BONNIE SCOTLAND
That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake,
Some usefu’ plan, or beuk could make.
BURNS.
[Illustration: BENEATH THE CRAGS OF BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIRE]
BONNIE SCOTLAND
PAINTED BY SUTTON
PALMER · DESCRIBED BY
A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF
PUBLISHED BY A. & C.
BLACK · LONDON · MCMXII
[Illustration]
_Published November 1904_
_Reprinted 1905, 1912_
Note
The author does not attempt elaborate word-pictures, that would seem
pale beside the artist’s colouring. His design has been, as
accompaniment to these beautiful landscapes, an outline of Scotland’s
salient features, with glimpses at its history, national character, and
customs, and at the literature that illustrates this country for the
English-speaking world. While taking the reader on a fireside tour
through the varying “airts” of his native land, he has tried to show how
its life, silken or homespun, is a tartan of more intricate pattern than
appears in certain crude impressions struck off by strangers. And into
his own web have been woven reminiscences, anecdotes, and borrowed
brocade such as may make entertaining stripes and checks upon a
groundwork of information. The mainland only is dealt with in this
volume, which it is intended to follow up with another on the Highlands
and Islands.
Contents
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE BORDERS 1
CHAPTER II
AULD REEKIE 23
CHAPTER III
THE TROSSACHS ROUND 45
CHAPTER IV
THE KINGDOM OF FIFE 69
CHAPTER V
THE FAIR CITY 90
CHAPTER VI
THE HIGHLAND LINE 111
CHAPTER VII
“ABERDEEN AWA’!” 136
CHAPTER VIII
TO JOHN O’ GROAT’S HOUSE 157
CHAPTER IX
THE GREAT GLEN 177
CHAPTER X
GLASGOW AND THE CLYDE 197
CHAPTER XI
THE WHIG COUNTRY 215
CHAPTER XII
GALLOWAY 244
List of Illustrations
1. Beneath the Crags of Ben Venue, Perthshire _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. Tantallon Castle, on Coast of Haddingtonshire 2
3. The Bass Rock, Firth of Forth, off Coast of Haddingtonshire 4
4. Neidpath Castle, Peeblesshire 8
5. Abbotsford, Roxburghshire 12
6. Melrose, Roxburghshire 16
7. Scott’s favourite View from Bemerside Hill, Roxburghshire 20
8. Edinburgh from “Rest and be Thankful” 24
9. Edinburgh from Salisbury Crags--Evening 28
10. Craigmillar Castle, near Edinburgh 32
11. Linlithgow Palace 36
12. The Bass Rock--A Tranquil Evening 38
13. Loch Achray, the Trossachs, Perthshire 42
14. Stirling Castle from the King’s Knot 46
15. The Outflow of Loch Katrine, Perthshire 48
16. In the Heart of the Trossachs, Perthshire 50
17. Brig o’ Turk and Ben Venue, Perthshire 52
18. Birches by Loch Achray, Perthshire 54
19. Head of Loch Lomond, looking up Glen Falloch, Perthshire 56
20. Golden Autumn, the Trossachs, Perthshire 58
21. The River Teith, with Lochs Achray and Vennachar, Perthshire 60
22. Veiled Sunshine, the Trossachs, Perthshire 62
23. Near Ardlui, Loch Lomond, Dumbartonshire 64
24. The Silver Strand, Loch Katrine, Perthshire 66
25. Loch Achray and Ben Venue, Perthshire 68
26. The Castle of St. Andrews, Fifeshire 70
27. Loch Lubnaig, Perthshire 76
28. In Glenfinlas, Perthshire 80
29. On the Dochart, Killin, Perthshire 84
30. Perth from the Slopes of Kinnoul Hill 90
31. Ben A’an, corner of Loch Katrine, Perthshire 94
32. Loch Vennachar, Perthshire 98
33. A Croft near Dalmally, Argyllshire 102
34. Wet Harvest Time near Dalmally, Argyllshire 106
35. The Grampians from Boat of Garten, Inverness-shire 112
36. Killin, Perthshire 114
37. A Moor near Killin, Perthshire 116
38. In Glenfinlas, Perthshire 118
39. Looking up Glen Lochay near Killin, Perthshire 120
40. Beneath the Slopes of Ben Ledi, near Callander, Perthshire 122
41. A Wild Spot, Killin, Perthshire 124
42. The Falls of Tummel, Perthshire 126
43. Dunkeld and Birnam from Craigiebarns, Perthshire 128
44. A Wooded Gorge, Killin, Perthshire 130
45. Looking up the Pass of Killiecrankie, Perthshire 132
46. Killin, Head of Loch Tay, Perthshire 134
47. Dunnottar Castle, Kincardineshire 136
48. Old Mar Bridge and Lochnagar, Aberdeenshire 140
49. Balmoral, Aberdeenshire 144
50. Strath Glass, Inverness-shire 148
51. A Peep of the Grampians, Inverness-shire 152
52. The River Glass near Beauly, Inverness-shire 158
53. Moor of Rannoch, Perthshire and Argyllshire 162
54. The Isles of Loch Maree, Ross-shire 166
55. Moor and Mountain, Ross-shire 170
56. Crags near Poolewe, Ross-shire 174
57. Inverness from near the Islands 178
58. Tomdoun, Glen Garry, Inverness-shire 182
59. A Shepherd’s Cot in Glen Nevis, Inverness-shire 186
60. River Awe flowing to Loch Etive, Argyllshire 190
61. A Croft near Taynuilt, Loch Etive, Argyllshire 194
62. Glencoe, Argyllshire 198
63. Garelochhead, Dumbartonshire 202
64. Glen Sannox, Isle of Arran 206
65. Loch Triochatan, Entrance to Glencoe, Argyllshire 210
66. Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran 214
67. The Falls of the Clyde, Lanarkshire 216
68. A Highland View 220
69. Kilchurn Castle, Loch Awe, Argyllshire 226
70. River Coe, Glencoe, Argyllshire 230
71. Ben Cruachan from Inverlochy, Argyllshire 234
72. The Morven Hills from Appin, Argyllshire 238
73. A Croft near Loch Etive, Argyllshire 242
74. A Birch-Wood in Springtime, by Loch Maree, Ross-shire 246
75. On the River Ayr, Ayrshire 250
BONNIE SCOTLAND
CHAPTER I
THE BORDERS
The dawn broadens, the mists roll away to show a northward-bound
traveller how his train is speeding between slopes of moorland, green
and grey, here patched by bracken or bog, there dotted by wind-blown
trees, everywhere cut by water-courses gathering into gentle rivers that
can be furious enough in spate, when they hurl a drowned sheep or a
broken hurdle through those valleys opening a glimpse of mansions and
villages among sheltered woods. Are we still in England, or in what at
least as far back as Cromwell’s time called itself “Bonnie Scotland”? It
is as hard to be sure as to make out whether that cloudy knoll on the
horizon is crowned by a peat-stack or by the stump of a Border peel.
Either bank of Tweed and Liddel has much the same aspects. An expert
might perhaps read the look or the size of the fields. Could one get
speech with that brawny corduroyed lad tramping along the furrows to his
early job, whistling maybe, as if it would never grow old, an air from
the London music-halls, the Southron might be none the wiser as to his
nationality, though a fine local ear would not fail to catch some
difference of burr and broad vowels, marked off rather by separating
ridges than by any legal frontier, as the lilting twang of Liddesdale
from the Teviot drawl. Healthily barefooted children, more’s the pity,
are not so often seen nowadays on this side of the Border, nor on the
other, unless at Brightons and Margates. The Scotch “bonnet,”
substantial headgear as it was, has vanished; the Scotch plaid, once as
familiar on the Coquet as on the Tweed, is more displayed in shop
windows than in moorland glens, now that over the United Kingdom reigns
a dull monotony and uniformity of garb. Could we take the spectrum of
those first wreaths of smoke curling from cottage chimneys, we might
find traces of peat and porridge, yet also of coal and bacon. Yon
red-locked lassie turning her open eyes up to the train from the
roadside might settle the question, were we able to test her knowledge
whether of the Shorter Catechism or of her “Duty towards her Neighbour.”
It is only when the name of the first Scottish way-station whisks by,
that we know ourselves fairly over the edge of “Caledonia stern and
wild”; and our first thought may well be that this Borderland appears
less stern than the grey crags of Yorkshire, and less wild than some
bleak uplands of Northumberland.
What makes a nation? Not for long such walls as the Romans drew across
this neck of our island, one day to point a moral of fallen might, and
to adorn a tale of the northern romancer who by its ruins wooed his
alien bride. Not such rivers as here could be easily forded by those
mugwump moss-troopers that sat on the fence of Border law, and--
[Illustration: TANTALLON CASTLE, ON COAST OF HADDINGTONSHIRE]
Sought the beeves to make them broth
In England and in Scotland both.
Is it race? Alas for the ethnologic historian, on its dim groundwork of
Picts and Celts--or what?--Scotland shows a still more confusing pattern
of mingled strains than does the sister kingdom! To both sides of the
Border such names for natural features as Cheviot, Tweed, and Tyne, tell
the same tale of one stock displaced by another that built and
christened its Saxon Hawicks, Berwicks, Bamboroughs, and Longtowns upon
the Pens and Esks of British tribes.--Is it a common speech? But from
the Humber to the Moray Firth, along the east side of Britain,
throughout the period of fiercest clash of arms, prevailed the same
tongue, split by degrees into dialects, but differing on the Forth and
the Tyne less than the Tyne folks’ tongue differed from that of the
Thames, or the speech of the Forth from that of the Clyde mouth. So
insists Dr. J. A. H. Murray, who of all British scholars was found
worthy to edit the Oxford English Dictionary, that has now three
editors, two of them born north of the Tweed, the third also in the
northern half of England. Scottish “wut” chuckles to hear how, when the
shade of Boswell pertly reported to the great doctor that his post as
Lexicographer-General had been filled by one who was at once a Scotsman
and a dissenter, all Hades shook with the rebuke, “Sir, in striving to
be facetious, do not attempt obscenity and profanity!”--or ghostly
vocables to such effect.
Is it loyalty to a line of princes that crystallises patriotism? That is
a current easily induced, as witness how the sentiments once stirred by
a Mary or a Prince Charlie could precipitate themselves round the stout
person of George IV.--Is it religion? Kirk and Covenant have doubtless
had their share in casting a mould of national character; but the Border
feuds were hottest among generations who seldom cared to question “for
gospel, what the Church believed.”--Is it name? Northerners and
Southerners were at strife long before they knew themselves as English
and Scots.
By a process of elimination one comes to see how _esprit de corps_ seems
most surely generated by the wont of standing shoulder to shoulder
against a common foe. Even the shifty baron, “Lucanus an Apulus anceps,”
whose feudal allegiance dovetailed into both kingdoms, that professional
warrior who “signed on,” now with the northern, now with the southern
team, might well grow keen on a side for which he had won a goal, and
bitter against the ex-comrades who by fair or foul play had come best
out of a hot scrimmage. Heartier would be the animosity of bonnet-lairds
and yeomen, between whom lifting of cattle and harrying of homes were
points in the game. Then even grooms and gillies, with nothing to lose,
dutifully fell into the way of fighting for their salt, when fighting
with somebody came almost as natural to men and boys as to collie dogs.
So the generations beat one another into neighbourly hatred and national
pride; till the Border clans half forgot their feuds in a larger
sentiment of patriotism; and what was once an adventurous exercise, rose
to be a fierce struggle for independence. The Borderers were the
“forwards” of this international sport, on whose fields and strongholds
became most hotly forged the differences in which they played the part
of
[Illustration: THE BASS ROCK, FIRTH OF FORTH, OFF THE COAST OF
HADDINGTONSHIRE]
hammer and of anvil by turns. Here, it is said, between neighbours of
the same blood, survive least faintly the national resentments that may
still flash up between drunken hinds at a fair. Hardly a nook here has
not been blackened and bloodstained, hardly a stream but has often run
red in centuries of waxing and waning strife whose fiery gleams are long
faded into pensive memories, and its ballad chronicles, that once
“stirred the heart like a trumpet,” can now be sung or said to general
applause of the most refined audiences, whether in London or Edinburgh.
The most famous ground of those historic encounters lies about the East
Coast Railway route, where England pushes an aggressive corner across
the Cheviots, and the Tweed, that most Scottish of rivers, forms the
frontier of the kingdoms now provoking each other to good works like its
Royal Border Bridge. Beyond it, indeed, stands Berwick-upon-Tweed, long
the football of either party, then put out of play as a neutral town,
and at last recognised as a quasi-outpost of England, whose parsons wear
the surplice, and whose chief magistrate is a mayor, while the townsfolk
are said to pride themselves on a parish patriotism that has gone the
length of calling Sandy and John Bull foreigners alike. This of course
is not, as London journalists sometimes conceive, the truly North
Berwick where a prime minister might be seen “driving” and “putting”
away the cares of state. That seaside resort is a mushroom beside
Berwick of the Merse, standing on its dignity of many sieges. The
Northumberland Artillery Militia now man the batteries on its
much-battered wall, turned to a picturesque walk; and the North British
and North Eastern Railways meet peacefully on the site of its castle,
where at one time Edward I. caged the Countess of Buchan like a wild
beast, for having dared to set the crown upon Bruce’s head. At another,
it was in the hands of Baliol to surrender to an Edward as pledge of his
subservience; and again, its precincts made the scene of a friendly
spearing match between English and Scottish knights, much courtesy and
fair-play being shown on both sides, even if over their cups a perfervid
Grahame bid his challenger “rise early in the morning, and make your
peace with God, for you shall sup in Paradise!” who indeed supped no
more on earth.
The North British Railway will carry us on near a stern coast-line to
Dunbar, whose castle Black Agnes, Countess of March, defended so
doughtily against Lord Salisbury, and here were delivered so signally
into Cromwell’s hands a later generation of Scots “left to themselves”
and to their fanatical chaplains; then over a land now swept by volleys
of golf balls, to Pinkie, the last great battlefield between the
kingdoms, where also, almost for the last time, the onrush of Highland
valour routed redcoat soldiery at Prestonpans. But tourists should do
what they do too seldom, tarry at Berwick to visit the tragic scenes
close at hand. In sight of the town is the slope of Halidon Hill, on
which the English took their _revanche_ for Bannockburn. Higher up the
Tweed, by the first Suspension Bridge in the kingdom, by “Norham’s
castled steep,” watch-tower of the passage, and by Ford Castle where the
siren Lady Ford is said to have ensnared James IV., that unlucky
“champion of the dames,” a half-day’s walk brings one to Flodden,
English ground indeed, but the grave of many a Scot. Never was
slaughter so much mourned and sung as that of the “Flowers of the
Forest,” cut down on these heights above the Tweed. The land watered
with “that red rain” is now ploughed and fenced; but still can be traced
the outlines of the scene about the arch of Twizel Bridge on which the
English crossed the Till, as every schoolboy knew in Macaulay’s day, if
our schoolboys seem to be better up in cricket averages than in the
great deeds of the past, unless prescribed for examinations.
Battles, like books, have their fates of fame. Flodden long made a sore
point in Scottish memory; yet, after all, it was a stunning rather than
a maiming defeat. A far more momentous battlefield on the Tweed, not far
off, was Carham, whose name hardly appears in school histories, though
it was the beginning of the Scotland of seven centuries to come. It
dates just before Macbeth, when Malcolm, king of a confused Scotia or
Pictia, sallied forth from behind the Forth, and with his ally, Prince
of Cumbria on the Clyde, decisively defeated the Northumbrians in 1018,
adding to his dominions the Saxon land between Forth and Tweed, a leaven
that would leaven the whole lump, as Mr. Lang aptly puts it. Thus
Malcolm’s kingdom came into touch with what was soon to become feudal
England, along the frontier that set to a hard and fast line, so long
and so doughtily defended after mediæval Scotland had welded on the
western Cumbria, as its cousin Cambria fell into the destinies of a
stronger realm. Had northern Northumberland gone to England, there would
have been no Royal Scotland, only a Grampian Wales echoing bardic boasts
of its Rob Roys and Roderick Dhus, whose claymores might have
splintered against Norman mail long before they came to be beaten down
by bayonets and police batons.
But we shall never get away from the Border if we stop to moralise on
all its scenes of strife--most of them well forgotten. Border fighting
was commonly on a small scale, with plunder rather than conquest or
glory for its aim; like the Arabs of to-day, those fierce but canny
neighbours were seldom in a spirit for needless slaughter, that would
entail fresh blood-feuds on their own kin. The Border fortresses were
many, but chiefly small, designed for sudden defence against an enemy
who might be trusted not to keep the field long. On the northern side
large castles were rare; and those that did rise, opposite the English
donjon keeps, were let fall by the Scots themselves, after their early
feudal kings had drawn back to Edinburgh. In the long struggle with a
richer nation, they soon learned to take the “earth-born castles” of
their hills as cheaper and not less serviceable strongholds.
The station for Flodden, a few miles off, is Coldstream, at that
“dangerous ford and deep” over which Marmion led the way for his train,
before and after his day passed by so many an army marching north or
south. The Bridge of Coldstream has tenderer memories, pointed out by
Mr. W. S. Crockett in his _Scott Country_. This carried one of the main
roads from England, and the inn on the Scottish side made a temple of
hasty Hymen, where for many a runaway couple were forged bonds like
those more notoriously associated with the blacksmith of Gretna Green.
Their marriage jaunts into the neighbour country were put a stop to only
half a century ago, when the
[Illustration: NEIDPATH CASTLE, PEEBLESSHIRE]
benefits of Scots law, such as they were, became restricted to its own
inhabitants. English novelists and jesters have made wild work with the
law, by which, as they misapprehend, a man can be wedded without meaning
it; one American story-teller is so little up-to-date as to marry his
eloping hero and heroine at Gretna in our time. The gist of the matter
is that while England favoured the masculine deceiver, fixing the
ceremony before noon, it is said, to make sure of the bridegroom’s
sobriety, the more chivalrous Scots law provided that any ceremony
should be held valid by which a man persuaded a woman that he was taking
her to wife. No ceremony indeed was needed, if the parties lived by
habit and repute as man and wife. The plot of Colonel Lockhart’s _Mine
is Thine_, one of the most amusing novels of our time, turns on a noted
case in which an entry in a family Bible was taken as a sufficient proof
of marriage. It is only gay Lotharios who might find this easy coupling
a fetter; though in the next generation, especially if it be careless to
treasure family Bibles, there may arise work for lawyers, a work of
charity when the average income of the Scottish Bar is perhaps five
pounds _Scots_ per annum.
Gretna Green, of course, lies on the western highroad from England,
beside which the Caledonian Railway route from Carlisle enters Scotland,
soon turning off into a part of it comparatively sheltered from invasion
by the Solway Firth, whose rapid ebb and flow make a type of many a
Gretna love story. This side too, has often rung with the passage of
armed men. At Burgh-on-Sands, in sight of the Scottish Border, died
Edward I., bidding his bones be wrapped in a bull’s hide and carried as
bugbear standard against those obstinate rebels. The rout of Solway
Moss made James V. turn his face to the wall, his heart breaking with
the cry, “It came with a lass and it will go with a lass!” And the Esk
of the Solway was seldom “swollen sae red and sae deep” as to daunt
hardy lads from the north who once and again
Swam ower to fell English ground,
And danced themselves dry to the pibroch’s sound.
These immigrants, unless they found six feet of English ground for a
grave, seldom failed to go “back again,” perhaps with an English host at
their heels. Prince Charlie’s army passed this way on its retreat from
Derby. But this side of the Borderland is less well illustrated by
stricken fields and sturdy sieges. It has, indeed, no lack of misty
romance of its own, such as an American writer dares to bring into the
light of common day by adding a sequel to Lady Heron’s ballad, in which
the fair Ellen is made to nurse a secret grudge at last confessed: she
could not get over, even on any plea of poetic license, that rash
assertion:
There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far
Who would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar!
“Fosters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves,” how they rode and they ran on those
hills and leas in days unkind to “a laggard in love and a dastard in
war”! These names belong to the English side, as does Grahame in part.
Elliot and Armstrong, Pringle and Rutherford, Ker and Home, Douglas,
Murray, and Scott, are Scottish Border clans, who kept much together as
in the Highlands. “Is there nae kind Christian wull gie me a night’s
lodging?” begged a tramp on the Borders, and had for rough answer, “Nae
Christians here; we’re a’ Hopes and Johnstones!” a jest transmuted
farther north into the terms of a black Mackintosh and red Macgregors.
The first name of fame passed on the Caledonian line is Ecclefechan,
birthplace of Thomas Carlyle, now a prophet even in his own country, but
it is recorded how a devout American pilgrim of earlier days found no
responsive warmth in the minds of old neighbours. “Tam Carlyle--ay,
there was Tam!” admitted an interrogated native. “He went tae London;
they tell me he writes books. But there’s his brither Jeems--he was the
mahn o’ that family. He drove mair pigs into Ecclefechan market than ony
ither farmer in the parish!” Tom had carried his pigs to a better than
any Dumfriesshire market. If we turned west by the Glasgow and
South-Western Railway, we should soon come among the shrines of Burns
and the monuments of Wallace. But let us rather take the central route,
on which flourishes a greener memory.
The “Waverley” route from Carlisle, a central one between those East and
West Coast lines, so distinguishes itself as passing through the cream
of the country associated with Sir Walter Scott, its first stage being
the wilds of Liddesdale, where he spent seven holiday seasons collecting
the Border Minstrelsy. This district, where “every field has its battle
and every rivulet its song,” can boast of many singers. From the days of
Thomas the Rhymer comes down its long succession of ballad-makers who
“saved others’ names but left their own unsung.” At Ednam was born James
Thomson, bard of _The Seasons_ and of “Rule, Britannia,” who surely
deserves a less prosaic monument than here recalls him. From Ednam, too,
came Henry Lyte, a name not so familiar, but how many millions know his
hymn “Abide with me”! Some of Horatius Bonar’s hymns were written during
his ministry at Kelso. About Denholm were the “Scenes of Infancy” of
John Leyden, poet and scholar, cut off untimely. Near his humble home,
now turned into a public library, is the lordly house of Minto, one of
whose daughters wrote the “Flowers of the Forest.” Thomas Pringle, the
South African poet, was born at Blakelaw, near Yetholm, the Border seat
of gipsy kings. Home, the author of _Douglas_, is said to have come from
Ancrum, which can more certainly claim Dr. William Buchan of _Domestic
Medicine_ renown. Riddell, author of “Scotland Yet,” began life as a
Teviot shepherd. If we may touch on living names, was not Mr. Andrew
Lang born among the “Soutars of Selkirk,” who has gone so far _ultra
crepidam_? But indeed a whole page might be filled with a bare catalogue
of the bards of Tweed and Teviot.
The _genius loci_, greatest of all, while born in Edinburgh, sprang from
a Border family of “Scotland’s gentler blood.” The cradle of his race
was in Upper Teviotdale, near Hawick, that thriving “Glasgow of the
Borders,” among whose busy mills the old Douglas Tower still stands as
an hotel, and rites older than Christian Scotland are cherished at its
time-honoured Common Riding. Not far off are Harden, home of Wat Scott
the reiver, and Branxholme, that after being repeatedly burned by the
English, bears an inscription of its rebuilding by a Sir
[Illustration: ABBOTSFORD, ROXBURGHSHIRE]
Walter Scott of Reformation times, whose namesake and descendant would
make its name known so widely. At Sandyknowe farm, between the Eden and
the Leader Water, he lived as a sickly child in his grandparents’
charge, and under the massive ruin of Smailholm Tower, drank in with
reviving health the inspiration of Border lore and romance--
Ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lover’s sleights, of ladies’ charms,
Of witches’ spells, of warriors’ arms;
Of patriot battles, won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold;
Of later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.
While stretch’d at length upon the floor,
Again I fought each combat o’er,
Pebbles and shells, in order laid,
The mimic ranks of war display’d;
And onward still the Scottish Lion bore,
And still the scatter’d Southron fled before.
Later on, the old folks being dead, his sanatorium quarters were shifted
to his aunt’s home at Kelso, where also an uncle bought a house,
inherited by the lucky poet. For a time he attended the Grammar School,
whose pupils had for playground the adjacent ruins of the Abbey, so
roughly handled in Border wars and by iconoclastic zealots. This boy had
other resources than play, who could forget his dinner in the charms of
Percy’s _Reliques_; and his lameness did not hinder him from roaming
over the beautiful country in which Tweed and Teviot meet. Their
confluence encloses the ruins of Roxburgh Castle, once a favourite royal
residence and strong Border fortress, before whose walls James II.,
trying to wrest it back from the English, was killed by the bursting of
one of those new-fangled “engines” that were to break down moated
castles, replaced by such sumptuous mansions as Floors, the modern
_château_ of the Duke of Roxburghe. Roxburgh town has disappeared more
completely than its castle, its name surviving in that of the
picturesque Border shire where, off and on, Scott spent much of his
youth, photographing on a sensitive mind the scenes he has made famous,
and getting to know the flesh-and-blood models of Meg Merrilies, Edie
Ochiltree, Old Mortality, Dandie Dinmont, Josiah Cargill, and other
“characters” that but for him might now be forgotten.
Kelso stands almost on the site of Roxburgh, but its place as county
town is taken by Jedburgh, guard of the “Middle March,” farther to the
south, yet not so near the crooked border line. It stands upon a
tributary of the Teviot, among “Eden scenes of crystal Jed,” flowing
down from the Cheviots. Tourists do not know what they miss by grudging
time to divagate on the branches connecting the two main lines of the
North British Railway. Jedburgh, birthplace of scientific celebrities,
Sir David Brewster and Mrs. Somerville, has another grand Abbey, that
suffered much from early English tourists; and its jail occupies the
site of a vanished royal castle. In this old seat of “Jeddart justice,”
Scott began his career at the Bar, by the defence of such a poacher and
sheep-stealer as his own forebears had been on a bolder scale. Here a
few years later, he met Wordsworth in the house recently marked by a
memorial tablet; and other dwellings are pointed out as having housed
Queen Mary and Prince Charlie, while Burns has left a warm record of his
visit, so many of Scotland’s idols has Jedburgh known, and may well
reproach the hasty travellers who pass it by.
The young advocate did not waste much of his genius on defending
sheep-stealers and the like; but in those halcyon days of patronage,
through the influence of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, he soon got
the snug berth of Sheriff of Selkirk. This brought him to live at
Ashestiel on the Tweed, where he spent his happiest days, writing his
best poems, and beginning _Waverley_, to be laid by and forgotten for
years. Selkirk, too, has the misfortune of lying off the main line; but
strangers would do well to turn aside here for the wild pastoral scenes
of St. Mary’s Loch and the “Dowie Dens of Yarrow.” Too many, like
Wordsworth, put off this trip to rheumatic years; yet it may be easily
done by the coach routes from Selkirk and from Moffat on the Caledonian
line, that meet at Tibbie Shiels’ Inn, whose visitors’ book enshrines
such a collection of autographs; and its homely fame scorns the
pretensions of the new “hotel.” This is the heart of Ettrick Forest,
where stands a monument of its shepherd, James Hogg, unfairly
caricatured as the genial buffoon of the _Noctes_, but second only to
Burns as a popular poet, and best known over the English-speaking world
by his “Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless.” All the
schooling he had was a few months in early childhood; he taught himself
to write on slate stones of the hillside where he herded cows, and this
art he had to relearn when he first tried to sing of green Ettrick--
In many a rustic lay,
Her heroes, hills, and verdant groves;
Her wilds and valleys fresh and gay,
Her shepherds’ and her maidens’ loves.
The North British junction for Selkirk is at Galashiels, another
thriving woollen town, whose mills may not have improved the physique of
the “braw lads of Gala Water.” Before reaching this, the main line,
holding up the Tweed where it is looked down upon by a colossal statue
of Wallace, passes two more of David I.’s quartet of Abbeys, so that the
tourist has no excuse for not visiting Dryburgh and Melrose. Melrose,
indeed, is a tourist shrine, that owns a somewhat sheltered climate,
with natural charms enough to fill its adjacent Hydropathic and the
hotels about the Abbey and the Cross, nucleus of a group of Tweedside
hamlets, to which warm red stone, sometimes filched from the ruins,
gives a snug and cheerful aspect; then the nakedness of the slopes, held
by Scott a beauty, though he laboured to clothe it with plantations,
hides nooks like that Rhymer’s Glen, where True Thomas was spirited away
by the Fairy Queen, and that Fairy Dean in which the White Lady of
Avenel appeared to Halbert Glendinning. Above rise the triple Eildon
Hills, in whose caverns Arthur and his knights lie sleeping, and from
the top, as our Last Minstrel boasted, can be seen more than forty spots
famed in history or song.
Of Melrose Abbey, the finest remains of Scottish ecclesiastical
architecture in its golden age, and of its
[Illustration: MELROSE, ROXBURGHSHIRE]
illustrious tombs, let the guide-books speak, and the romance that deals
with this neighbourhood of “Kennaquhair,” an _alias_ plagiarised by
Carlyle in his _Weissnichtwo_. Visiting it “by pale moonlight” or
otherwise, few will not turn three miles up the river to that other
showplace, Abbotsford, the Delilah of his imagination that bound Scott
in withs of care and set him to toiling for Philistines. The baronial
mansion, now overlooked by outlying villas of Galashiels, was all his
own creation, and most of the trees were planted by himself, in the
absorbing process that began with buying a hundred ill-famed acres, and
ended with such unfortunate success in making, as he said, “a silk purse
out of a sow’s ear.” When one thinks what it cost him, this exhibition
of artificial feudalism has its painful side; yet another Sir Walter, a
romancer of our own generation, declares that it “would make an oyster
enthusiastic.” But more moving is the pilgrimage from Melrose down the
Tweed to where, in St. Mary’s Aisle of Dryburgh Abbey, the most
beautiful fragment of a noble fane, among the tombs of his kin lies at
rest Scotland’s most illustrious son, he who best displayed the warp and
woof that makes the chequered pattern of his country’s nature.
When will Cockney revilers learn that Scotland is not all thrift,
caution, and kailyard prose, but a nation showing two main strains,
which Mr. John Morley suggests as the explanation of Gladstone’s complex
character? One component may be hard, practical, frugal, in politics
tending to democracy, in religion to logic; but this has been crossed by
a spirit, better bred in the romantic Highlands, that is generous,
proud, quick-tempered, reckless, reverent towards the past, rather than
eager for progress. The painter of Scottish life must recognise how
Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu are countrymen with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and
Andrew Fairservice, how Flora MacIvor is not less a Scotswoman than
Mause Headrigg or Jenny Dennison, and how the Jacobite and the
Presbyterian enthusiasm smacked of the same soil. If one shut one’s eye
to half the case, it would be easy to make out that rash impetuosity
flourished beyond the Tweed rather than the thistly prudence taken for a
more congenial crop.
Scott comprehended both of these elements. By birth and training he
belonged to the Saxon, by sympathy to the Celt. If his father was a
douce Edinburgh “writer,” one of his forebears had been that “Beardie”
who bound himself never to shave till the Stuarts came back to their
own. Brought up under the dry light of the Revolution Settlement, in his
reminiscences of childhood he transforms a worthy parish minister into a
“Venerable Priest,” and in later life he came to be himself little
better than an Episcopalian. It may be owned he had no more religion
than became a Cavalier; even the romance of superstition did not take
much hold on him, and that rhyming “White Lady” has not even a ghostly
life on his page. His favourite heroes are the like of Montrose and
Claverhouse, yet he can do justice to the stern virtues of the
Covenanters. In the sober historian mood he duly warns his grandchild
how life was galled and fettered in the good old days, which he was too
willing to see _couleur de rose_ when their picturesque incidents
offered themselves to the romancer. He turns a blind eye, perhaps, too
much on the faults of knights and princes, yet he knows the worth of
ploughmen and fisherfolk, and into Halbert Glendinning’s and Henry
Morton’s mouths he puts sentiments to which John Bright or Cobden might
say amen. He is happiest, indeed, in the past, when “the wrath of our
ancestors was coloured _gules_,” whereas we have learned, like Mr.
Trulliber’s wife, to be Christians and take the law of our enemies. His
appetite for imaginary bloodshed is a sore offence to writers like Mark
Twain, who appear less scandalised that a pork-baron, a corn-lord, or a
cotton-king should plot to be rich by starving children on the other
side of the world. But Scott’s very failings reflect the character of
his countrymen, who, Highland and Lowland, have been mighty fighters
before the Lord on a much wider field than from Berwick to John o’
Groat’s House. The pity is that this imaginative writer, who knew all
characters better than his own, should have fancied himself a shrewd man
of business, a part for which he was too generous and trustful. Of his
personal merits, the most marked is that in a class of sedentary
craftsmen notoriously apt to be irritable, bilious, jealous, and
vainglorious, Walter Scott stands out by hearty, wholesome, human
qualities which present him as the type of a Scottish gentleman.
Whatever record leap to light,
He never shall be shamed!
To have done with the “Scott Country,” we should hold on westward up the
Tweed to where its sources almost mingle with those of the Clyde, below
the bold mass of Tinto and other hills that might claim a less modest
title. This route would bring us by the renowned inn of Clovenfords,
“howff” of Christopher North and many another choice spirit, by
Ashestiel, then by Innerleithen, set up as a spa through its claim to
represent St. Ronan’s; and so to Peebles, a haunt of pleasure since the
days when James I. wrote of “Peeblis to the play.” For some reason or
other, Peebles and Paisley have become butts of Gotham banter, their
very names attracting the sly jests by which Scotsmen love to make fun
of themselves. But neither of them is a town to be sneezed at. Peebles,
for its part, after falling into a rather sleepy state, has been wakened
up in our time through the Tontine “hottle,” that so much excited Meg
Dods’ scorn; the huge Hydropathic that has introduced German bath
practice into Scotland; and the Institution bestowed on the town by
William Chambers, who hence set out to turn the proverbial half-crown
into a goodly fortune. Was it not at this Institution that the local
Mutual Improvement Society gravely debated the question, “_Shall_ the
material Universe be destroyed?” and decided, by a majority of one, in
the negative! When Sir Cresswell Cresswell, from his peculiar bench,
laid down the dictum that marriages between May and December often
turned out ill, it must have been a Paisley statistician who wrote to
him for the data on which he founded his assertion that “marriages
contracted in the latter part of the year, etc.” But Paisley has its
manufacturing prosperity to fling in the teeth of calumny; and Peebles
has romantic as well as comic associations, notably its Neidpath Castle
and its Manor Water Glen, haunted by memories of the Black Dwarf.
The leisurely tourist might gain Edinburgh by a
[Illustration: SCOTT’S FAVOURITE VIEW FROM BEMERSIDE HILL,
ROXBURGHSHIRE]
branch line through Peebles, and this route can be recommended to the
hippogriffs of cycles and motors. Beyond the Catrail, ancient barrier of
the Picts or the Britons of Strathclyde, our main railroad, as its way
is, keeps on straight up the course of the Gala, leaving to its right
the dreary Lammermoors; then between the Castles of Borthwick and
Crichton, it enters on the more prosaic Lothian country. To the left is
seen the Pentland ridge, and straight ahead springs up the cone of
Arthur’s Seat beaconing us to Edinburgh, goal of the race for which a
Caledonian express will be speeding along the farther side of the
Pentlands.
And not a kilt have we seen yet, since leaving London! Of this more
anon; kilts are not at home on the Borders, though I have seen one on
the Welsh Marches, worn in conjunction with a pith helmet by a retired
Liverpool tradesman. Since “gloves of steel” and “helmets barred” went
out of fashion on Tweedside, the local colour has been that modest
shepherd’s plaid displayed in Lord Brougham’s trousers to the ribaldry
of _Punch_, and even that goes out of homely wear. You may buy Scott and
Douglas tartans in the shops, but they seem vain things, fondly
invented, as indeed are some of the patterns now seen in the Highlands.
But there will be a good show of kilts in Edinburgh Castle, where once
they were like to be bestowed in the dungeon:--
Wae worth the loons that made the laws
To hang a man for gear--
To reave o’ life for sic a cause
As _lifting_ horse or mare!
And here our North British express, panting through the fat Lothians,
comes to slacken under the castellated walls of that gaol which tourists
are apt to take for the Castle--no true kilts to be looked for there
nowadays, yet perhaps at the Police Court under the head of drunk and
disorderly! So let us leave the Borderland behind with a quotation from
an American writer (_Penelope in Scotland_) who knows what’s what, and
who at first sight fairly loses her heart to Edinburgh, _haars_, east
winds, and all, that are its thorns in the flesh. “I hope,” she very
sensibly says, “that those in authority will never attempt to convene a
Peace Congress in Edinburgh, lest the influence of the Castle be too
strong for the delegates. They could not resist it nor turn their backs
upon it, since, unlike other ancient fortresses, it is but a
stone’s-throw from the front windows of all the hotels. They might mean
never so well, but they would end by buying dirk hat-pins and claymore
brooches for their wives; their daughters would all run after the kilted
regiment and marry as many of the pipers as asked them, and before night
they would all be shouting with the noble Fitz-Eustace,
Where’s the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?”