprived of his benefice for
denouncing the Restoration. The legend is, I presume, that Cargill hid
somewhere in the wild moorland hereabout, up the Donald's Cleuch burn
perhaps, or a long mile further on, by Gameshope Loch. A man might have
lain long, in the summer time, amongst these rugged hills, safe hidden
from any number of prying dragoons; but Heaven help him if he lay out
there in the winter season. All is wild, broken country, peat-hags,
mosses, and deep cleuchs, over which one goes best a-foot--and, of
necessity, best with youth on one's side if the journey be of any great
length.
From the height at the head of Donald's Cleuch burn, one looks down on
that gloomy tarn, Loch Skene, lying but a few short miles on the Yarrow
side of the watershed. Mr. Skene of Rubislaw tells--it is in Lockhart's
life--how when Sir Walter Scott and he visited this loch, a thick fog
came down over the hills, completely bewildering them, and "as we were
groping through the maze of bogs, the ground gave way, and down went
horse and horsemen pell-mell into a slough of peaty mud and black water,
out of which, entangled as we were with our plaids and floundering
nags, it was no easy matter to get extricated." Savage and desolate are
perhaps the words that best describe Loch Skene; yet, in fine summer
weather, how beautiful it may be! How beautiful, indeed, all this wild
waste of hills where those dour old Covenanters were wont to lurk, never
quite free from dread of the dragoons quartered but a few miles away
over the hills at Moffat. Tales of the Covenanting times, such, for
instance, as "The Brownie of Bodesbeck," used to possess an intense
fascination for Scottish boys; every Covenanter was then an immaculate
hero, and, I suppose, few boys took any but the worst view of
Claverhouse, or refused credence to any of the countless legends of him.
and of his diabolical black charger, of which we firmly believed the
story that it could course a hare along the side of a precipice. A point
in some of those tales that used to interest and puzzle at {370}least
one boy, was the mysterious fashion in which a fugitive would at
times disappear from ken when hard pressed on the open moor, and when
apparently cut off from all chance of escape. A possible explanation
presented itself to me one day, a summer or two back, when making my way
across the bleak upland that lies between Gameshope Loch and Gameshope
Burn. As I walked over the broken peaty surface of the plateau, but not
yet arrived where the land begins to drop abruptly into the Gameshope
Glen, a covey of grouse got up almost at my feet. The day was windless
and very still, and as I stood watching the flight of the birds, the
faint melodious tinkle of underground water somewhere very near to me
fell on my ear. Glancing around, I saw on the flat ground in front of
me within a yard of my feet, what appeared to be a hole, almost entirely
concealed by heather. It was from this direction that the sound of the
drip, drip of falling water seemed to come. Kneeling down, I pulled
the heather aside, and found a hole two or three feet in diameter, and
beneath it a roomy kind of chamber hollowed out of the peaty soil. It
was a place perhaps five feet deep, big enough at a pinch to conceal
half a dozen men; a place from which--unless there was a way out from
below--a man might never find exit, if inadvertently he fell in and in
his fall chanced to break a limb. In that wild region the prospect of
his ever being discovered by searchers would be very small. Unseen of
man, he might lie in that peaty grave till his bones bleached, rest in
that lonely spot till the last dread trump called him forth to judgment.
The day after I had chanced on this strange cavern, I returned with a
friend to whom I wanted to show it, and though we knew that we must be
often within a few yards of the spot, search as we might we never again
found that hole. Was it in some _cache_ such as this--perhaps in this
very spot--that Covenanters sometimes lay hid? Here two or three might
have lain for days or weeks at a time, sheltered from wind or rain and
secure from hostile eyes; it would be warm enough, {371}and the drip of
water into it is so slight as to be hardly worth naming. Doubtless
if one took careful landmarks it would be easy to find again, once
knowledge of its whereabouts was gained. And so the lurking Covenanters
would have had small difficulty; but without such landmarks, to find it
except by chance seems hopeless. None of the shepherds knew of the hole,
save one old man who said he had heard there was some such place. But
one might go a hundred times across that moor, passing close to the
hidden mouth, and unless the faint tinkle of water betrayed it, or
by remote chance one blundered in, its existence would never even be
suspected. It is a place worthy to be the abode of the Brown Man of the
Muirs; and the district is wild and lonesome enough to breed the most
eerie of superstitions.
Harking back now to the Tweed,--a little way above the bridge at
Tweedsmuir on the right bank there is a huge standing stone, called the
Giant's Stone, of which various legends are told. Two other stones lie
close at hand, but these appear to be mere ordinary boulders. According
to the Statistical Account of the Parish of 1833, this Giant's Stone is
the sole survivor of a Druidical Circle; all its fellows were broken up
for various purposes, and carted away; and we may be sure it was from no
feeling of compunction that even the one was spared. Residents tell us
that it was from behind this stone that a wily little archer in days of
old sent an arrow into the heart of a giant on the far side of Tweed.
The range is considerable; it must have been a glorious fluke. But I
rather think the place that is credited with this event, and with the
veritable grave of the slain giant, is higher up Tweed, opposite the
Hawkshaw burn. Somewhere up this burn stood Hawkshaw Castle or Tower,
home of that Porteous who gained unenviable notoriety for his feat of
capturing at I alia Moss, with the aid of some of the moss-trooping
fraternity, one of Cromwell's outposts, sixteen horse in all, and in
cold blood afterwards executing the unfortunate troopers. A contemporary
{372}historian relates that: "The greatest releiff at this tyme was by
some gentillmen callit moss-trouperis, quha, haiffing quyetlie convenit
in threttis and fourties, did cut off numberis of the Englishes, and
seased on thair pockettis and horssis." The "pockettis and horssis" were
all in the ordinary way of business; it is another affair when it comes
to cutting the throats of defenceless captives.
A few miles further on, the road we follow passes Badlieu, a place famed
as the home, away back in the eleventh century, of Bonnie Bertha, who
captured the roving heart of one of our early Scottish Kings as he
hunted here one day in the forest. Unhappily for Bertha, there was
already a Scottish Queen, and when news of the King's infatuation came
to that lady's ears, she--queens have been known to entertain such
prejudices--disapproved so strongly of the new _menage_, that one
afternoon when the king (who had been absent on some warlike expedition)
arrived at Bertha's bower, he found the nest harried, and Bertha and her
month-old babe lying dead. And ever after, they say, to the end the King
cared no more to hunt, nor took pride in war, but wandered disconsolate,
mourning for this Scottish Fair Rosamond. But how the rightful Queen
fared thereafter, tradition does not say.
And now we come to Tweed Shaws, and Tweed's Well, the latter by popular
repute held to be the source of Tweed. But there is a tributary burn
which runs a longer course than this, rising in the hills much nearer to
the head-waters of Annan. As is well known,
"Annan, Tweed, and Clyde
Rise a' cot o' au hill-side,"
a statement which is sufficiently near the truth to pass muster. Near
Tweed's Well of old stood Tweed's Cross, "so called," says Pennecuick,
"from a cross which stood, and was erected there in time of Popery, as
was ordinary in all the eminent places of public roads in the kingdom
before our Reformation." It is needless to say that no trace of any
cross now remains. {373}Up here, on this lofty, shelterless plateau, we
find one of the few spots now left in Scotland where the old snow-posts
still stand by the wayside, mute guides to the traveller when snow lies
deep and the road is blotted from existence as effectually as is the
track of a ship when she has passed across the ocean. Heaven's pity on
those whom duty or necessity took across that wild moorland during a
heavy snow storm in the old coaching days! Many a man perished up here,
wandered from the track, bewildered; stopped to rest and to take
his bearings, then slid gently into a sleep from which there was no
wakening. In 1831, the mail-coach from Dumfries to Edinburgh left Moffat
late one winter's afternoon. Snow was falling as for years it had not
been known to fall, and as the day passed the drifts grew deeper and
ever more deep. But the guard, MacGeorge, an old soldier, a man of few
words, could not be induced to listen to those who spoke of danger
and counselled caution. He had been "quarrelled" once before for being
behind rime with the mail, said he; so long as he had power to go
forward, never should "they" have occasion to quarrel him again. A
matter of three or four miles up that heart-breaking, endless hill out
of Moffat the coach toiled slowly, many times stopping to breathe the
horses; and then it stuck fast. They took the horses out, loaded
them with the mails, and guard and driver in company with a solitary
passenger started again for Tweedshaws, leading the tired animals. Then
the horses stuck, unable to face the deep drifts and the blinding storm.
MacGeorge announced his intention of carrying the mailbags; they _must_
be got through. The driver remonstrated. "Better gang back to Moffat,"
he said. "Gang ye, or bide ye, _I gang on!_" cried MacGeorge. So the
horses were turned loose to shift for themselves, and the two men
started on their hopeless undertaking, the passenger, on their advice,
turning to make his way back to Moffat. That was the last ever seen
alive of the two who went forward. Next {374}day, the mail-bags were
found beyond the summit of the hill,--the most shelterless spot of the
entire road,--hanging to a snow-post, fastened there by numbed hands
that too apparently had been bleeding. But of guard and coachman
no trace till three days later, when searchers found them, dead, on
Mac-George's face "a kind o' a pleasure," said the man who discovered
the body in the deep snow. Some such fate as that ever trod here on
the heels of foot passengers who wandered from the track during a
snow-storm.
In his "Strange Adventures of a Phæton," William Black writes of these
hills as "a wilderness of heather and wet moss," even in the summer
time; and he speaks of the "utter loneliness," the "profound and
melancholy stillness." There is no denying that it is lonely, and often
profoundly still. And no doubt to many there is monotony in the low,
rolling, treeless, benty hills that here are the chief feature in the
scenery. But I do not think it is melancholy. The sense of absolute
freedom and of boundless space is too great to admit of melancholy
creeping in. The feeling, to me at least, is more akin to that one
experiences when standing on the deck of a full-rigged ship running down
her Easting in "the Roaring Forties," with the wind drumming hard out of
the Sou'West. From the haze, angry grey seas come raging on the weather
quarter, snarling as they curl over and leap to fling themselves aboard,
then, baffled, spew up in seething turmoil from beneath the racing keel,
and hurry off to leeward. There you have a plethora of monotony; each
hurrying sea is exactly the mate of his fellow that went before him,
twin of that which follows after. Day succeeds day without other variety
than what may come from the carrying of less or more sail; hour after
hour, day after day, the same gigantic albatrosses, with far-stretched
motionless wings soar and wheel leisurely over and around the ship,
never hasting, never stopping,--unhasting and relentless as Death
himself. Monotony absolute and supreme, but a sense of freedom and of
boundless space, and no touch of {375}melancholy. So it is here
among these rolling hills where the infant Tweed is born. There is
no melancholy in the situation, or at worst it can be but of brief
duration. Who could feel melancholy when, at last on the extreme summit
and beginning the long descent towards Moffat, he sees spread out on
either hand that glorious crescent of hills, rich in the purple bloom
of heather; Annan deep beneath his feet wandering far through her quiet
valley, and dim in the distance, the English hills asleep in the golden
haze of afternoon. For my part, I would fain linger, perched up here,
late into the summer gloaming, watching the panorama change with the
changing light when the sun has long set and the glow is dying m the
west;
"For here the peace of heaven hath fallen, and here
The earth and sky are mute in sympathy."
And this ground is classic ground. It was at Errickstane, not far below,
where, more than six hundred years ago, the young Sir James Douglas
found Bruce riding on his way to Scone, to be crowned King of Scotland.
And to the left of the road shortly after leaving its highest point on
the hill, there yawns that tremendous hollow, the Devil's Beef Tub, or,
as it is sometimes called, the Marquis of Annandale's Beef Stand. It
was here in the '45 that a Highland prisoner, suddenly wrapping himself
tight in his plaid, threw himself over the edge ana rolled like a
hedgehog to the bottom, escaping, sore bruised indeed, but untouched
by the bullets that were sent thudding and whining after him by the
outwitted prisoners' guard. He is a desperate man who would attempt a
like feat, even minus the chance of a bullet. It is a wild place and
a terrible. The reason of its being called the Marquis's Beef Stand is
given by Summertrees in "Redgauntlet." It was, said he, "because
the Annandale loons used to put their stolen cattle in there." And
Summer-tree's description of it is so truthful and vivid that it
behoves one to quote it in full: "It looks as if four hills were laying
{376}their heads together to shut out daylight from the dark hollow
space between them.
[Illustration: 0396]
A d----d deep, black, blackguard-looking abyss of a hole it is, and goes
straight down from the road-side, as perpendicular as it can do, to be
a heathery brae. At the bottom there is a small bit of a brook, that you
would think {377}could hardly find its way out from the hills that are
so closely jammed round it."
And so, finally, having overshot the limits of Tweed and her
tributaries, we cast back to the hills on the immediate border-line of
the two kingdoms, and pass into the country of Dandie Dinmont.