The greatest as well as

“The last of all the Bards was he

Who sung of Border chivalry”.

The pull of the blood has in this instance proved more potent than that

of birth and early environment; although Walter Scott was from his

childhood, at Sandyknowe and Kelso, familiar with Border scenes, as well

as steeped in Border lore. At a later stage in his growth, lame as he

was, with Shortreed and other congenial companions he tramped the glens

and climbed the hills and hill-passes of Tweedside, gathering and

storing as he went its history and romance for the delight of future

generations,

“Giving each rock its storied tale,

Pouring a lay for every dale,

Knitting, as with a moral band,

His native legends with his land,

To lend each scene the interest high

Which Genius beams from Beauty’s eye.”

But while he knew by heart the whole Borderland, and had explored its

chief river from where

“Tweed, Annan, and Clyde

A’ rise in ae hill-side”,

to where it enters the sea, under the time- and war-battered walls of

the ancient town of Berwick, there were parts of the Tweed and its

tributaries that he knew better than others. There is, in the eyes of

Scott devotees, an Inner Circle, a “Holy of Holies”, of the Scott

Country, and, fortunately for the pilgrim to these shrines, its centre

lies where the main lines of road and rail, like those of

river-drainage, converge around the meeting-place of Ettrick, Gala, and

Leader with Tweed—under the shadow of the Eildon Hills and beside those

two “miraculous” products of the hand and brain of man—Melrose Abbey and

Abbotsford House. The creative art, in prose and verse, of the Great

Magician was not often exercised on the chief stream higher up than

Neidpath and Manor, or, at farthest, “Merlin’s Grave”, beside

Drummelzier and under Tinnis. Nor did his genius much frequent the lower

courses of Tweed, below Kelso Bridge and Wark Castle, and the inflow of

the “sullen Till”, although here also are many scenes of beauty and

pages of story that might well have set his imagination afire. It seems

more at home, also, in the valleys of the Teviot, the Ettrick, and the

Yarrow than on the Leader, the Gala, and other northern affluents of the

Tweed. Accident and propinquity may have helped to determine his choice

of scene and theme; but old associations and affinities may have done

still more. The nearer the Border line of the Cheviots, the thicker are

footprints of the clan and national frays of old—of battles and

skirmishes in which Scott’s own ancestry took more than their share; and

the deeper and richer the soil of tradition in which he delighted to

delve. To the Teviot, the Borthwick, and the Ettrick—to Branxholm and

Harden, Rankleburn and Newark—he was drawn by the call of the blood of

his father’s race; an equal tie bound him to the Jed, the old home of

his mother’s kin, the “hot and hardy Rutherfords”; while Yarrow, the

heart of his Forest Sheriffdom, is also the core of its ballad poetry.

It has to be remembered, also, that the period of Scott’s greatest

literary output was also the period of failing physical powers, and that

journeys through his beloved Borderland had to be more and more

circumscribed to beaten paths of easy access.

It was by Kelso Bridge, beside where the wand of the Wizard Michael

Scott “bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone”, that, in the fresh

morning of youth, the spell of the great Border river first fell on

Walter Scott. His kinsfolk lived in the neighbourhood; and several of

them are buried in the Abbey Aisle. His great-grandfather and namesake,

the Jacobite “Beardie” who had fought at Killiecrankie, had occupied a

house in the Coalmarket; his kindly Aunt Janet resided in what is now

called Waverley Lodge; his uncle, Captain Robert Scott, a lover and

collecter of books, had his home at Rosebank, which he bequeathed to Sir

Walter, who—“his poverty not his will consenting”—sold this house of

many memories, along with “thirty acres of the most fertile land in

Scotland”.

Only a few miles away, beside the stark and far-seen old keep of

Smailholm, was the farm of Sandyknowe, leased from Scott of Harden by

his grandfather Robert Scott, to which, between the ages of three and

eleven, the little boy from Edinburgh came annually for holidays.

Everyone remembers the lines that record the impression made on his

youthful mind by his “barren scene and wild”—by the tall, grey,

weather-beaten tower looking down from its rock upon the lone lochan,

and out and away over many scenes of Border romance to “the distant

Cheviots blue”; and of the legends of foray and strife that were told in

the boy’s wondering ears by the “aged hind”, and that took shape

afterwards in “The Eve of St. John” and other tales of the Master.

What more natural than that young Walter, “become rather delicate from

overgrowth” and threatened with permanent lameness, should be sent,

while twelve or thirteen years of age, to his Kelso relatives for

change, outdoor freedom, and recruitment? He went to the Grammar School

as pupil, and even for a time as usher, under the Rector, Lancelot

Whale, from whom are drawn some of the traits of “Dominie Sampson”. He

delighted his master by his recitation of the “Speech of Galgacus”, and

beguiled his school companions from their lessons by his tales of old

romance. He read, in the arbour of his aunt’s old-fashioned garden, or

under the ancient elm that still survives, Bishop Percy’s _Reliques_,

the identical copy of which is in Kelso Library. Among his fellow-pupils

were the Ballantynes, James and John, a fateful conjunction, for out of

a hint dropped in a talk with the elder of these old schoolmates grew

the _Scottish Border Minstrelsy_—the first two volumes of which were the

earliest issued from the Kelso “Ballantyne Press”, in 1802—and much else

of note in Scott’s career and fortunes. A biographer may well say that

it was “here he began to gather up his intellectual gains and make his

friendly conquests”. Kelso gave bent and direction to his genius.

Like Smailholm, Kelso was “meet nurse for a poetic child”, for here join

two “superb rivers”—Tweed and Teviot—each bringing down, from a hundred

sources, its treasure of ancient story. As we have said, the beauty and

romance of Tweedside do not begin in this neighbourhood. They are the

endowment of the main stream from its tap-root to the sea.

Berwick-upon-Tweed, for centuries a cause of contention between the

Kingdoms, was at one time regarded as separate and apart from

each—“England, Scotland, and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed”. Since the

fifteenth century, however, it has territorially belonged to England,

although situated on the north bank of the river. Its Edwardian and

Elizabethan walls—the former recently placed, along with the venerable

Bell Tower, the symbol of Berwick Liberties, under the protection of the

Board of Works as a national relic and for preservation against the

attacks of vandalism—enfold a sheaf of history. Few places have been the

scenes of more furious sieges and merciless captures. Its bridge of

fifteen arches, built before the Civil Wars and upheld for centuries

from State funds, connects the town with Tweedmouth and Spittal to the

south, although it is of small account, as a bond of union and means of

traffic, compared with its upstream neighbour, the Royal Border Bridge,

which carries the railway lines between England and Scotland.

[Illustration: SMAILHOLM TOWER]

A mile or two higher up, but still into tide-water, flows in the

Whitadder, which with its tributary, the Blackadder, comes out of the

recesses of the Lammermoors to drain the fertile Merse, passing on its

way many scenes that must have tempted Sir Walter to make its valley the

stage of one of his romances. His fancy may have played with the idea.

But beyond an occasional allusion, or the dispatch of one or two of his

characters through it, in hot haste for some other arena of action, he

never specifically annexed this heritage of the Humes and earlier Lords

of Dunbar and Merse to the “Scott Country”, though some have attempted

to identify Cranshaws Castle or Wedderlie with Ravenswood. Wedderburn

recalls the “Seven Spears”. Polwarth and Marchmont, Ninewells and

Nisbet, Kimmerghame and Langton, Edrington and Hutton, Chirnside and

Bunkle, Duns and Greenlaw, are names steeped in the spirit of Border

poetry as well as noted in local and national annals. The valleys in

which lie Abbey St. Bathans, on the Whitadder, Priestlaw, on the Faseny,

and Longformacus, on the Dye, seem to beckon for an interpreter of their

almost forgotten stories; while that of the mysterious “Edinhall”, on

Cockburn Law, the largest and most southerly of Scottish “brochs”, is

wholly lost. At Ellemford, James IV was brought to a halt, in the futile

“Raid of Ellem”; and his descendant Charles I came to a turning-point in

his fortunes when he was faced by the Covenanting Host, encamped on Duns

Law. From Haliburton, hard by the “Blackadder Rings”, Scott derived one

line of his descent. Yet this region of the Merse serves at most only as

a background in his Border Romance.

Higher up the main stream, beyond Paxton, and Horncliffe, and Horndean,

one comes to Ladykirk, whose fine old sixteenth-century church is said

to have been founded and dedicated to the Virgin in gratitude for an

escape from drowning in the Tweed. Behind it is Swinton, the home of an

ancient and knightly family from which Sir Walter was descended, on his

mother’s side. Over against it are the “castled steep” and “flanking

walls” of Norham, the guardian of England and of the heritage of the

Prince-Bishops of Durham, to the siege of which “Mons Meg” has travelled

in her day—the scene, too, of quarrels and of conferences, at one of

which Edward I decided between the rival claims of the “Competitors” for

the Crown of Scotland.

At Tillmouth and Twizell Castle, where the Till brings down waters—Glen

and Bowmount, Breamish and College—drawn from both skirts of Cheviot,

one is close to ground yet more closely bound to the tragedy of the

Kingdoms and to the genius of Scott, for near here is Ford Castle, where

the Scottish King is supposed to have dallied too long with Lady Heron;

the bridge across which he allowed the English van to cross and attack

him on flank; and the hill-slope of Flodden, down which, in 1513,

“From his mountain home

King James did rushing come”—

to meet disaster half-way, and to fall in the midst of the flower of his

nobles and of his kingdom.

At Coldstream, Longshanks crossed the Tweed on the fatal enterprise of

invading and subduing Scotland; Leslie, on his way to join Cromwell at

Marston Moor, and Monk on the march to proclaim Charles II in London.

Wark Castle, in which, according to tradition, the Order of the Garter

was instituted—with Carham beside it, where, at a much more distant

date, a generation before Macbeth, Malcolm II, King of Scots, won a

victory that brought the boundary of his realm in permanence to the

Tweed—stands within easy reach of Kelso. So also, on the opposite or

Scottish bank, does Birgham, the soil on which William the Lion and the

Scots prelates disowned the supremacy of the English Church, and where

was signed the Treaty for that projected marriage of the heirs of the

two Kingdoms—Prince Edward and the Maid of Norway—which, but for evil

chance, might have united them without the intervention of three

centuries of desolating war.

But it is at Kelso Bridge, below the meeting of Tweed and Teviot, that

we come fully within the circle of the Magician’s charm—where every

stream and wood and glen seems to take light and colour from the

imagination of Walter Scott. The scene has been admired and praised by a

host of poets and travellers before and since his time. Burns looked

down upon it from different points of view and owned himself

“enchanted”. It has been extolled by, among others, James Thomson, of

the _Seasons_, who was born at Ednam Manse on the Eden Water, only two

or three miles away, and by Thomas Pringle, Scott’s fellow-pupil at

Kelso and the first editor of _Blackwood_, who sang, from the South

African veld, of “Bonnie Teviotdale and Teviot’s mountains blue”. The

parent river makes a wide sweep, and, with its bold wooded banks, seems

to embrace and protect the houses of the little market town, in the

midst of which rise the ruined western towers and a fragment of the nave

of the renowned Tyronesian Abbey. The place, standing so perilously near

the English border, was guarded on the south and on the north by two

great strongholds. Of Roxburgh or Marchmont Castle, on the narrow ridge

between Tweed and Teviot, only a few walls, rising a few yards above the

sod, remain. Its history would fill a volume. But one remembers chiefly

that James II of Scots—he of the “Fiery Face”—was killed by the

explosion of a cannon, while directing attack upon it from the farther

bank of the Tweed, leaving the country, as was so often its fortune

under the Stewart Dynasty, to the hazards of a long minority. On the

town of Roxburgh—which once, as one of the “Four Burghs”, was a leader

in the path of municipal and commercial progress—a more sweeping fate

has descended; not a stone has been left above another on a site upon

which for long was held “St. James’s Lammas Fair”.

[Illustration: ROXBURGH CASTLE]

Hume Castle, Kelso’s other bulwark—or, if it happened to be in the hands

of an enemy, its thorn in the flesh—stands on high ground to the north,

where its square-set form, now reduced to a shell, can be seen from all

parts of the ground that lies between the Lammermoor and Cheviot. But

the town had strength within itself in its great Norman Abbey Church,

built for purposes of war as well as of prayer. It was founded by that

zealous abbey- and cathedral-rearer, David I, the son of Canmore and of

Saint Margaret; and its head, as a mitred abbot who acknowledged only

the jurisdiction of the Holy See, held a position that gave him a

precedence, much envied and much resented, over the superiors of the

neighbouring religious houses of Jedburgh, Dryburgh, and Melrose. It was

endowed with rich benefices and wide territories, but its wealth and

glory all vanished in the storms of the Reformation, or, more ruthless

still, of the English invasions and the Civil Wars.

A large part of the Abbey heritage has passed to the Kers, of the ducal

house of Roxburghe, whose stately seat, Floors Castle, planned by

Vanbrugh and completed by Playfair, commands from its terraces one of

the widest and loveliest views upon Tweed. Of the Kers of Cessford, who

had feuds with the rival branch of the Kerrs of Ferniehirst, as well as

with the Scotts and other neighbours, it has been said that they had a

genius for fighting on the winning side: “When the power of the

Douglases on the Border began to crumble, they became Crown vassals, and

their fortunes mounted rapidly. They won new lands, and held, and still

hold, the old. They kept a hawk’s eye on the wild tracts of moor and

pasture and peat bog, where even in the old days of foray there was, as

Dandie Dinmont said, ‘mair stabling for horses than change-houses for

men’, and where now all is utterly abandoned to the curlew and the

sheep. But they moved their household gods, and extended their bounds,

from the Bowmont to the Kale, from the Kale to the Teviot, and finally

from the Teviot to the Tweed.” Their ruined castle of Cessford stands in

a lonely place, on a slope overhanging a little side-glen of the Kale

Water, some eight miles from Floors. The roof is gone, and all about is

bare and deserted. A few sapling ashes grow in the crannies of the

stone, but time has riven the thick walls which Surrey, in 1523, found

so hard to breach, and has thrown down the grand old Crow Tree that

stood so long beside Habbie Ker’s stronghold. Long before this the

family had flitted to a warmer nest, and had feathered it with the

spoils of Old Roxburgh Castle and of Kelso Abbey.

Scarcely less than Melrose and Abbotsford are Kelso and Floors the

centre of a sanctuary of Border romance; and over the scene the forms of

Hume Castle and Smailholm Tower seem to keep sentry-watch and to “shift

places mysteriously, like the triple heads of the weird Eildons, as if

they were pacing guard upon the hilltops”. In the setting of the picture

revealed from these vantage-grounds are—along with places already

noted—the hanging woods of Stichell and Newtondon; Nenthorn, Hendersyde,

Mellerstain, Makerstoun; beyond Teviot, the rich woodlands of

Springwood, Woodendean, and Sunlaws; the darker pine trees around the

hunting seat of Bowmont Forest; the folds in which lie the “Gypsy

capital” of Kirk Yetholm, the ancient Kirk of Linton, Eckford of the

Douglases and Crailing of the Cranstons; the hills of Hounam and

Morebattle; and, behind all, the soft blue line, rising high in Great

Cheviot and sinking away towards the west, of the chain that divides the

kingdoms, with peeps here and there of Haddon Rig, and Ruberslaw, and

Dunion, and Minto Crags, and Penielheugh, crowned by its Waterloo

monument, with other scarce less famous Border heights.

While, above the junction, the ascending valley of the Tweed holds its

way westwards, so that the water-sheds of its northern tributaries are

in common with those of streams flowing to the Forth and the Clyde,

Teviotdale keeps throughout a line that is parallel with the Marches of

the Kingdoms, from which its main channel is nowhere more than a dozen

miles away as the crow flies. It follows that there is more of hazard,

and with this more of romance, crowded into its annals than perhaps into

those of any other area of like extent. It is sprinkled over with

battlefields and with peel towers, most of them now in ruin; every dale

has been the scene of a fray, and every burn has a song or ballad tacked

to its name. These Middle and West Marches were a centre of power and

action, first of the House of Douglas, and then of the “Bauld

Buccleuch”. The “Good Sir James of Douglas” kept the peace of this

troubled frontier for the Bruce; his son, the “Knight of Liddesdale”,

expelled the English from Teviotdale, and was killed while hunting in

Ettrick Forest; his grandson, the first of the Douglas Earls, also

chased out the invaders and brought back spoils from the English side;

his great-grandson, the second Earl, captured Percy’s pennon at

Newcastle, and was slain at Otterburn, while riding home by the road of

Redesdale and the Carter Bar with his prey; while it is of a later

descendant, “Earl Tineman”, captured at Shrewsbury by a later Hotspur,

that the canny saying is quoted in _The Fortunes of Nigel_: “Poortith

(poverty) takes away pith, and the man sits full still who has a rent in

his breeks”.

[Illustration: BRANXHOLM TOWER]

A Scott of Buccleuch accompanied James V when he hanged Johnnie

Armstrong of Gilnockie and all his company at Carlenrig near Teviothead;

and the “rank reiver’s” reproach, given in one version of the ballad,

was not without edge:

“Now haud your tongue, Sir Walter Scott,

Nor speak o’ reif and felonie;

If ilka man had his ain coo,

A richt poor clan your name would be.”

It was from Branxholm, on the Teviot above Hawick, that another Scott of

the name—generation after generation were Walters—rode forth to rescue

“Kinmont Willie” from prison in Carlisle. The Minstrel’s tale, in the

_Lay_, opens at and returns again and again to Branxholm Ha’; it was at

the Tower Inn, at Hawick, where the Duchess Anne of Buccleuch and

Monmouth held her receptions, and that the greatest of all the Sir

Walters parted from his guests the Wordsworths.

It is a land dedicated to the achievements of Douglases and Scotts, but

that resounds also with the deeds of Elliots and Armstrongs, and of

minor and broken clans, Turnbulls and Rutherfords, Cranstouns and

Olivers. It has its rich endowment of beauty as well as of history.

Around the keep of Branxholm, which from the deep bank overhanging the

stream has often defied its enemies, have gathered buildings of more

recent date and a screen of ancient trees. Below it is the Tower of

Goldilands, where a marauding Scott was hanged at his own gate, and here

comes in from the left the Borthwick Water. As Leyden has it:

“Where Bortha hoarse, that loads the meads with sand,

Rolls her red tide to Teviot’s western strand,

Through slaty hills, whose sides are shagged with thorn,

And springs in scattered tufts the dark-green corn,

Towers wood-girt Harden, far above the vale”—

Harden, the cradle of the branch of the Scotts from which the author of

the _Lay_ was descended; the “mountain home”, hidden in its narrow glen,

to which the “Flower of Yarrow” was brought by “Auld Wat”—“a wide

domain, and rich, had purple heath been grain”.

At the town of Hawick, Teviot meets Slitrig, coming from the wild bounds

of Liddisdale. All roads in Teviotdale seem to lead to Hawick, the

capital of its trade as well as a centre of its history. Proud as its

citizens are of the leading position of the burgh in the tweed and

hosiery manufacture of the South of Scotland, and of the undiminished

importance of its great lamb and sheep fairs, they are prouder still of

the prowess of its sons in the dark days that followed Flodden, and in

other scenes of Border strife. Scott was familiar with its story, as

with the streets and with the steep hills that surround this stirring

little metropolis of industrial and pastoral life; and allusion has

already been made to the literary and legendary memories attached to the

site of the Tower in which the Douglases of Drumlanrig entertained their

guests and protected their rights. From the parish church of St. Mary,

since often rebuilt, the heroic Ramsay of Dalhousie was carried away by

the Knight of Liddisdale, to be immured and to suffer a lingering death

in the Douglas hold of Hermitage—

“Did ever knight so foul a deed?”

An older memorial of the past of Hawick is the Motehill, on which

justice was dispensed, and an outlook kept for enemies, in times beyond

the range even of tradition. The great “Hawick Tradition” of the capture

of the standard of the English marauders at Hornshole is kept green by

the annual ceremony of the “Common Riding”, when Hawick is to be seen in

its gayest and most jubilant mood. The words and tune of its slogan of

“Teribus ye Teriodin” are supposed to have descended to it from heathen

times, and to have originally been an invocation to the gods of the

early Saxons and Norsemen—Thor and Odin. The defiant spirit of these

warriors of old seems still to ring in the chaunt sung by the Cornet and

his men as they ride round the marches in the beginning of June:

“Teribus ye Teriodin,

Sons of heroes slain at Flodden,

Imitating Border Bowmen,

Aye defend your rights and Common.”

A few miles up the Slitrig is Stobs Castle, an ancient seat of the

Elliots, which became a military centre during the Great European War;

and there are many other places of note and fame on the once hazardous

way, now followed by the railway, that leads across the hills to the

head-streams of the Liddel and thence to those of the North Tyne, or to

the “Debatable Land”, the Solway, and Carlisle. Another crowd of warlike

memories and of pastoral and woodland charms awaits those who, from

Hawick, or from the old Douglas seat of Cavers, lower down Teviotdale,

explore the Hobkirk valley, or pass over the skirts of Ruberslaw into

Rule Water—to Bonchester and to Hobkirk, where Thomson planned his

_Seasons_, and to Southdean, where the poet spent his early years, and

to the Carter Bar and the Border.

A few miles below Hawick, past Hornshole and past Denholm, the

birthplace of John Leyden—the poet, the Oriental scholar, the friend of

Scott, whose “brief and bright career” closed too soon in the Malay

East—below “dark Ruberslaw” and the Dunion, which interposes its

round-backed form between the “mining Rule” and the “crystal Jed”, and

more directly under the Minto Crags and the Chesters moors, lies one of

the loveliest bits on Teviot. Haughs and dells, green hills and wide

sweeps of river spread around the fragments of Fatlips Castle, whose

owner, a Turnbull, dwelt

“Mid cliffs from whence his eagle eye

Full many a league his prey could spy”;

and around Minto House, the home, since the Union, of the Elliots, a

race great in law and in war, in song and in statecraft, with whom,

through their descent from “Gibbie with the Gowden Garters”, a daughter

of Harden, Sir Walter could “count kin”. Jed Water and Ale Water come in

from south and north, farther down, and here, too, every foot is famous.

The “Minstrel” sings of scenes, on the track of William of Deloraine,

“good at need”, among them

“Ancient Riddel’s fair domain,

Where Aill, from mountains freed,

Down from the lakes did raving come;

Each wave was crested with tawny foam,

Like the mane of a chestnut steed”.

The inflow of this turbulent stream is below the fine old

tree-surrounded Ancrum House. It is overshadowed by Penielheugh and by

the ridge of Lilliard’s Edge, across which the main road from Carlisle,

that has followed the course of the Teviot almost from its source, toils

painfully over to the valley of the Tweed. On a day in 1545, Ancrum Moor

“Ran red with English blood,

Where the Douglas true and the bold Buccleuch

’Gainst keen Lord Evers stood”—

a victory to which, according to traditions, “fair Maid Lilliard”

contributed manfully, until, like a hero of “Chevy Chase”, she “fought

upon her stumps”.

Jed Water is still more charged with the history and legends of the

past. Much of it, including Jedburgh Abbey, is the patrimony of the

branch of the Kerrs represented by the Marquis of Lothian, whose modern

seat, Mount Teviot, lies opposite Jedfoot, while the ancient home of the

family, Ferniehirst, begins to run to decay. It would take many pages to

do justice—even “Jeddart justice”—to Jedburgh, whose townsfolk, armed

with their “Jeddart staves” and to their slogan of “Jeddart’s Here!”

were in the front of the Border Wars. Its Abbey, founded by David the

Saint, who placed here Augustinian canons from Beauvais early in the

twelfth century, is still, in spite of having been seven times burned,

the stateliest and the best preserved of the mediæval religious houses

of the Scott Country. The site of the Royal Castle, where in the “Golden

Age” of the Borders Alexander III held court after his second marriage,

has disappeared under public buildings; but the house in the Backgate is

pointed out where Mary Queen of Scots lay sick to death after her

perilous ride to Hermitage, as well as the lodging in the Castlegate

occupied by Prince Charlie on his march into England.

His road lay over a shoulder of Carter Fell into Redesdale, where runs

what is still the only way across the hills for wheeled traffic in the

sixty miles between Wooler, on the Till, and Riccarton, on the Liddel,

although the Romans built over the Cheviots paved roads, one of which

descended into the head of Kale Water, and, from the site of the old

Border Trysts at Pennymuir, ran straight as a ruled line to the camp of

Newstead, under Eildon. From end to end these hills are deserted, except

by the shepherd and the sportsman. Along the “wild and willowed shore”

of Teviot and of Jed, the “glaring balefires blaze no more”. The race of

the mosstroopers—of “John o’ the Side” and “Christie’s Will”, the

“Laird’s Jock” and “Hobbie Noble”—is long extinct. But there are still

to be found fine products of the soil, of the type of the stalwart

tenant of Charlieshope. The Border spirit may have run into

manufactures, and pastoral and arable farming, and Kirk and State

contentions, but anyone who fancies it is dead should attend a “Common

Riding”, or an otter or fox-hunt, or a game of curling or of hand- or

foot-ball in these parts; or a meeting or parting of Hawick “Teeries” or

of “Jedburgh callants”. He will doubt no more.

Dryburgh Abbey is less than ten miles distant from Jedburgh, in a

straight line. But there are marked features distinguishing it from its

Teviotdale neighbour as well as from the Abbeys standing below and above

it on Tweedside—Kelso and Melrose. It was planted in its corner of

Berwickshire by baronial and not by kingly beneficence, its founder

being the great Hugh de Morville, in David’s time Constable of Scotland

and Lord of Lauderdale, whose tomb is near the site of the high altar.

It was smaller in size and less richly endowed than the other three, but

is not less generously invested with historic and legendary interest.

Its fate and condition are not dissimilar, for like the others it was

many times burned and ravaged in the Border wars, and was afterwards

abandoned for centuries to neglect and decay. These Tweedside monastic

houses have now fallen upon happier times; for, apart from the reverence

they have gathered from the past, and not least from their association

with Sir Walter Scott, they have lately become national possessions,

through the generosity of the Duke of Roxburghe at Kelso, of the Duke of

Buccleuch at Melrose, and of Lord Glenconner at Dryburgh. The

Præmonstratensian Abbey on the bend of the Tweed under Bemerside Hill

differs from its rivals in respect that it has preserved more of the

monastic buildings and less of the church. Of Dryburgh Abbey

Church—apart from the north transept, of which more has to be

said—little is left beyond the gables of the south transept and of the

west front, the latter pierced by a five-light window, surmounting some

ruined walls, and the foundations of piers. But the chapter house—St.

Modan’s chapel—is extant, and its vaulted roof covers interesting

architectural and archæological details, while of the cloisters,

sacristy, fratery, and other domestic buildings of the “White Friars” of

Dryburgh there are considerable remains, clad in ivy and overhung by

immemorial yews and other trees. Enough survives to indicate a structure

of much grace and beauty, showing a great range of styles from

Romanesque to Later Pointed, and built of a local reddish sandstone

which, as at Melrose, has weathered into a rich and harmonious variety

of colour.

[Illustration: DRYBURGH ABBEY: THE TOMB OF SIR WALTER SCOTT]

It is, however, in its situation and in its happy blending with its

immediate surroundings that Dryburgh is chiefly distinguished from its

compeers. It is secluded from the world, on the margin of the wide

stream; hidden among woods and overlooked by hills. To reach it you have

to circumvent rivers and climb up and down steep braes. The easiest way

of approach is by crossing Lessudden Bridge, from the south bank of the

Tweed above the tower of Littledean. This was the road followed by the

“bold Baron” of Smailholm, whose tower and Beacon Hill, and the standing

stones on the moor of Brotherstone, look down from the eastern and

northern skyline on the scene

“Over Tweed’s fair flood, and Mertoun’s wood,

And all down Teviotdale”.

By Mertoun’s wood, the screen of Dryburgh from gales blowing from the

sea, and now the property of Lord Polwarth, a Scott of the Harden blood,

the way winds to the Abbey precincts, overshadowed by the great trees

that surround Dryburgh House. Naturally the feet first seek the tomb of

Sir Walter in St. Mary’s Aisle. The story of how the best beloved of the

sons of the Border came to be laid under this fragment of the north

transept and choir—a well-preserved piece of elegant First Pointed

work—is itself a romance. His grandmother on the father’s side, Barbara

Haliburton, was the daughter of a Merse laird, who was owner of part of

the lands of Dryburgh, including the Abbey ruins. She became his

inheritor; but before then Robert Haliburton had lost his lands through

unwise speculation. David Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan—brother of

Lord Chancellor Erskine and of Harry Erskine, the brilliant wit and

pleader—who has left the impress of his eccentric mind on the colossal

statue of Wallace which stands, “frowning towards England”, above his

suspension bridge for foot passengers crossing the Tweed from St.

Boswells, became possessor of the ground; and, through Lady Scott,

obtained a promise from the author of _Waverley_ that he should be

buried in this kindred earth. Lady Scott died in 1826, and Buchan in

1829, while Sir Walter himself was not laid here until 26th September,

1832. In his fragment of “Autobiography”, Scott records how he had come

to his own again in this twice-hallowed spot; and, with a touch of

prophecy as well as pathos, he wrote: “And thus we have nothing left of

Dryburgh, although my father’s maternal inheritance, but the right of

stretching our bones where mine may perhaps be laid ere any eye but my

own glances over these pages.” Nowhere—not even in Melrose—could the

Wizard rest more tranquilly than in this scene where nature and art, the

present and the past, and life and death seem to be brought into perfect

accord.

The funeral cortège, coming from Abbotsford, crossed the Tweed and

Leader at Leaderfoot, and climbing, past Gladswood, by a road with which

Scott was familiar, halted where he had often halted, and where

multitudes have halted since, at a bold and sharp elbow of the path,

raised three hundred feet above the river, whence an unrivalled view can

be had into the heart of the Scott Country. Immediately below, across

the stream, on a peninsula of land washed on three sides by the Tweed,

is Old Melrose, a spot which had gathered sanctity many centuries before

the mediæval abbeys rose in the valley. Here a mission station of the

Christian faith was planted from distant Iona; and hence, probably,

travelled Aidan to convert heathen Northumbria and to found Lindisfarne

and Hexham; here dwelt, as first abbot, his companion Eata, and also

Boisel, who gave his name to St. Boswell’s opposite, and to whom came

for instruction Cuthbert, a shepherd lad who had been reared at

Wrangham, near Brotherstone, and had tended his flock and seen visions

in the Lammermoors. From “Mailros”, the bald promontory—its very name

attests the tongue in which the Celtic founders spoke—St. Cuthbert’s

body in its stone coffin floated downstream on its many wanderings by

water and land; and, as related by Bede, the hermit Drithelm was wont in

winter to break the ice on the river, and, standing up to the neck in

the water, recite his prayers. Although it was abandoned before the

“Sair Saint” brought to the neighbourhood and to Scotland the first

monks of the Cistercian Order, some of the prestige of Old Melrose must

have clung to the name and been transferred to the Religious House on

the new site, the ruddy walls of which can be descried, sheltering at

the foot of the Eildons, across the fields on which, long before the

coming of the Columban missionaries, the Romans planted the

expeditionary camp and permanent station of Trimontium, that have only

lately yielded their secrets to the spade.

This Bemerside Hill is a “Mount of Vision” from which all the chief

shrines and high places of the Scott Country can be surveyed, at least

with the mind’s eye. Abbotsford itself, if not in actual view, can be

mapped into the scene by direction and position. Out of sight, directly

under the brow of the hill, is the ancient square fortalice, with later

buildings attached, and grounds stretching down towards the Tweed, where

Haigs have been resident for seven centuries. They were benefactors of

Melrose when Alexander III was king, and when Thomas the Rhymer was

their neighbour and wellwisher, and uttered the prophecy that has so

mightily helped its own fulfilment:

[Illustration: BEMERSYDE HOUSE]

“Betyde, betyde, whate’er betyde,

Haig shall be Haig of Bemersyde.”

Sir Walter Scott was a later friend of the family, and was often a guest

in the beautiful rose-garden below the mansion. A grateful nation

bestowed the house and manor on the late Field-Marshal Earl Haig, who

now lies at rest close by Sir Walter at Dryburgh. The whole scene and

surroundings seem to be touched by the spirit of prophecy and of poetry.

On the hills opposite stood the “Eildon Tree” and the “Eildon Stone”;

and beyond these, on Abbotsford property, the reputed “Rhymer’s Glen”,

where “True Thomas” encountered the Queen of Faëry, although the tryst

may well have been at Huntlywood, behind Brotherstone, on the Eden

Water, and near Corsbie Tower, the ruined “Castle of Avenel”. As has

been said, Drithelm and Cuthbert were visionaries, so were Boisel, the

second Abbot of the old, and Waldave, the first Abbot of the new

foundation; and centuries before the time of the Seer of Ercildoune they

dreamed dreams and saw things not of this world and far into the future.

According to popular belief, of like gifts was “Auld Michael”, whose

words “cleft Eildon Hills in three”. The last and the greatest of these

“Wizard Scotts” is he who sleeps with his fathers in St. Mary’s Aisle.

When descent is made into the valley of the Leader, one is still in the

land of enchantment. The ivy-covered “Rhymer’s Tower” is a few miles up

the glen, and on the way, under the Black Hill of Earlston, are

Drygrange and the “Broom o’ the Cowdenknowes”. Near by, at Mellerstain,

lived and sang Grizel Baillie, who was Grizel Hume; and in the Kirk of

Legerwood is the monument of that other Grizel, who, in the dress of a

highwayman, saved her father’s life by holding up the King’s officer

carrying the writ for his execution. Higher up Leader are Carolside,

and, in a side glen, Auld Thirlstane, the seat of “Auld Maitland”, and

Spottiswoode, the home of Alicia Spottiswoode—Lady John Scott—writer and

composer of “Bonnie Annie Laurie” and other thrilling Scots lyrics. The

new Thirlstane—it is hundreds of years old—is in the centre of

Lauderdale, beside the venerable Royal Burgh of Lauder, the last of the

municipalities in the land to retain its old burghal rights and customs.

Many are the hill-forts and camps that look down on the now peaceful

scenes through which the road—a favourite tourist coach route—passes on

its way from the crossing of the Lammermoors to the Tweed; and among

them are Channelkirk where Cuthbert heard the summons of the Heavenly

Host, and Edgarshope, by which the message of fire that told of the

crossing of the border by the English bands, was wont to be passed on to

Soutra Edge, near by the Hospice of the Red Friars, to which, and not to

Faeryland, Thomas retired from the world, when he followed the

mysterious Hart and Hind up Leaderside.

Not less richly furnished with the relics of eld and with the charms of

modern cultivation is the parallel vale of the Gala, the nursery of the

“Braw Lads”. The “Shirra” often traversed it on his way by Midleton Moor

to his home and sphere of jurisdiction on Ettrick and Tweed, upon which

the stream, road, and railway debouch a little below the mill lades and

chimney stalks of the town of Galashiels, and almost opposite to

Abbotsford. On the links and bends of the Gala, and its side glens of

the Heriot, the Armit, and the Luggate, are many places of historic

note—Crookston, of the Borthwicks, for example; Stow—the “Stowe of

Wedale”, of Arthurian and mediæval fame; Bowland, like Eildon Hall, on

the farther side of the Eildons, a possession of the House of Buccleuch;

the ruined “broch” on the Bow Hill, facing, across the valley, a similar

structure which, with the termination of that ancient and mysterious

line of earthworks, the “Catrail”, occupies the crown of Torwoodlee, of

the Pringles; finally, Buckholm Hill and Tower, looking over the roofs

of the busy seat of tweed manufactures to Gala Hill and Gala House of

the Scotts. “Gala Water, Buckholm, Torwoodlee”, were among the last

audible words murmured by the dying “Border Minstrel”.

Between “Leader howms” and Gala Water runs the little stream of the

Allan or Alwyne through the “Fairy Dean”. Lovers of Scott will not pass

it by, because, apart from the loveliness of its succession of

wood-embowered haughs, it leads to a spot where three ruined peel

towers—Hillslap, Colmslie, and Langshaw—stand not many bowshots apart,

memorials of the time when the smaller lairds had to bind themselves

together by a “bond of manrent”, for protection against their more

powerful neighbours; and the first of these has been identified, with

some sanction from Scott himself, as the “Glendearg” of the Glendinnings

in _The Monastery_ and _The Abbot_. Near the bridge which crosses the

Tweed at the “Pavilion of Alwyn”, and the “groves of noble Somerville”,

was the scene of the misadventure of Philip, the Sacristan, at the hands

of the spirits, and of Mysie Happer, the daughter of the miller of the

Halidome. The dairy farm of the “monks of St. Mary’s” was on Allan

Water; up it led the “girth-gait” which they often followed on the way

to Soutra Hospice. True Thomas’s rhymed sayings cling to this

countryside like—in Father Philip’s phrase—“burrs to a beggar’s rags”.

The region between Leaderfoot and Galashiels was part of the original

patrimony of the Cistercian Abbey; all the way, but especially where

Gattonside, set on its hillside and surrounded by its famous orchards,

“beiks in the sun”, one sees, in glimpses or in full view,

[Illustration: MELROSE ABBEY: CHOIR AND NORTH TRANSEPT]

“Where fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose

And Eildon slopes to the plain”.

In drawing near to Melrose, especially if one crosses at Leaderfoot, and

approaches by the village of Newstead and over the site of the Roman

camp, one feels there is something to be said for Dorothy Wordsworth’s

disappointment on coming first into near view of the Abbey. It stands

back from the river—perhaps because the river has left it—and apart from

the hills. It is in the fields outside of the village, the streets of

which come to its gate and stop there; and it is surrounded by walls,

which interrupt and deform proportions seriously injured by the loss of

its central tower. Melrose—“the light of the land, the abode of saints,

the grave of monarchs”—is a glorious fragment, more beautiful, perhaps,

in detail than in general effect, in ornament than in design; and

memorable even more for its legendary and literary associations than for

its actual history. The monastery dates from the same abbey-building

reign as its rivals on Tweedside; but architecturally the church belongs

to another horizon. Of the original Norman fabric that stood on the site

scarcely a trace remains. It was swept away during the descent upon it

of Edward II in 1322, and what remained must have perished under the

equally destructive assault of Richard II in 1385. Between these two

dates, a building arose, represented by the eastern end of the nave with

its flying buttresses and by adjoining parts of the choir and transepts,

that may be regarded as a monument of the piety and the gratitude of

Robert the Bruce, whose heart, brought back from the Paynim lands to

which the “good Sir James” of Douglas had carried it, is buried in the

Abbey. The work of rebuilding was continued for nearly a couple of

centuries longer; and it is evident that the highest art and

craftsmanship the age could produce were employed in construction and in

ornament, which, owing to the fineness of grain of the red sandstone

employed, remains in wonderful preservation. It is doubtful whether it

was completed before the tempests of the Tudor invasions and of the

Reformation fell upon it, and the monks were put to flight. It has not

been definitely ascertained how far the long nave extended to the

westward, or what was the plan of the monastic buildings, of which and

of the cloister only a few fragments are left on the northern side of

the church. The presbytery, with its much extolled “east oriel” window,

was probably among the later additions, and is one of the finest

examples of Perpendicular Gothic extant. Scott would have us view it

when the moon is shining “through slender shafts of shapely stone, by

foliaged tracery combined”, and to imagine that

“Some fairy’s hand

’Twixt poplars straight the ozier wand,

In many a freakish knot, had twined”.

But even more wonderful and beautiful to many eyes is the great

Decorated window of the south transept that lightens the aisle in which,

as is fabled, the Wizard Michael sleeps with his magic books beside him.

Familiar are the lines in which Sir Walter, a constant pilgrim to this

shrine, chants its praises—of its cloister garth:

“Nor herb, nor floweret, glistened there,

But was carved in the cloister-arches fair”;

of the vaulted roof, where

“The key-stone that locked each ribbéd aisle

Was a fleur-de-lys or a quatrefeuille”;

and of the pillars, with their clustered shafts, that

“With base and with capital flourished around

Seem’d bundles of lances which garlands had bound”.

It must have been a labour of love to frame this marvellously carved

casket, in which are laid the ashes of kings and prelates. Here rest the

chiefs of the once mighty House of Douglas, and, not far away, of the

English Warden who desecrated their tombs and was overtaken and slain at

Ancrum Moor; among minor clans “Ye race of ye House of Zair”—Kerrs and

Pringles; and, later in date but of the same stubborn and trusty Border

stuff, Tom Purdie, the reclaimed poacher and faithful watchdog and

factotum of the Laird of Abbotsford. The prayer of John Morvo, inscribed

on the wall of the south transept,

“I pray to God and Marie baith

And sweet St. John keep this haly Kirk frae skaith”,

has not been fulfilled. To other bludgeonings of fate was added its

conversion into the parish church in the seventeenth century. Walter

Scott helped to rescue it from vandalism and neglect; and he continues

to be the guardian spirit of the “dark Abbaye”.

Not less than in the days of the monks is the adjacent town of

Melrose—“Kennaquair” the residence of the antiquarian Captain Cuthbert

Clutterbuck—an appanage of the Abbey, out of which indeed it has partly

been built. One looks in vain for the “Druid Oak”, which existed only in

Scott’s fancy. But Melrose has its market cross and market place, and

does a modest business with the country round. Its chief source of

prosperity, however, is in its situation and its associations; it may be

called the capital of the “Scott Country”. Abbotsford is little more

than a couple of miles away. The road to it passes Darnick Tower, a red

keep festooned with greenery, the stronghold of one of the lay vassals

of the Abbey; and skirts, in the grounds of the Hydropathic

Establishment, the “skirmish field” on which was fought in 1526 the fray

between the Scotts and the Kerrs of the Douglas faction that gave rise

to a long feud between the clans. Scott, it may be noted, speaks of the

scene, when

“Cessford’s heart-blood dear

Reeked on dark Elliot’s Border spear”,

as if it had taken place beside the ruined Kerr stronghold of Holydean,

on the southern side of the hills beyond Huntly-burn and the “Rhymer’s

Glen”, and thus near to the pretty village of Bowden, which sits under

the lowest of the three Eildons, and looks down into the valley of the

Ale and towards Cavers Carre and Lilliesleaf.

The fields and woods sloping down from Bowden Moor and Cauldshields

Loch, on the left of the way from Melrose to Abbotsford, are part of the

possessions which Sir Walter gathered together between 1811, when he had

to give up Ashestiel, and 1824; and they still belong to his

descendants. The nucleus of the property was the little farm of Cartley,

or Clarty, Hole, on the Tweed a little above the inflow of the Gala. It

lay almost opposite to the site of the plum trees that, according to a

story of Border foray much cherished in Galashiels, gave to that town

the burghal arms and the slogan tune of “Soor Plooms”, the favourite

bagpipe air of Scott’s Kelso uncle. On the strength of a tradition that

there was here a crossing-place of the monks, Abbotsford got its new and

ever memorable name. A modest cottage, which forms part of the west

wing, gradually grew with the growth of the owner’s fame and fortunes,

until, at the end of fourteen years, by addition and reconstruction,

mainly all of Sir Walter’s own devising, it had become the stately

baronial mansion, adorned with turrets, corbels, and crowsteps, that

challenges the eye by its form and size as well as by its history. Into

it the author of the _Waverley Novels_ may be said to have built his

fancies, his aspirations, and his ambitions; and here he counted on

spending the evening of his days in well-earned rest, surrounded by his

children and his friends, and by the love and admiration of his fellow

countrymen. Hardly had this “poem in stone and lime” been brought to

completion when an untimely frost blasted his hopes, and with unimpaired

courage, but with gradually failing strength, he turned to a task,

greater than any that ever fell to his namesake the “michty Michael”,

and worked unremittingly, with hand and brain, for another seven years’

term until he came back for the last time to Abbotsford, a spent and

broken man, to die. Sadder far his return than his departure a year

before in quest of health, when

“A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,

Nor of the setting sun’s pathetic light

Engendered, hung o’er Eildon’s triple height”.

It brought the last touch of tragedy and of heroism to the closing scene

of that noble life—to the passing of the marvellous power, the warm and

generous heart, the gallant spirit that was Walter Scott. He enjoyed,

however, many happy days in Abbotsford; it is associated more with his

triumphs than with his misfortunes. Here he trod his fields, delighted

“to call this wooded patch of earth his own”, entertained literary

celebrities like Washington Irving, Maria Edgeworth, and the

Wordsworths, held almost feudal receptions of his retainers and

neighbours, talked and walked with his familiars—Lockhart, Skene,

Cranstoun, the “beloved Erskine”—and with his “ain folk”, and planned

and wrote his novels. Tweed sings a blither as well as a fuller strain

since he dwelt by it.

Into the house, he built material more substantial than his hopes. Scott

had the antiquarian temper and taste; and like Burns’s Grose, and his

own Oldbuck, he gathered about him “a routh o’ auld nicknackets”, many

of them the free-will offering of admirers. In this way the door of the

old Edinburgh Tolbooth—the “Heart of Midlothian”—came into his

possession, along with the ponderous lock and key over which “Daddie

Ratton” had held charge. Sculptured and inscribed stones from the High

Street and Canongate houses have also found their way here; while within

the house has been collected a museum of Border antiquities, along with

portraits, and personal souvenirs and relics, gathered from all corners

of the land. The house has been left “very much as in Sir Walter’s

time”; and a constant stream of pilgrims visits it. In the library are

relics of Napoleon, of Prince Charlie and Flora Macdonald, of Nelson and

Wellington; in the drawing-room, among other famous pictures, is

Raeburn’s portrait of Scott; in the armoury, memorials of Rob Roy,

Montrose, Claverhouse, and Archbishop Sharpe, and the keys of Loch Leven

Castle, while on the walls are blazoned the escutcheons of “ye Clannis

and men of name quha keepit ye Scottish Marches in the days of auld”.

But more impressive than any of these things are the chair in which

Scott sat to write or dictate and the pen that in his hand was as a

magician’s rod.

The way from Abbotsford to Selkirk, by the valleys of the Tweed and

Ettrick, past Fawdonside and Lindean, was a familiar one to the

“Shirra”. He had legal and other county business that carried him often

during a third of a century to the head town of his Forest Sheriffdom;

and inclination went hand in hand with duty, for the road led to Ettrick

and Yarrow, to “Sweet Bowhill” and to

“The shattered front of Newark’s towers

Renowned in Border story”.

[Illustration: ABBOTSFORD]

Selkirk—the old “church of the shielings”, which, in the days when David

I and his successors hunted in the forest of Ettrick, served the royal

sportsmen for their orisons—narrowly missed being the seat of an Abbey.

A colony of Tyronesian monks were settled in it more than eight

centuries ago, but were removed, “for convenience”, to Kelso. The

“Souters of Selkirk” have since given themselves to war, to shoemaking,

and latterly to tweed manufacture. But the town has not neglected

poetry, and bards of later date have been born and have sung in it,

since Burns and Scott drew the “birse” across their lips. It is set well

above the vale of the Ettrick, at the gate of the Haining policies; and

its public buildings are gathered around the triangular market-place, in

which stands a statue of Sir Walter in his sheriff’s robes. In the Free

Library is hung the Flodden Standard brought home by the survivors of

that day of disaster, when “the Flowers o’ the Forest were a’ wede

awa’”.

In 1645 Montrose was resting, with his cavalry, in Selkirk, his infantry

encamped at Philiphaugh, on the other side of Ettrick, when David Lesley

crept up on him from Melrose, in the mist of a September morning. In two

or three hours the fruits of nine brilliant victories were lost, and the

great captain was a fugitive speeding across Minchmoor to Traquair,

where, the door being shut on him, he passed on to Clydesdale and the

Highlands. There have been many romantic crossings of Minchmoor, and

meetings and partings at “Wallace’s Trench”—part of the old Catrail or

Picts’ Dyke—and at the Cheese Well. Walter Scott accompanied his friend

Mungo Park—whose statue stands near his own in the streets of

Selkirk—when Park was starting on his African journey. They separated on

the ridge above Williamhope, where, as has already been told, Sir

William Douglas, the “Flower of Chivalry”, was slain by his cousin the

Earl of Douglas, in revenge, it is said, for the most unchivalrous deed

of the starving to death, in Hermitage Castle, of Sir Alexander de

Ramsay. Across this high moor between Yarrow and Tweed came James V,

with five belted earls, to the meeting with the “Outlaw Murray”, lord of

Hangingshaws, and Newark, and Philiphaugh and other lands on Yarrow. The

king’s message ran—

“Bid him meet me at Permanscore,[1]

And bring four in his companie;

Five earls sall come wi’ mysel,

Good reason I suld honoured be”.

Permanscore is a hollow of the hill, “where wind and water shears”, and

here, three hundred years after the “Outlaw’s” time, the “Shirra”

assembled and conducted “a perambulation of the marches” in a case of

disputed boundaries.

Carterhaugh—the meadow on which faithful Janet met “Young Tamlane”, and,

by holding him through all his grisly transformations, rescued him from

Fairy-land—lies in the fork between Ettrick and Yarrow. Behind it is

Bowhill, at the time when the _Lay_ was written the favourite seat of

the Buccleuch family; and the “Duchess’s Walk”, along the right bank of

the Yarrow, is named from the lady who suggested to Scott the “Goblin

Page” as an episode of the _Lay_. It leads to where

“Newark’s stately tower

Looks out from Yarrow’s birchen bower”,

and to the “embattled portal arch”

“Whose ponderous grate and massy bar

Had oft rolled back the tide of war”.

Within the deserted walls, the widowed Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth

is pictured as listening to the tale of the Last Minstrel. Local

tradition has it that in the courtyard the Irish prisoners who

surrendered at Philiphaugh were massacred; another story asserts that

they were slaughtered on “Slainmenslee”. Newark was a royal hunting-seat

in the fifteenth century; and its possession carried with it the

Hereditary Sheriffdom of the Forest, which with many things else in this

country came to the House of Buccleuch.

Over against Newark is Foulshiels, the birthplace of Mungo Park.

Broadmeadows and Lewinhope and Tinnis are higher up the stream, which

here runs between steep wooded hills, cloven by narrow side glens and

with spaces of rich haughland on its margin. Yarrow burrows under banks

of birch and hazel, or overshadowed by fine forest trees. The vale is

“strewn with the sites of the tragedies of far-off years, forgotten by

history, but remembered in song and tradition”; it is “the very

sanctuary of romantic ballad-love. Its clear current sings a mournful

song of the ‘good heart’s bluid’ that once stained its wave; of the

drowned youth caught in the ‘cleaving o’ the craig’. The winds that

sweep the hillsides and bend ‘the birks a’ bowing’ whisper still of the

wail of the ‘winsome marrow’, and have an undernote of sadness on the

brightest day of summer; while with the fall of the red and yellow leaf

the very spirit of ‘pastoral melancholy’ broods and sleeps in the

enchanted valley. Always, by Yarrow, the comely youth goes forth only to

fall by the sword, fighting against odds in the Dowie Dens, or to be

caught and drowned in the treacherous pools of this fateful river;

always the woman is left to weep over her lost and lealful lord.” No

strict identification of ballad sites and origins is possible; but the

story of the “Dowie Dens” has become associated with Tinnis bank and

with Deucharswire, beside Yarrow Kirk; and is said to be founded on the

slaughter in 1616 of Walter Scott of Oakwood by the kin of John Scott of

Tushielaw, with whose daughter, Grizel, Oakwood had contracted an

irregular marriage.

[Illustration: TRAQUAIR]

A group of authentic memories gather around Yarrow Kirk and Manse, and

the bridge which carries a crossroad over the hills to Ettrick. A

succession of cultured pastors have dwelt here, including Dr. Rutherford

the grandfather of Scott, two generations of Russells, and the late Dr.

Borland. By an unfortunate fire, in the spring of 1922, the restored

church was destroyed, together with the memorials placed in it of Sir

Walter, of Willie Laidlaw, his friend and amanuensis, of Wordsworth, and

of the Ettrick Shepherd, all of them residents or visitors on Yarrow and

worshippers in this secluded fane. In a field close by is a stone carved

in rude Latin minuscules to the “Sons of Liberalis, of the Dumnogeni”, a

relic of post-Roman times. Above Yarrow Kirk, the valley widens until it

becomes spacious enough to hold the clear mirror of St. Mary’s Loch; the

hills become bare and green and smooth, and over the ridge on the right

comes the road from the Tweed by Paddyslack and Mountbenger to the

Gordon Arms. It was from this road that Wordsworth, in good company,

caught his first, and his last, glimpse of Yarrow—

“When first descending from the moorlands

I saw the stream of Yarrow glide

Along a bare and open valley,

The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.

When last along its banks I wandered,

Through groves that had begun to shed

Their golden leaves upon the pathway,

My steps the Border Minstrel led.”

Hogg farmed, unsuccessfully, Mountbenger, before he removed across

Yarrow to Altrieve, where he spent the last year of his life and where

he died. In his youth he had herded sheep on Blackhouse heights, where

looking down on the ruined peel on the Douglas burn are the stones that

mark the place where the “seven bauld brethren” fell, in their pursuit

of “Lord William and Lady Margaret”. The escaping lovers lighted down at

this “wan water”.

“‘Hold up, hold up, Lord William,’ she said,

‘For I fear that ye are slain.’

‘’Tis naething but the shadow of my scarlet cloak

That shines in the water so plain.’”

But it was his “heart’s bluid”, and the pair were buried together in St.

Mary’s Church, whose deserted graveyard is set on a shelf of Hendersyde

Hill, overlooking the loch, and fronting the dome of Bowerhope Hill.

On the banks of a burn which flows into Yarrow a little below where it

issues from the loch is Dryhope Tower. “Auld Watt” of Harden came to it

to bear away Mary Scott, the “Flower of Yarrow”, and part of the

provision for their housekeeping was the spoils of the “first

harvest-moon”. Half-way along the shore of St. Mary’s, at Cappercleuch,

pours in the Meggat Water, a stream that drains some of the highest

ground in the Southern Uplands. It was a favourite royal hunting-forest

in 1529, when James V came this way intent on the extirpation of the

Border thieves; and fate threw in his path Cockburn of Henderland, whose

tower was near Meggatfoot. The hollow and waterfall of the “Dowglen” are

shown where his lady sought shelter, while “they broke her bower and

slew her knight”; the spot, with names inscribed, can be seen in a

little clump of wood beside the ruined peel to which she bore him on her

back and dug his grave:—

“And thinkna ye my heart was sair

When I laid the mools on his yellow hair;

And thinkna ye my heart was wae

When I turned aside awa to gae”.

Unfortunately for tradition, the fact is on record that Cockburn of

Henderland, like his neighbour Scott of Tushielaw, was tried and

executed at Edinburgh. James Hogg would have made small ado about

brushing such obstructions out of the way of romance. His statue stands

at the head of St. Mary’s Loch—the presiding genius of the scene. The

road up Yarrow, passing through the woods of Rodono, holds out beyond

it, by the Loch of the Lowes and Chapelhope to Birkhill, and then, under

the “Grey Mare’s Tail” and White Coombe, down Moffatdale. But the seated

figure of the burly Shepherd, wrapped in his plaid, faces “Tibbie

Shiels”, the rendezvous of generations of thirsty fishers and poets, on

the narrow space between the lochs, and looks towards the hills up which

the crossroad climbs steeply, making for Ettrick. It was at this famous

hostelry that Hogg gave his classical order, after a hard night’s

drinking with Christopher North and other congenial company, “Tibbie,

bring in the Loch!” “He taught the wandering winds to sing”, reads the

inscription on his monument; and the strong song of the winds that blow

down Ettrick accompanies the traveller as he climbs over by the

Packman’s Grave, descends to Tushielaw and, turning upstream at

Crosslee, follows the valley to the Shepherd’s birthplace and grave,

beside Ettrick Kirk. This out-of-the-world nook in the hills—for the

road up Ettrickdale comes to an end a few miles higher, under Ettrick

Pen—may be reckoned the heart of pastoral Scotland. The thoughts and the

talk of the inhabitants are absorbed in sheep—except what may be

reserved for sport, and “auld farrant tales”, and church affairs. Around

the Shepherd rest many of his own kin and kind: farmers and herds,

lairds and tenants, reivers, smugglers, and gypsies—and in this strange

mixed company, “Boston of Ettrick”, of the “Fourfold State”, the great

preacher and Covenanting divine.

The Castle of Thirlstane, on Ettrick, stands a little below the kirk,

with a fragment of Gamescleuch Tower facing it on the opposite bank.

Thirlstane belonged to the “Ready, aye Ready” Scotts, until it went by

marriage to its present possessors the Napiers. Tushielaw was another

hold of the clan, and here dwelt Adam Scott—“King of the Thieves”, and

“King of the Borders”—the father of Mary, the “Forest Flower” of the

“Queen’s Wake”—until his rival from Holyrood came and “justified” him,

says legend, on the Doom Tree at his own door.

Across the water from Tushielaw “Rankleburn’s lonely side” leads far

into the hills. Rankleburn is the traditional first home of the Scotts

in the basin of the Tweed, although Kirkurd in the Lyne valley might put

in an earlier claim. They are even said to have drawn their name and

their chief title from this deserted glen, high up which lies Buccleuch,

now marked only by the foundations of a chapel wall. Scott of Satchells,

who wrote the family story in halting rhyme, in 1686, tells how a

wandering Scott from Galloway, in the remote days of Kenneth II, seized

a hunted buck by the horns, swung it on his shoulders and brought it to

the king:—

“And for the buck thou stoutly brought

To us up that steep heugh,

Thy designation ever shall

Be John Scott of Buck’s cleuch”.

Neither at Gilmanscleuch, nor on the Deloraine burn, nor at the Dodhead

have the men of the type of Jamie Telfer, who, “steady of heart and

stout of hand, once drove their prey from Cumberland”, left any trace of

themselves in standing walls. A reminiscence of old forest times

survives in such names as Hindhope and Hartwoodmyres; the shell of an

ancient peel guards, at Kirkhope, the “Swire Road” across the “Witchie

Knowe” from Yarrow to Ettrick Bridgend; and Oakwood has something more

substantial to show in the shape of the red keep which local legend

insists was built by the redoubtable Sir Michael Scott himself, although

its foundations must have been laid centuries after his date. Enough for

us that it was in the keeping of “Auld Watt” of Harden.

“Wide lay his lands round Oakwood Tower

And wide round haunted Castle Ower.”

At Oakwood we are back again beside Selkirk, and at Selkirk we are near

where, each skirting the grounds of Sunderland Hall, Tweed and Ettrick

meet, and where we can resume our course up the larger stream. With the

delightful section of the Tweed between The Rink and Elibank, Walter

Scott had many close ties. The right bank, and part of the left, were

within his jurisdiction as Sheriff, in which office he succeeded his

friend, Andrew Plummer of Sunderland Hall, in 1799. But even earlier he

made familiar acquaintance with the district, on angling and walking

excursions, and had visited the Russells and “Laird Nippy”, at

Ashestiel. The Rutherfords of Fairnilee—the old house in which was born

Alison Rutherford, the author of the popular version of “The Flowers of

the Forest”, stands roofless and deserted, but a new mansion has risen

in its neighbourhood—were of his kin. He was a welcome guest also with

the Pringles of Yair, whose home, bound about by the woods and hills, is

across the river, with the “sister heights of Yair”, otherwise known as

the “Three Brethren”, as background. It may be remembered that it was

with a son of “the long-descended lord of Yair”, Alexander Pringle of

Clovenfords, that in later days he went over the field of Waterloo.

Clovenfords was the nearest point of his Sheriffdom to town, and it was

convenient for him to take up occasional residence there. Leyden had

been schoolmaster in the village, which stands high above the rocky den

of the Caddon, on the Peebles and Galashiels road, a mile from the

“bonny bit” of Caddonfoot. While raising grapes and other fruit it

piously preserves the memory of the author of _Marmion_ in the form of

an effigy set up before the door of the inn, where, besides Scott,

William and Dorothy Wordsworth and other famous travellers have

sojourned.

[Illustration: ASHESTIEL: SCOTT’S FIRST HOUSE IN THE BORDER COUNTRY]

In 1804, Scott found it convenient to take a lease of Ashestiel; and

that leafy cover became his home for the next seven years. It is within

a couple of miles of Clovenfords and Caddonfoot. Under Caddonlee, where

William the Lion waited with his bands from the Highlands and the

Lothians, until he was joined by the Forest men on his ill-fated

invasion of England, Tweed is crossed by a single wide arch to where

“Glenkinnen’s rill” and glen open a short cut, oft traversed with the

“Yair boys”, to Yarrow. Near the Peel burn is a knoll shaded by oak and

birch—the “Shirra’s Knowe”—where part of _Marmion_ is said to have been

written. The house, much changed since Scott’s day, turns its front and

two extended wings away from the Tweed; but its most attractive aspect

is perhaps that towards the river. The little stream, that with its

hoarse roaring in spate used to keep the great author, then just

blossoming into fame, from his sleep, still tumbles through the garden.

His armchair, which came back from Abbotsford after his death, and the

window through which his favourite dogs sprang in or out at his call,

are still shown. In these Ashestiel years he saw the last volume of the

_Minstrelsy_ through the press, published the _Lay_, completed _Marmion_

and _The Lady of the Lake_, edited Dryden, and began but laid aside

_Waverley_. His legal work was not absorbing, and he had time, aside

from literature, for following the hounds, “burning the water”, making

raids into the Forest, and holding convivial meetings with his friends.

They were perhaps the happiest, if not the most brilliant, years of his

life.

At Elibank, a couple of miles above Ashestiel, we leave Selkirkshire and

enter Peeblesshire. The bare grey walls of the old castle of Gideon

Murray, of the Black Barony branch of the name, a lord of Session and

trusted Councillor of James VI, stands well above the tree-line, against

the background of the hills, and commands a wide view of Upper and Lower

Tweeddale. History, in this region, arranges itself in strata, with the

oldest at the top—by the river margin are road and rail, farms with

their fertile haughs, and the houses and tweed-mills of Walkerburn and

Innerleithen; fragments of peels and bastiles of the fighting times when

Thornielee and Holylee were onsteads of the monks or of the king’s

forest vassals, are perched on the ridges, or hide in the folds or

“hopes” of the hills, on whose summits are found the forts and cairns of

a still earlier day. The outposts of the Moorfoots come to the left bank

of the river, and behind them are the broad shoulders of Windlestraelaw;

while over against them are steep outliers of Minchmoor—Elibank, Bold

and Plora Laws. “Juden” Murray’s tower is of feudal date and aspect.

Scott tells the story of how Young Harden, son of Auld Watt and the

“Flower of Yarrow”, and presumably a personable young man, was captured

by the owner of the tower and was about to be hanged, when the more

politic lady pointed out that she had three ill-favoured daughters to

dispose of, and the prisoner was happily married to the youngest and

plainest, “Mucklemou’d Meg”. An injudicial proceeding; but not more so

than the transaction by which Murray’s neighbour, Lord Traquair, had the

President of the Court of Session carried off from Leith Links, by a

Border freebooter, Christie’s Will, and kept in a dungeon of Hermitage

Castle, until a case was decided in Traquair’s favour. Doubt has been

thrown on both stories, and in particular it has been objected that

Gideon Murray, whose descendants, the Lords Elibank of to-day, are

established at Darn Hall on Eddleston Water, had only one daughter, that

her name was Agnes, and that, although she married Young Harden, the

alliance was with full consent of all parties concerned.

Lee Pen and Kirnie Law stand sentinels at the entrance of Leithen Water,

up which the houses of Innerleithen straggle for a mile or more, along a

road which runs across into Lothian, by the Piper’s Grave, the Heriot

Water, and Carcant. It is a way by which Walter Scott, walking or

driving, has often reached Tweedside, and he would note in passing

Leithen Hopes, where his friend Hogg was once a herd laddie, and on the

lower slope of the Pen, south of Lee Tower and above the village, the

beginnings of the new “Spa”. The topographical resemblances of “St.

Ronan’s” to Innerleithen are not very close; and Sir Bingo Binks, Lady

Penelope Penfeather, Dr. Quackleben, and other types in Scott’s solitary

attempt at a satiric portrayal of the social manners and humours of his

own day, are not of local growth. One looks in vain, also, for a

“Cleikum Inn” nearer than Peebles. Yet the spirit of Meg Dods pervades

the place, the inhabitants of which eagerly accepted the identification

and “recognized some of the characters as genuine portraits”. They have

even adopted the device, on the inn-sign, of “St. Ronan and the Devil”

as the burgh arms.

Geologists—who, “knappin the chucky stanes to pieces wi’ hammers”,

reminded Meg of “sae many stane masons run daft”—still frequent the

locality, along with anglers and tourists; for at Thornilee, as well as

across Tweed at Grieston and the Glen, are celebrated beds of

fossiliferous rocks. The bridge is not far above the pool—the

“Droon-pouch”—from which the body of the young son of King Malcolm the

Maiden was drawn by the Innerleithen people, in gratitude for which its

church was made a “Sanctuary” with privileges equal to those of Stow and

of Tyninghame. On the farther side is the entrance to the valley of the

Quair, and the woods surrounding the venerable form of Traquair House.

Its claim to be “the oldest inhabited house in Scotland” applies

specifically to its western wing, which is said to date back fully nine

centuries. However this may be, the antique character of Traquair is

written on its outward features as well as inscribed in its record. It

passed through the hands of a succession of royal favourites, of whom

the last was James III’s musician and “familiar shield-bearer”, Rogers,

who was among those hung over Lauder Bridge by the jealous nobles,

before it came into the possession of a branch of the Stewart Earls of

Buchan. The Traquair Stewarts have been of mixed reputation; but the

tradition of loyalty to the cause of their Royal kin now clings to the

house and is symbolized in the great Bear Gateway—the prototype of that

of the “Barons of Bradwardine” in _Waverley_—which is not to be opened

until a Stewart King comes again this way.

Like the house itself, all its surroundings breathe of the poetry and

romance of the past. For was it not behind Plora Craig that “Bonnie

Kilmeny gaed up the glen”? Are there not some scrogs of birch left by

the waterside of the much besung “Bush aboon Traquair”? Were not the

dwelling of Willie Laidlaw, and the scene of “Lucy’s Flitting” in the

upper valley, in which stands the lordly mansion of Lord Glenconner—“The

Glen” _par excellence_? And above all, is it not by the road along the

Quair that one “turns aside to Yarrow”?

In the nine miles between Innerleithen and Peebles the full current of

Tweed winds through a country brimfull of beauty and story. Whether the

road followed upstream be that on the right or that on the left bank,

one passes the ruins of ancient strongholds and modern country-seats,

set among trees and lawns—on the south side, after Traquair, Cardrona,

Kailzie, Haystoun, and Kingsmeadows, and on the north Glenormiston, the

two Horsburghs, and Kerfield—and, behind these, high hills of grass and

heather, Lee Pen, Dunslair and the Makeness Kips, over against the

Glenrath Heights and the Dun Rig, from which on a clear day can be seen,

it is said, the Calton Hill in Edinburgh and the Isle of May. The little

country-town of Peebles is in a level space where Eddleston Water, side

by side with rail and highway, meets Tweed; and from time immemorial it

has been a resort of royalty, a place for pastime and

relaxation—“Peebles for pleesure!”—and, in a modest way, for trade. It

had a reputation for sanctity, also, in witness whereof there are the

remains of the two mediæval churches—those of St. Andrew and of the Haly

Rude. The house of the Archdean of Glasgow is represented by the

Lodging, in the High Street, of the Dukes of Queensberry, now become a

public library, whose name, the Chambers Institute, recalls the fact

that the founders of the publishing house of Chambers were born in a

humble cottage in one of the cross streets. Peebles has outgrown the

limits marked by the fragment of the town wall, and has spread

northwards to the foot of the hills, where on Venlaw—part of its lost

patrimony—it has public walks and a “Hydro”; while it has crossed, by

the handsome stone bridge, to the southern bank of Tweed; whence a

branch railway follows the course of the river to Broughton, on the way

to Clydesdale.

A mile out of the town, to the west, is Neidpath Castle, the most

commandingly and romantically situated, and, in spite of the yawning

gaps made in its walls by Cromwell’s cannon, the best-preserved—Traquair

excepted—of the strongholds of the olden time on Tweed. The river is

here constricted by the bare cairn-strewn ridge of Caidmuir—once Peebles

Common—on the south, and by the Edston heights on the Neidpath side, and

has cut a deep ravine through which has drained the great lake that once

filled upper Tweeddale. The water swirls around rock and boulder below

the castle base; and the screen of trees, whose destruction by that

“degenerate Douglas”, Old Q., provoked Wordsworth’s indignant sonnet,

has been partially restored. Access to the lofty thick walled double

tower, still partly occupied, is by a gateway and courtyard; and over

this outer portal are the arms of the early owners—the strawberries of

the Frasers of Oliver Castle, from whom are descended the Frasers of the

North; and the goat’s head of the Hays of Yester, who here entertained

James VI, defied the Commonwealth, and were created Lords of Tweeddale.

Afterwards the castle and lands came into the possession of the

Douglases of Queensberry, and they now belong to the Earl of Wemyss and

March. From the window, now built up, over the arch, as has been sung by

Scott and by Campbell, the dying “Maid of Neidpath” looked forth to

watch the return of her undiscerning lover. Still discoverable is the

casement in the Justice Room of the tower, out of which wrong-doers were

hung after summary trial.

[Illustration: NEIDPATH CASTLE]

As Pennecuik sang two centuries ago:

“The noble Neidpath Peebles overlooks

With its fair bridge and Tweed’s meandering crooks”.

But it overlooks much else; and a short distance above it there open up,

to right and left, the subsidiary vales of the Lyne and the Manor. The

former comes from the “Cauldstaneslap”, in the heart of the Pentlands,

and passing on its way, at the meeting with the Tarth, Drochil

Castle—built as a retreat by the Regent Morton, who was shortened by a

head with a guillotine of his own contriving before he had time to

complete his work—enters Tweed below the remains of the great Roman Camp

of Lyne. The Manor Water draws its springs from the neighbourhood of

Yarrow. Once it was defended by eight strong peels, only one of which,

Barns—where Mr. John Buchan has laid the scene of his “John Burnet of

Barns”—stands erect. Posso Craigs, where the Stewart Kings bred their

falcons, and the sites of St. Gordian’s Kirk and Cross and of “Macbeth’s

Castle” can be pointed out. But Manor’s chief memorials are the grave

and the cottage of David Ritchie, the prototype of the “Black Dwarf”,

the “recluse of Meiklestane Moor”. Scott, as a young visitor to Manor

with Adam Ferguson, received an impression which never left him when the

deformed and eccentric being, who built his own hut with its doorway

three feet high, took him into its arcana, and locking the door and

seizing his hand, asked him earnestly: “Hae ye the pooer?”—the power of

divination!

The “Thieves’ Road”, by which the Border reivers made their way into

Lothian, strikes athwart the hills enclosing the valleys of Manor and

Lyne, descending to the Tweed from the slopes of the Scrape to the woods

of Dawick. Veitches were succeeded in this sheltered place by Naesmiths,

whose fortunes were built up by an indefatigable seventeenth century

lawyer known as “the Deil o’ Dawick”. It boasts possession of the oldest

larches in Scotland, brought hither on the suggestion of Linnæus, though

the honour is disputed by Kailzie lower down Tweed. Across the river is

another fine wooded domain—Stobo—whose ancient church preserves a Norman

doorway, a saddle-back tower, and a “jougs”; while, from the hills

behind, this level strath seems to be menaced by the fragments of Tinnis

Castle, set, like a robber tower on the Rhine, on the summit of an

almost inaccessible rocky spur. It is believed to have been the original

hold of the Tweedies of Drummelzier, a race whose fabled descent was

from a Tweed water-nymph, and whose conduct towards their neighbours,

the Veitches of Dawick and the Geddeses of Rachan, sadly belied the

motto on their tomb at Drummelzier Church—“Thole and Think”. Hard by

that edifice at the meeting of the Powsail and the Tweed, and not far

from the ruined castle of the Hays of Drummelzier, is another grave of

which tradition has much to say—that of “Merlin the Wild”, who

prophesied on the spot the Union of the Kingdoms.

Beyond Drummelzier and Broughton, an estate and parish which in the

eighteenth century belonged to two historical personages of dubious

repute—“Secretary Murray” of the ’45 and M‘Queen of Braxfield,

Stevenson’s “Lord Justice Clerk”—the Tweed is found to have dwindled

almost to the dimensions of a moorland burn, enclosed among smooth brown

“hills of sheep”. Smaller streams pour down in headlong course on either

hand; and there are not wanting places of historic and literary note by

the river banks and in the tributary valleys. Every burn and haugh has

its story of old feuds, in which Frasers and Tweedies, Hunters and

Murrays, Scotts and Hays, and other clans of Upper Clydesdale have had a

part; and “forts” and “rings” and “chesters” are plentifully sprinkled

on the hill-tops. They are especially rife on the heights looking down

on the Holms water, which comes from the grassy and heathery folds of

Culter Fell and Cardon, and, after joining the Broughton burn, falls

into the Tweed below Rachan. For in this neighbourhood, by the “Pass of

Corscrine”, ran for a time the frontiers of the Kingdom, as fixed

between Edward I and Edward Baliol. Like many other old families of the

district, the Geddeses of Rachan, “chiefs of the name”, passed out of

the Upper Tweed in poverty and litigation. The like fate, or worse,

befell the Murrays of Stanhope, whose representative, after the laird

who lost his head in the ’45, was the “Judas” of the Rebellion, for whom

Scott’s father showed his contempt, by flinging out of the window the

cup from which his caller had partaken of tea in George Square. The fact

that they claimed to have received their lands, “for a Bow and a Broad

Arrow, when the King comes to hunt in Yarrow”, from Malcolm Canmore did

not prevent the Hunters from parting with the estate of Polmood, after

one of the longest lawsuits in the annals of even the Scots law.

Stanhope and Polmood have streams tumbling down to Tweed from the

heights of Dollar Law and Broad Law, 2800 feet above sea-level; and on

the opposite, or right bank, above the fragment of Wrae Castle, which

once belonged to the Tweedies, is the site of “Lincumdoddie”, where

dwelt “Willie Wastle’s wife”, whose face, according to Burns’s song,

“wad fyle the Logan Water”, which runs by it. Beyond the Kinkledoors

burn is the “Crook Inn”, beloved by the many anglers who have sought

sport and recreation in this solitude among the hills, where, besides

Tweed itself, there are many wild side streams—Hearthstane, Menzion,

Fruid, and Fingland; Glencraigie, Glenbreck, and Glencor—frequented by

brown and yellow trout. But, chief of all, there is the Talla, which,

from its springs in lonely Gameshope, rushes down the rocks at Talla

Linnfoot, and rests in the two-mile-long reservoir of the Edinburgh

Water Company, before joining the Tweed at Tweedsmuir Church, nearly

opposite the scant remains of Oliver Castle, where the Frasers first

planted themselves on Tweedside.

The Frasers had fled the scene long before the Hunters and the Hays, the

Geddeses and the Tweedies, and other families have succeeded and

followed them in their flight. Few, and set far apart, are houses and

“bields” of any kind, on the lonely road that keeps high up the hillside

above the valley floor, until, at “Tweed’s Well”, passing over into

Annandale, it parts company with the “Scott Country”.