From Buckton we’ve venison in store;
From Swinhoe we’ve bacon, but the Scots it have taken,
And the Prior is longing for more.
The yellow sands that occupy the levels and reach out at low tide to Holy
Island are treacherous. With the exquisite colouring of sea and sky on a
summer day blending with them, they look at this distance like the shores
of fairyland; but the grim little churchyard of Holy Island has many
memorials presenting another picture—a picture of winter storm and
shipwreck, for which this wild coast has ever been memorable. Off
Bambrough, where the Farne Islands are scattered in the sea, the scene is
still recalled of the wreck of the _Forfarshire_ and Grace Darling’s
heroism; and the monument of that famous girl stands in Bambrough
churchyard to render the summer pilgrim mindful of the danger of this
coast. Dangerous not only to those on the waters, but also to travellers
who formerly took the short cut from Berwick across the sands, instead of
going by the hilly road. The way, clearly marked in daylight by a line
of poles, has often been mistaken at night; sudden storms, arising when
travellers have reached midway, have swept them out to sea; or fogs have
entangled the footsteps even of those who knew the uncharted flats best.
Whatever the cause, to be lost here was death. The classic instance,
still narrated, is that of the postboy carrying the mails from Edinburgh
on the 20th of November, 1725. Neither he nor the mail-bags was ever
heard of again after leaving Berwick, and it was naturally concluded that
he was lost on the quicksands in a sea-fog.
Away on the west of the road rise the Kyloe hills, like ramparts, and on
their tallest ridge the church tower of Kyloe, conspicuous for long
distances, and greatly appreciated by sailors as a landmark. The village
is not perhaps famous, but certainly notable for a former vicar, who
apparently aspired to writing a personal history of his parish as well as
keeping a merely formal set of registers. Scattered through his official
records are some very curious notes, among them: “1696. Buried, Dec. 7,
Henry, the son of Henry Watson of Fenwick, who lived to the age of 36
years, and was so great a fool that he could never put on his own close,
nor never went a ¼ mile off ye house in all this space.”
The road at this point was the scene of Grizel Cochrane’s famous exploit,
in 1685, when at night-fall, disguised as a man, and mounted on
horseback, she waylaid the mail rider, and, holding a pistol to his head,
robbed him of the warrant he was carrying for the execution of her
father, Sir John Cochrane, taken in rebellion against James the Second.
By this means she obtained a fortnight’s respite, a delay which was used
by his friends to secure his pardon. Grizel Cochrane has, of course,
been ever since the heroine of Border song. A clump of trees on a
hillock, surrounded by a wall, to the right of the road, long bore the
name of “Grizzy’s Clump,” but it has recently been felled and so much of
the landmark destroyed. The country folk, possessed of the most
invincible ignorance of the subject, know the place only as “Bambrough
Hill,” a title they have given it because from the summit an excellent
view of Bambrough Castle is gained.
[Picture: Bambrough Castle]
The plantations of Haggerston Castle now begin to cover the land sloping
down toward the sea, and, after passing a deserted building on the left,
once a coaching inn, the park surrounding the odd-looking modern
castellated residence is reached. Here, by the entrance to the house,
the road goes off at an acute angle to the left, and, continuing thus for
a quarter of a mile, turns as sharply to the right. An old manorial
pigeon-house, still with a vane bearing the initials C.L.H., stands by
the way, and bears witness to the ownership of the estate in other times
by the old Haggerston family. It was to Sir Carnaby Haggerston that
those initials belonged, the late eighteenth-century squire, who
destroyed the old Border tower of Haggerston Castle, and built a new
mansion in its stead, just as so many of his contemporaries did.
Sir Carnaby Haggerston does not appear—apart from this vandal act of
his—to have been an especially Wicked Squire, although his devastating
name launched him upon the world ear-marked for commission of all the
crimes practised by the libertine landowners who made so brave a show in
a certain class of literature and melodrama once popular. His name
strikes the ear even more dramatically than that of Sir Rupert
Murgatroyd, the accursed Baronet of Ruddigore in Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s
comic opera, but he never lived up to its possibilities. The only things
he seems to have had in common with the typical squire of old seem to
have been a love of port and whist, and a passion for building houses too
large for his needs or means.
The Wicked Squire who unwillingly sat to the novelists who used to write
in the pages of _Reynolds’ Miscellany_ and journals of that stamp fifty
years ago, as the high-born villain of their gory romances, may be
regretted, because without him the pages of the penny novelist are become
extremely tame; but his disappearance need not be mourned for any other
reasons.
It is to him we owe the many supposedly “classical” mansions that, huge
and shapeless, like so many factories, reformatories, or workhouses,
affront the green sward, the beautiful gardens, and the noble trees of
many English parks. To build vast mansions of this “palatial” character,
the squires often pulled down middle-Tudor or Elizabethan, or even
earlier manor-houses of exquisite beauty, vying with one another in the
size and extravagance of the new buildings, whose original cost and
subsequent maintenance have during the past hundred and fifty years kept
many county families in straitened circumstances, and do so still. There
was a squire who pulled down a whole series of mediæval wayside crosses
in his district, and used the materials as building-stones toward the
great mansion he was erecting for the purpose of outshining a neighbour.
Those transcendent squires, the noblemen of old, had larger opportunities
and made the worst use of them. The Duke of Buckingham, for example,
bought a property, demolished the Elizabethan hall that stood on it, and
built Stowe there in its place; a building of vast range and classic
elevation with colonnades and porticoes, and “windows that exclude the
light and lead to nothing,” as some one has very happily remarked. Sir
Francis Dashwood, that hero of the Hell Fire Club, pulled down West
Wycombe church and built the existing building, that looks like a
Lancashire cotton-mill, and every one built houses a great deal larger
than were wanted or they could afford; which, like the Earl of
Leicester’s seat at Holkham were so little like homes that they could
neither live in their stately apartments nor sleep in their vast
bedrooms. Like the Earl and Countess of Leicester, who were compelled
for comfort’s sake to sleep in one of the servants’ bedrooms in the
attics, they lived as settlers in corners of their cavernous and
uncomfortable palaces.
Pity the poor descendant of the Squires! He cannot afford in these days
to keep up his huge house; to pull it down would in itself cost a
fortune; and its very size frightens the clients of the house-agent in
whose hands he has had it for letting, these years past. All over
England this is seen, and the old Yorkshire tale would stand true of any
other county and of many other county magnates of that time. The Marquis
of Rockingham, according to that story, built a mansion at Wentworth big
enough for the Prince of Wales; Sir Rowland Winn built one at Nostel
Priory fit for the Marquis of Rockingham; and Mr. Wrightson of Cusworth
built a house fit for Sir Rowland Winn. No doubt the farmers carried on
the tale of extravagance down to their stratum of society, and so _ad
infinitum_.
But to return to Haggerston Castle, which now belongs to the Leylands.
Conspicuous for some distance is the tower built of recent years to at
one and the same time resemble a mediæval keep and to serve a practical
purpose as a water-tower, engine-room, and look-out. The place, however,
is remarkable for quite other things than its mock castle, for in the
beautiful park are kept in pens, or roaming about freely, herds of
foreign animals which make of it a miniature Zoological Gardens. It is,
in a sense, superior indeed to that well-known place, for if the
collections do not cover so wide a range, the animals are in a state of
nature. Emus, Indian cattle, kangaroos, and many varieties of wild buck
roam this “paradise,” together with a thriving herd of American bison.
The bison is almost extinct, even in his native country, but here he
flourishes exceedingly and perpetuates his kind. A bison bull is a
startling object, come upon unawares, and looks like the production of a
lunatic artist chosen to illustrate, say, the Jabberwock in _Alice in
Wonderland_. He is all out of drawing, with huge shaggy forelegs, and
head and shoulders a size too large for the rest of his body; an eye like
a live coal, tufted coat, like a worn-out door-mat, and
uncomfortable-looking horns: the kind of creature that inhabits Nightmare
Country, popularly supposed to be bred of indigestion and lobster
mayonnaise.
XXIX
BEYOND Haggerston, and up along the rising road that leads for six of the
seven miles to Berwick, the journey is unexpectedly commonplace. The
road has by this time turned away from the sea, and when it has led us
through an entirely charming tunnel-like avenue of dwarf oaks, ceases to
be interesting. Always upwards, it passes collieries, the “Cat” inn, and
the hamlet of Richardson’s Stead or Scremerston, whence, arrived at the
summit of Scremerston Hill, the way down into Tweedmouth and across the
Tweed into Berwick is clear.
Tweedmouth sits upon the hither shore of Tweed, clad in grime and
clinkers. Like a mudlark dabbling in the water but not cleansing himself
in it, Tweedmouth seems to acquire no inconsiderable portion of its dirt
from its foreshore. Engineering works and coal-shoots are responsible
for the rest. Little or nothing of antiquity enlivens its mean street
that leads down to the old bridge and so across the Tweed into Scotland.
The roofs of Berwick, clustered close together and sealing one over the
other as the town ascends the opposite shore of the river, are seen, with
the spired Town Hall dominating all at the further end of the long,
narrow, hump-backed old structure, and away to the left that fine viaduct
of the North Eastern Railway, the Royal Border Bridge. But the finest
view, and the most educational in local topography, is that gained by
exploring the southern shore of the Tweed for half a mile in an easterly
direction. An unlovely waterside road, it is true, a maze of railway
arches spanning it, and shabby houses hiding all but the merest glimpses
of Tweedmouth church and its gilded salmon vane, referring to the
salmon-fishery of the Tweed, but leading to a point of view whence the
outlook to the north-west is really grand. There, across the broad
estuary of the Tweed, lies Berwick, behind its quays and its enclosing
defences. Across the river, in the middle distance, goes Berwick Bridge,
its massive piers and arches looking as though carved out of the rock,
rather than built up of single stones. Beyond it, in majestic array, go
the tall arches of the Royal Border Bridge, and, in the background, are
the Scottish hills. Tweedmouth, its timber jetty, its docks, and church
spire, and its waterside lumber are in the forefront. This, then, is the
situation of Berwick, for centuries the best-picked bone of contention
between the rival countries of England and Scotland; the Border cockpit,
geographically in the northern kingdom, but wrested from it by the
masterful English seven hundred and fifty years ago, and taken and
re-taken by or from stubborn Scots on a round dozen of occasions
afterwards. Sieges, assaults, stormings, massacres under every condition
of atrocity; these are the merest commonplaces of Berwick’s story, until
the mid-sixteenth century; and the historian who would write of its more
unusual aspects must needs turn attention to the rare and short-lived
interludes of peace.
[Picture: The Scottish Border: Berwick Town and Bridge from Tweedmouth]
It was in 1550, during the short reign of Edward the Sixth, that the
existing fortifications enclosing the town were begun, whose
river-fronting walls are so conspicuous from Tweedmouth. The old bridge,
built by James the First, was the first peaceful enterprise between the
two kingdoms, for, although Berwick had for over a century been
recognised as a neutral or “buffer” state, peace went armed for fear of
accidents, and easy communication across the Tweed was not encouraged.
There is food for reflection in comparison between that bridge and the
infinitely greater work of the railway viaduct. The first, 1,164 feet in
length, with only 17 feet breadth between the parapets, bridging the
river with fifteen arches, cost £17,000, and took twenty-four years to
build; the railway bridge of twenty-eight giant arches, each of 61½ feet
span, and straddling the Tweed at a height of 129 feet, was built in
three years, at a cost of £120,000. The “Royal Border Bridge,” as it was
christened at its opening by the Queen, has precisely the appearance of a
Roman aqueduct and belongs to the Stone and Brick Age of railways. Were
it to do over again, there can be no doubt that, instead of a long array
of graceful arches, half a dozen lengths of steel lattice girders would
span the tide. It was at a huge cost that England and Scotland were thus
joined by rail; bridge and approaches swallowing up the sum of £253,000.
The first passenger train crossed over, October 15, 1848, but the works
were not finally completed until 1850. In the August of that year the
Queen formally opened it, nearly two years after it was _actually_
opened; a fine object-lesson for satirists. How we laugh at ceremonials
less absurd than this when they take place in China and Japan.
Berwick town is seen, on entering its streets, to be unexpectedly modern
and matter-of-fact. The classically steepled building that bulks
commandingly in the main thoroughfare and looks like a church is the Town
Hall, and displays the arms of Berwick prominently, the municipal
escutcheon supported on either side by a sculptured bear sitting on his
rump and surrounded by trees. It is thus that one of the disputed
derivations of Berwick’s name is alluded to. At few towns has the origin
of a place-name been so contested as at Berwick; and, for all the pother
about it, the question is still, and must remain, unanswered. It might
as reasonably have come from _aberwic_, the mouth of a river, as from
_bergwic_, the hillside village, and much more reasonably than from the
fanciful “bar” prefix alluding to the bareness of the country; while of
course the legend that gives the lie to that last variant, and seeks an
origin in imaginary bears populating mythical woods, is merely infantile.
The church-like Town Hall, which is also a market-house and the town
gaol, does indeed perform one of the functions of a church, for the ugly
Puritan parish church of the town has no tower, and so the steeple of the
Town Hall rings for it.
In the broad High Street running northward from this commanding building
are all the prominent inns of the town, to and from which the coaches
came and went until the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway in
1846. Some of the short stages appear to have been misery-boxes,
according to Dean Ramsay, who used to tell an amusing anecdote of one of
them. On one occasion a fellow-traveller at Berwick complained of the
rivulets of rain-water falling down his neck from the cracked roof. He
drew the coachman’s attention to it on the first opportunity, but all the
answer he got was the matter-of-fact remark, “Ay, mony a ane has
complained o’ that hole.”
The mail-coaches leaving Berwick on their journey north were allowed to
take an extra—a fourth—outside passenger. Mail-coaches running in
England were, until 1834, strictly limited to four inside and three
outside. Of these last, one sat on the box, beside the coachman, while
the other two were seated immediately behind, on the fore part of the
roof, with their backs to the guard. This was a rule originally very
strictly enforced, and had its origin in the fear that, if more were
allowed, it would be an easy matter for desperadoes to occupy the seats
as passengers and to suddenly overpower both coachman and guard. The
guard in his solitary perch at the back, with his sword-case and
blunderbuss ready to hand, could have shot or slashed at those in front,
on his observing any suspicious movement, and it is somewhat surprising
that no nervous guard ever did wound some innocent passenger who may have
turned round to ask him a question. The concession of an extra seat on
the outside of coaches entering Scotland was granted to the
mail-contractors in view of the more widely scattered population of
Scotland, and of the comparative scarcity of chance passengers on the
way.
But there is very great uncertainty as to the number of passengers
allowed on the mails in later years. Moses Nobbs, one of the last of the
old mail-guards, states that no fewer than eight passengers were allowed
outside at the end of the coaching age. Doubtless this was owing both to
the complaints of the contractors that with the smaller complement they
could not make the business pay, and to the growing security of the
roads.
Royal proclamations used, until recent times, to specifically mention
“our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed” when promulgating decrees, for as by
treaty an independent State, neither in England nor Scotland, laws and
ordinances affecting Great Britain and Ireland could not legally be said
to have been extended to Berwick without the especial mention of “our
town.” A state whose boundaries north and south were Lamberton Toll and
the Tweed, a distance of not more than four miles, with a corresponding
extent from east to west, it was thus on a par with many a petty German
principality. Nearly three-quarters of the land comprised within
“Berwick Bounds” is the property of the Corporation, having been granted
by James the First when, overjoyed at his good fortune in succeeding to
the English crown and thus uniting those of the two countries, he entered
upon his heritage. Lucky Berwick! Its freehold property brings in a
revenue of £18,000 a year, in relief of rates.
If the streets of Berwick are disappointing in so historic a place, then
let the pilgrim make the circuit of the town on the ramparts. These, at
least, tell of martial times, as also do the fragmentary towers of the
old castle, the few poor relics left of that stronghold by the modern
railway station overhanging a deep cleft. Then, away in advance of the
ramparts, still thrusting its tubby, telescopic, three-storied form
forward, is the old Bell Tower, where, in this advanced post, the
vigilant garrison kept eyes upon the north, whence sudden Scottish raids
might be developed at any time.
Grass covers the ramparts and sprouts in tufts upon the gun-platforms
contrived in early Victorian days upon them, and almost every variety of
obsolete cannon, short of the demi-culverins with which Drake searched
the Spanish Main, go to make up what—Heaven help them and us!—War Office
officials call batteries. Guns bristle thickly upon the waterside
batteries overlooking the harbour, but not one of them is modern. All
are muzzle-loading pieces, fit for an artillerist’s museum, and their
carriages—where they are mounted at all—are in bewildering variety,
principally, however, of rotting wood. The most recent piece, an
Armstrong gun not less than fifty years old, lies derelict in the long
grass, and children amuse themselves by filling its hungry-looking maw
with clods. Pot-bellied like all the old Armstrongs, it has a look as
though it had grown fat and lazy with that diet and lain down in the long
grass to sleep. Perhaps to guard its slumbers, a War Office notice
beside the prostrate gun vainly forbids trespassing!
Down in a ditch of the fortifications a soldier in his shirt sleeves, his
braces dangling about his legs, is tending early peas with all the
tenderness of a mother for an invalid child; for, look you, early peas in
these latitudes have a hard fight for it; and the fight of those
vegetables for existence against the nipping blasts that sweep from off
the North Sea is the only sign of warfare the place has to show. Taken
as a whole, and looked at whichever way you will, the “defences” of
Berwick-upon-Tweed show a trustfulness in Providence and in the
astounding luck of the British Empire which argues much for the piety or
the folly of our rulers. And so, with the varied reflections these
things call forth, let us away up the High Street, and, passing under the
archway of the Scotch Gate, spanning its northern extremity, leave
Berwick on the way to Scotland.
XXX
“SEEING Scotland, Madam,” said Dr. Johnson, in answer to Mrs. Thrale’s
expressed wish to visit that country, “is only seeing a worse England.
It is seeing the flower gradually fade away to the naked stalk.” This
bitter saying of the Doctor’s comes vividly to mind when leaving Berwick
on the way to Edinburgh. Passing the outskirts of the town at a point
marked on the Ordnance map with the unexplained name of “Conundrum,” the
country grows bare and treeless on approaching the sea, and at Lamberton
Toll, three miles north, where “Berwick Bounds” are reached and Scotland
entered, the scene is desolate in the extreme. The cottage to the left
of the road at this point, formerly the toll-house of the turnpike-gate
that stood here, is a famous place, rivalling Gretna Green for the
runaway matches, legalised at the gate until 1856, when changes in the
law rendered a part of the once-familiar notice in the window
out-of-date. It ran, “Ginger-beer sold here, and marriages performed on
the most reasonable terms”; an announcement which for combination of the
trivial and the tremendous it would be difficult to beat.
Geographically in Scotland when across the Tweed, we are not politically
in that country until past this cottage. Then indeed we are, in many
ways, in a foreign country.
[Picture: Lamberton Toll]
Scots law is a fearful and wonderful variant from English. Even its
terminology is strange to the English ear, which finds—hey, presto!—on
passing Berwick Bounds, a barrister changed into an “advocate,” a
solicitor converted into a “Writer to the Signet,” and a prosecutor
masquerading under the thrilling and descriptive alias of “pursuer.” It
was the laxity of Scots law that made, not only Gretna Green, but any
other place over the Border from England, a resort of those about to
marry and impatient of constraints, legal or family, at any period
between 1753 and 1856. Gretna Green and its neighbour, Springfield, in
especial, and in no small degree Lamberton Toll, were the scenes of much
hasty marrying during that space of time. Marrying, _bien entendu_, and
not giving in marriage, for these were runaway matches, and those whose
position it was to give, and who withheld their consent, generally came
posting up to the toll-gate in pursuit just in time to hear the last
words of the simple but effective ritual of the toll-keeper who had
witnessed the declaration of the truants that, “This is my wife,” and
“This is my husband,” a simple form of words which, uttered in the
presence of a witness, was all that the beneficent legal system of
Scotland required as marriage ceremony. This form completed, and for
satisfaction’s sake a rough register subscribed, the indignant parent,
who possibly had been battering on the outside of the door, was admitted
and introduced to his son-in-law.