Border from the passing of Lord Hardwicke’s Clandestine Marriage Act in
1753 until that of Lord Brougham in 1856, which put a stop to this “over
the Border” marrying by rendering unions illegal on the part of those not
domiciled in Scotland, which had not been preceded by a residence in that
kingdom of not less than twenty-one days by one or other of the
contracting parties.
There was no special virtue in the first place across the Border-line at
any point, nor did it matter who “officiated,” the person who “performed
the ceremony” being only a witness and in no sense a clergyman; but it
was obviously, with these legal facilities, the prime object of runaway
couples pressed for time, and with hurrying parents and guardians after
them, to seize their opportunity at the first place, and at the hands of
the first person in that liberal minded land. Not that the Kirk looked
benevolently upon this. It fined them, for discipline’s sake, and the
happy couples cheerfully paid, for by doing so they acquired the last
touch of validity, which, on the face of it, could not be called into
dispute.
One of this long line of Hymen’s secular priesthood at Lamberton Toll
had, early in the nineteenth century, an unhappy time of it, owing to an
error of judgment and an ignorance of the law scarcely credible. Joseph
Atkinson, the toll-keeper, was away one day at Berwick when a runaway
pair arrived at the gate. His wife, or another, sent them after him, and
in Berwick the ceremony, such as it was, was performed. Now Berwick is a
county of itself, and the inhabitants boast, or used to, that their town
belongs to neither England nor Scotland. It is hinted (by those who do
not belong to Berwick) that it belongs instead to the devil, which
possibly is a reminiscence of the townsfolk’s smuggling days, on the part
of those who duly render unto Cæsar. This by the way. Unhappily for Mr.
Joseph Atkinson, Berwick owes allegiance to English law, as he found when
his ceremony was declared null and void, and he was duly sentenced to
seven years transportation for having contravened the Marriage Act of
1753.
[Picture: Off to the Border]
Halidon Hill, where the English avenged Bannockburn upon the Scots in
1333, is on the crest of the upland to the west of Lamberton Toll. Now
the road runs upon the edge of the black cliffs that plunge down into the
North Sea, commanding bold views of a stern and iron-bound coast.
Horses, coachmen, guards, and passengers alike quailed before the storms
that swept these exposed miles, and even the highwaymen sought other and
more sheltered spots. Macready, on tour in the north, was snowed up
here, in the severe winter of 1813–14. Coming south through the deep and
still falling snow, he travelled in a cutting made in the drifts for
miles between Ross Inn and Berwick-on-Tweed. “We did not reach
Newcastle,” he says, “until nearly two hours after midnight: and
fortunate was it for the theatre and ourselves that we had not delayed
our journey, for the next day the mails were stopped; nor for more than
six weeks was there any conveyance by carriage between Edinburgh and
Newcastle. After some weeks, a passage was cut through the snow for the
guards to carry the mails on horseback, but for a length of time the
communications every way were very irregular.”
Where the little Flemington Inn stands solitary at a fork of the road,
close by a tremendous gap in the cliffs, is placed Burnmouth station, on
the main line, wedged in a scanty foothold, hundreds of feet above the
sea. Day or night it is a picturesque place, but more especially in the
afterglow of sunset, when the inky blackness of the rift in the cliffs
can still be set off against the gleam of the sea, caught in a notch of
the rocks, and when the lighted signal-lamps of the little junction glow
redly against the sky on their tall masts, like demon eyes. A fishlike,
if not an ancient, smell lingers here, for Burnmouth station is
constantly in receipt of the catches made down below by the hardy fishers
of the three hamlets of Burnmouth, Partinghal, and Ross, queer fishing
villages of white-washed stone cottages that line the rocky shore
unsuspected by ninety-nine among every hundred travellers along the road
above. Herrings caught in the North Sea are cured here, packed in
barrels, and sent by rail to distant markets.
Ayton, two miles onward, away from the sea, is entered in perplexing
fashion, downhill and by a sharp turn to the right over a bridge spanning
the Eye Water, instead of continuing straight ahead along a road that
makes spacious pretence of being the proper way. Ayton itself, beyond
being a large village, with a modern castellated residence in the
Scottish baronial style and vivid red sandstone at its entrance, is not
remarkable.
Leaving Ayton, the road enters a secluded valley whose solitudes of
woodland, water, and meadows are not imperilled, but only intensified, by
the railway, which goes unobtrusively within hail of this old coaching
highway. On the right rise the gently swelling sides of a range of hills
sloping upwards from the very margin of the road and covered with woods
of dwarf oak, through whose branches the sunlight filters and lies on the
ferns below in twinkling patches of gold. Here stood the old Houndwood
Inn, and the building yet remains, converted—good word in such a
connection—into a manse for the Free Church near by, itself a building
calculated to make angels weep; if angels have appreciations in
architecture. Another, and a humbler, building carries on the licensed
victualling trade, and calls itself, prettily enough, the “Greenwood
Inn.” It is, in fact, a stretch of country that makes for inspiration in
the rustic sort. If there were a sign of the “Robin Hood” here we should
acclaim it romantic and appropriate, even though tradition tells not of
that mythical outlaw in these marches. If not Robin, then some other
chivalric outlaw surely should have pervaded the glades of Houndwood,
open as they are, with never a fence, a hedge, or a ditch to the road,
just as though these were still the fine free days of old, before
barbed-wire fences were dreamed of, or notices to trespassers set up,
threatening vague penalties to be enforced “with all the rigour of the
law,” as the phrase generally runs.
It is a valley of whose delights one must needs chatter, although with
but dim hopes of communicating much of its charm. Through it that little
stream called by the medicinally sounding name, the Eye Water, wanders
with a feminine hesitancy and inconstancy of purpose. It flows all ways
by turns and never long in any direction, and with so many amazing loops
and doublings, that it might well defy the precision of the Ordnance
chartographers themselves. We bid farewell to this fickle stream at
Grant’s House, and scrape acquaintance with another, the Pease Burn,
flowing in another direction. For Grant’s House stands on the watershed
which orders the going of several watercourses. It is also the summit
level of this railway route to the North. Here, quite close to the road,
is Grant’s House station, and here, bordering the road itself, are the
houses that form Grant’s House itself. This sounds like speaking in
paradox, but the place is a village, or rather a scattered collection of
pretty cottages that have gathered around the one inn which was the home
of the original Grant. The place-name seems to hint of other and
less-travelled times, when these Borders were sparsely settled and
wayfarers few; when but one house served to take the edge off the
solitude, and that an inn kept by one Grant. The imagination, thus
uninstructed, weaves cocoons of speculation around these premises and
conceives him to have been a host of abounding personality, thus to hand
his name down to posterity, preserved in a place-name, like a fly in
amber. But all speculations that start upon this innkeeping basis would
be incorrect, for this sponsorial Grant was the contractor who made the
road from Berwick to Edinburgh, building a cottage for himself in this
then lonely spot, which only in later years became the Grant’s House inn.
More streams and woods beyond this point, and then comes the long and
toilsome rise up to Cockburnspath, past Pease Burn, where the road takes
a double S curve on the hillside, and other tall hills, to right and left
and ahead, largely covered with firs and larches, seem to look on with a
gloomy anticipation of some one, less cautious than his fellows, breaking
his neck. Where there are no hillside woods there are grass meadows in
which, if it be June or July, the haymakers can be seen from the road,
haymaking, with attendant horses and carts, at a perilous angle. The
Pease Burn, flowing deep down in its Dene, is spanned at a height of 127
feet, half a mile down stream, by a four-arched bridge, built in 1786.
XXXI
SET in midst of these steep and twisting roads and above these watery
ravines is Cockburnspath Tower, a ruined Border castle of rust-red stone
that frowns down upon the road on the edge of a tremendous gully. It was
never more than a peel-tower, but strongly placed and solidly built, a
fitting refuge for those who took part in the ups and downs of Border
forays. In the days when Co’path Tower (local pronunciation) was built,
every one’s house was more or less a defensible building. “An
Englishman’s house is his castle” is a figurative expression commonly
used to prefigure the inviolate character of the law-abiding citizen’s
domicile, but it might have been said literally of dwellers in these
debateable lands. The more property he possessed, the stronger was the
Border farmer’s tower. When the moss-troopers and mediæval scoundrels of
every description were on the warpath, or merely out on a cattle-lifting
expedition, these embattled agriculturists shut themselves up in their
safe retreats. The lower floor, on a level with the ground, received the
live stock; the floor above, the servants; and to the topmost story, as
the safest situation, the family retired. The gate below was of iron,
for your Border reiver was no squeamish sort, and would burn these
domestic garrisons alive without hesitation. Therefore in the most
approved type of fortress there was nothing inflammable. Sympathy,
however, would be wasted on those old-time cultivators, for they all took
a turn at armed cattle-lifting as occasion offered, and found the
readiest way of stocking their farms with every requisite to be that of
stealing what they required.
For why? Because the good old rule
Sufficeth them: the simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.
Short and sudden forays were characteristic of this kind of life. The
Border cattle-lifter came and went in the twinkling of an eye, and drove
the captured flocks and herds away with him at a rate no merely honest
drover ever marshalled his sheep and heifers to market. There must have
been many highly desirable, but inanimate and not easily portable, things
which the raiders were obliged to leave behind, as one of this kidney
regretted in casting a last glance at a hayrick he had no means of
lifting. “Had ye but four feet, ye suld no stand lang there,” said he,
as he turned to go.
The mouldering old tower here at Cockburnspath belonged to the Earls of
Home. Beautifully situated for preying upon occasional travellers, the
glen and the foaming torrent below have no doubt received the bodies of
many a one who in the old days was rash enough to pass within sight of
the old tower. The comparatively modern bridge that takes a flying leap
across the ravine is the successor of an ancient one of narrower span
that still, covered with moss and ferns, arches over the water, deep down
in the hollow, and is popularly supposed to be the oldest bridge in
Scotland. A dense tangle of red-berried rowan-trees, firs, and oaks
overhangs the gorge. Altogether a place that calls insistently to be
sketched and painted, but a place, from the military point of view, to be
wary of; being a position, as Cromwell in one of his despatches says,
“where one man to hinder is better than twelve to make way.” It was at
the “strait pass at Copperspath,” as he calls it, that the great general,
writing after the battle of Dunbar, found plenty to hinder.
If ever general profited more by the mistakes of the enemy than by his
own tactical ability, it was Cromwell at this juncture. The Scots under
Leslie had cooped him up at Dunbar, and, surrounded by the enemy, who
occupied the heights and closed every defile that led to a possible line
of retreat, he must, diseased and famishing as were his forces, have
capitulated, for the sea was at his back, and no help possible from that
direction. It was then that Leslie made his disastrous move from the
hills, and came down upon the English in the levels of Broxburn, to the
south of Dunbar town, where Cromwell had his headquarters; and it was
then that Cromwell, seizing the moment when the enemy, coming down in a
dense mass upon a circumscribed space by Broxburn Glen, retrieved the
situation, and, directing a cavalry movement upon Leslie’s forces, had
the supreme relief of seeing them broken up and stamped into the earth by
the furious charge of his horsemen. The fragments of the Scottish army,
routed with a slaughter of three thousand, and ten thousand prisoners,
fled, and Cromwell’s contemplated retreat to Berwick was no longer a
necessity. Indeed, the whole of the Lowlands of Scotland now lay open
before him, and he entered Edinburgh with little opposition.
[Picture: Cockburnspath Tower]
It is a distance of nine miles between the village of Cockburnspath and
Dunbar, the road going parallel with the sea all the way. First it goes
dizzily over the profound rift of Dunglass Dene, spanned at a height of a
hundred and twenty-five feet above the rocky bed of a mountain stream by
the bold arch of the railway viaduct and by the road bridge itself. It
is a scene of rare beauty, and the walk by the zigzagging path among the
thickets and the trees, down to where the sea comes pounding furiously
into a little cove, a quarter of a mile below, wholly charming. Away out
to sea is the lowering bulk of the Bass Rock, a constant companion in the
view approaching Dunbar.
The direct road for Edinburgh avoids Dunbar altogether, forking to the
left at Broxburn where the battlefield lay, where the burn still flows
across the road as it did on the day of “Dunbar Drove,” as Carlyle calls
that dreadful rout. Here “the great road then as now crosses the Burn of
Brock. . . . Yes, my travelling friends, vehiculating in gigs or
otherwise over that piece of London road, you may say to yourselves,
Here, without monument, is the grave of a valiant thing which was done
under the Sun; the footprint of a Hero, not yet quite indistinguishable,
is here!”
Ahead, with its great red church on a hillock, still somewhat apart of
the south end of the town, is Dunbar, the first characteristically
Scottish place to which we come. It is not possible to compete with
Carlyle’s masterly word-picture of it, which presents the place before
you with so marvellous a fidelity to its spirit and appearance:—“The
small town of Dunbar stands high and windy, looking down over its
herring-boats, over its grim old castle, now much honeycombed, on one of
those projecting rock-promontories with which that shore of the Firth of
Forth is niched and vandyked as far as the eye can reach. A beautiful
sea; good land too, now that the plougher understands his trade; a grim
niched barrier of whinstone sheltering it from the chafings and tumblings
of the big blue German Ocean.” There you have Dunbar.
[Picture: The Tolbooth, Dunbar]
Let us add some few details to the master’s fine broad handling; such as
the fact that its streets are wondrously cobble-stoned, that those
whinstone rocks are red and give a dull, blood-like coloration to the
scene, and that the curious old whitewashed Tolbooth in the High Street
is the fullest exemplar of the Scottish architectural style. Windy it
is, as Carlyle says, and with a rawness in its air that calls forth
shivers from the Southron even in midsummer. Here the stranger new to
Scotland is apt to see for the first time the sturdy fishwives and lasses
who, still often with bare feet, go along the streets carrying
prodigiously weighty baskets of fish on their backs, sometimes secured by
a leather strap that goes from the basket around the head and forehead!
One leaves Dunbar by wriggly and exiguous streets, coming through the
fisher villages of Belhaven and West Barns to where the main avoiding
route rejoins at Beltonford. The Scottish Tyne winds through the flat
meadows on the right—at such fortunate times, that is to say, as when it
does not pretend to be an inland sea and take the meadows, the road, and
the railway for its province. The road, too, is flat, and the railway,
which hugs it closely, the same. A good road, too, and beautiful.
Midway of it, towards East Linton, are the farmsteads and ricks of
Phantassie, at which spot Rennie, the engineer who built London Bridge,
and heaven and Dr. Smiles alone know how many harbours, was born in 1761.
“Phantassie” is a name that sorely piques one’s curiosity, so odd is it;
but the group of farm-buildings is commonplace enough, if more than
commonly substantial. No fantasy in their design, at any rate.
At East Linton we cross the Tyne which, crawling through the meadows,
plunges here in cascades under the road bridge, amid confused rocks. The
railway crosses it too, close by, and spans the road beyond; and the
village huddles together at an angle of the way. A long ascent out of it
commands wide views of agricultural Haddingtonshire, and of that
surprising mountainous hill, Traprain Law, rising out of the plain to a
height of over seven hundred feet.
Not merely a surprising hill, but one with an astonishing story. It had
always been thought that treasure was buried there, among the traces of
ancient buildings; and accordingly, with the permission of Right
Honourable A. J. Balfour, on whose land the hill is situated, excavations
were begun in 1919. It was found that the hill-top had been inhabited
intermittently over remote periods, and diggings were made into
successive strata of hearths and floorings. At first the “finds” were of
minor articles: bronze ornaments, glass and pottery, fragments of iron,
mostly of Celtic origin, but some Roman. The great discovery was made on
May 12th, 1919, when a workman, driving a pick through a floor, brought
up a silver bowl on the point of it. A deep recess was then discovered,
filled with treasure: bowls, spoons, cups, saucers, and a miscellaneous
collection of plate, mostly cut to pieces in strips folded over and
hammered down into packets of silver. Although it was grievous to look
upon that destruction, a good many of the fragments retained their
original decoration. They appear to be partly of Romano-Christian
origin, for the sacred symbol occurs among them, and on one piece is the
inscription “Jesus Christus.” Other pieces are almost as certainly
pagan, hearing as they do figures of Pan and Hercules. Among them were
four coins: the earliest of the Emperor Valerius, whose reign began A.D.
364, and the latest of Honorius, who died A.D. 463. A metal belt of
Saxon character was among this treasure-trove.
It appeared, therefore, that this hoard was a relic of one of the
sea-rovers’ raids on this coast in the fifth or sixth century, and that
the spoils had in some cases come from plundered religious houses. The
raiders were perhaps disturbed in their activities, and buried their loot
in the expectation of returning for it at some more suitable time.
But they never returned. What happened to them is a vain conjecture.
They may have been found here and slain by some stronger force, and
perhaps they were lost at sea. In any case, their hoard lay here for
close upon one thousand five hundred years. What they had hoped to carry
away is now an exhibit in the Scottish National Museum at Edinburgh.
To the north-going cyclist the road presently makes ample amends for the
mile-long rise, for, once topping it, a gentle but continuous descent of
four miles leads into Haddington, down a road that for the most part
could scarce be bettered, so excellent its surface, so straight its
course, and so beautifully sylvan its surroundings. Hailes Castle is
finely seen on the left during this descent, its ruined walls and
ivy-covered towers wrapped three parts round with the thick woodlands
that clothe the lower slopes of Traprain Law. Mary, Queen of Scots, and
her evil spirit, the sinister Bothwell, had Hailes Castle for their bower
of love, and Wishart the martyr had a cell in it for a prison, so that
its present beauty of decay lacks nothing of historic interest.
Nor does the fine mansion of Amisfield, through whose park-like lands the
road now descends. Amisfield has lurid associations. Under the name of
New Mills, it was in 1687 the scene of a dreadful parricide, and was at a
later period purchased by the infamous Colonel Francis Charteris, who
might aptly be termed (in Mr. Stead’s phrase), the Minotaur of his day.
It was he who renamed it after the home of his family in Nithsdale. As
his exploits belong chiefly to London, we, fortunately, need not enlarge
upon them here. The parricide already referred to was the murder of his
father by Philip Standsfield. Sir James Standsfield had set up a cloth
factory here, on the banks of the Tyne, and had done remarkably well. He
had two sons, Philip and John. The eldest had been a scapegrace ever
since that day when, as a student at St. Andrews, he had gone to a
meeting-house and flung a loaf at the preacher. It took the astonished
divine on the side of the head and aroused within him the spirit of
prophecy. Addressing the crowded chapel at large (for the loaf had been
thrown unseen from some dark corner), he saw in a vision the death of the
culprit, at whose end there would be more present than were hearing him
that day; “and the multitude then present,” adds the chronicler, “was not
small.”
Philip had a short and ignominious military career on the Continent, and
returned home to prey upon his father; who, for sufficient reasons,
disinherited him in favour of his younger brother. In the end, aided by
some servants, he strangled the old man and threw the body in the river.
For this he was hanged at Edinburgh, and as the hanging was not
effectual, the executioner had to finish by strangling him, in which
public opinion of that time saw the neat handiwork of Providence.
XXXII
HERE begins Haddington, and here end good roads for the space of a mile;
and not until the burgh is left behind do they recommence. The traveller
who might set out in quest of bad roads and vile paving would without
difficulty discover the objects of his search at Haddington. He might
conceivably find as bad elsewhere, but worse examples would be miraculous
indeed. We have encountered many stretches of road, thus far, of a
mediæval quality, but the long road to the North boasts, or blushes for,
nothing nearly so craggy as are the cobble-stoned thoroughfares of this
“royal burgh.” The entrance to the town from the south resembles, in its
picturesque squalor, that to one of the decayed towns of Brittany.
Unswept, tatterdemalion as it is, it still remains a fitting subject for
the artist’s pencil, for here beside the narrow street stands the rugged
mass of Bothwell Castle, patched and clouted from time to time, but
happily as yet unrestored. Over the lintels of old houses adjoining,
still remain the pious invocations and quaint devices originally
sculptured there for the purpose of averting the baleful glance of the
Evil Eye.