misuse of the letter H, the name deriving from that of Ada, Countess of
Northumberland and ancestress of Scottish monarchs; foundress also of a
nunnery here which has long gone the way of such mediæval things. The
Tyne borders this town, and sometimes floods it, as may be readily seen
by an inscription on the wall of a house in High Street, which tells how
the water on October 4, 1775, suddenly rose eight feet and three
quarters. A curious legend, too, still survives, recording a flood in
1358, when a nun of the pious Ada’s old foundation, seizing a statue of
the Virgin out of its niche, waded into the torrent and threatened to
throw it in unless the Blessed Mary instantly caused the waters to
subside. That they immediately did so appears to have been taken as
evidence of the effective moral suasion thus applied.
[Picture: Bothwell Castle]
Haddington Abbey, the successor of earlier buildings, and now itself
partly ruined, stands by the inconstant river, the nave, now the parish
church, and the choir roofless, open to the sky. It is here within these
grass-grown walls that “Jane Welsh Carlyle, spouse of Thomas Carlyle,
Chelsea, London,” lies, as the remorseful epitaph says, “suddenly
snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out.” The
spot where the Abbey stands, by the dishevelled and tumbledown quarter of
Nungate, is the more abject now in that it still possesses old mansions
that tell of a more prosperous past. Here, on the river-bank, neglected
and forlorn like everything around, is the fine old screen of the Bowling
Green, where no one has, for a century past, played bowls, unless indeed
the wraiths of bygone Scottish notables haunt the spot o’ nights and play
ghostly games, like the Kaatskill gnomes in _Rip Van Winkle_. It is from
the other side of the river that the Abbey is best seen, its roofless
central tower, the _Lucernia Laudoniae_, or “Lamp of Lothian,” still
showing those triple lancets in every face which, according to the
legend, obtained for it that title. To obtain this view, the Abbey
bridge is crossed, which even now vividly illustrates on its wall the
ready way the old burgh had with malefactors. From it projects a great
hook, rusty for long want of usage, from which were hanged the reivers,
the horse-thieves, and casual evildoers, with jurisdiction of the most
summary kind. No Calcraft science with it either, with neck broken in
decent fashion, but just a hauling up of the rope and a tying of it to
some handy stanchion, and the unhappy malefactor left to throttle by slow
degrees. No other such picturesque hanging-place as this, but what is
scenery to a criminal about to be hanged like a tom-cat caught killing
chickens.
[Picture: Haddington Abbey, from Nungate]
The crest, arms, trade-mark or badge of Haddington is a goat. There is
no doubt about that, for Billy (or is it a Nanny?) has his (or her)
effigy on many of the old buildings. Only by comparison and by slow
degrees is it that the stranger arrives at the conclusion that it is a
goat, for the drawing of many of these representations leaves much to be
desired. Some resemble an elephant, others a horse, others yet what “the
mind’s eye, Horatio” might conceive a Boojum to be like; but in the open
space where High Street and Market Street join, the modern Market Cross,
surmounted by a more carefully executed carving, determines the species.
This is the centre of the town and neater than its entrance from the
south. The steepled classic building close by is not a church but the
Town House, masquerading in ecclesiastical disguise, very much as
Berwick’s Town Hall does. From this point it is only seventeen miles
into Edinburgh; but in 1750 and for long after the coach journey employed
the best efforts of the local stage during the whole day. Musselburgh,
little more than eleven miles away, was reached in time for dinner, and
only when evening was come did the lumbering vehicle lurch into its
destination in Auld Reekie, when every one went to bed, bruised and weary
with the toils of the expedition. The road at that time must have
resembled the specimen of roadway still adorning the south entrance to
Haddington.
[Picture: Edinburgh, from Tranent]
To-day, happily, it is in good condition as far as Levenhall, seven miles
short of our journey’s end, whence it is bad beyond the credibility of
those who have not seen it. Gladsmuir, Macmerry, and Tranent are
interposed between; places that sink their memories of the battle of
Prestonpans in iron-founding and coal-digging and suchlike, disregarding
the futilities of the Stuarts. As for Macmerry, whose name prefigures
orgies at the most of it, or sober revelry at the very least, it is odds
against your finding as depressing a place within a hundred miles. If
place-names were made to fit, why, then, Macdolour might suit it to a
marvel. Why? Just because it stands at the crest of a barren knowe; an
ugly row of cottages on either side, with cinders and dust, clinkers and
mud in front of them, and some gaunt works within eyeshot. God knows who
christened the place, or if the name signified merriment, but, if it did,
either the scene has changed wholly since then, or else he was a humorist
of the sardonic sort who so dubbed it. Tranent, too, a townlet
subsisting upon collieries: how grimly commonplace! But it at least has
this advantage, that from its elevated foothold it looks down upon the
Firth of Forth, that noble firth which Victor Hugo blundered over so
whimsically in rendering it as “_la Premiére de la Quatrième_.” Seen
under the summer sun, how glorious that seaward view, with the villages
of Preston and Cockenzie, half hidden by their woodlands, by the level
shores. Half-way down from Tranent’s hillside you see a fine panorama:
Arthur’s Seat in front, Calton Hill and its Nelson’s column, peering from
behind, and the distant shores of Fife, with blowing smoke-clouds, many
miles away. Between Arthur’s Seat and the Calton, Edinburgh is hid, nine
miles from this point. Down in the levels in the mid-distance there are
hints of Musselburgh in smoke-wreaths and peeping towers; and mayhap,
while you gaze, the southward-bound train, with its white puff of steam,
is seen setting forth on its long journey Londonwards. In these levels
was fought the battle of Prestonpans, Sunday, September 21, 1745, around
that village of Preston and those briny meads where the salt-pans used to
be and are no longer.
Preston—formerly Priest’s Town—got its name at the time when it was part
of the celebrated Abbey of Newbattle. The monks of that religious house
were the first discoverers of coal in Scotland, and also, in the twelfth
century, made this district the seat of a manufacture of salt.
Prestonpans, indeed, at one time supplied the whole of the East Coast
with salt, and it was only on the repeal of the Salt Duty that this old
town fell into decay. Women, known as salt-wives, a class almost as
picturesque as the fish-wives of Newhaven, used to carry the salt in
creels on their backs, to sell in Edinburgh and other towns.
In an orchard stands what was once the ancient village cross, erected in
1617, in place of an earlier. Well-known as the “Chapmen’s Cross,” it
was the meeting-place of the chapmen, packmen, or pedlars of the
Lothians. They gathered early in July, transacted the business of their
guild and elected their “King” and his “Lord Deputy” for the ensuing
year. The “ink-bottle,” cut in stone, into which they dipped their pens,
is still visible on the base of the cross. The Bannatyne Club saved it
from utter destruction, and instituted a convivial guild, the “Society of
Chapmen of the Lothians,” visiting the cross every year, with Sir Walter
Scott as one of their members.
The world has vastly changed since “the Forty-five.” It has, as a small
detail, ceased to produce its salt by evaporation of sea water; and, a
larger and more significant matter, no longer wages war for sake of
dynasties. The Highlanders who fought and gained this fleeting victory
for Prince Charlie were the last who drew the sword for Romance and Right
Divine. Prince Charlie had moved out of his loyal Edinburgh at the
approach of the English under Sir John Cope, who, of course, in that fine
foolish manner of British officers, which will survive as long as the
officers themselves, wholly underrated his enemy. He was defeated
easily, with every circumstance of indignity, his soldiers fleeing in
abject terror before the impetuous charge of the ferocious hairy-legged
Highlanders, emerging, figures of grotesque horror, out of the mists
slowly dispersing off the swampy fields in the laggard September sunrise.
The English numbered 2100 against the 1400 under Prince Charlie; but only
four minutes passed between the attack and the flight. In that short
space of time the field was deserted and the clansmen, pursuing the
terror-stricken rabble which just before had been a disciplined force,
slew nearly four hundred of them. The total loss of the Highlanders in
slain was thirty, nearly the whole of them falling in the first discharge
of musketry. Almost incredible, but well-authenticated, stories are told
of the cowardice of Cope’s regiments. Cope himself was swept away in the
wild rush, vainly endeavouring to stem it, and it was not until they were
two miles from the field, at St. Clement’s Wells, that he could bring
them to a halt. Even then, the accidental discharge of a pistol scared
them off again, and although no one pursued, they rode off with redoubled
energy. This precipitate retreat of mounted troops over miles of
country, from an unmounted enemy who were not pursuing them, is perhaps
the most disgraceful incident in the military history of the country.
The flying infantry were in far worse case. In endeavouring to escape by
climbing the park walls of Preston, they were cut down in great numbers
by the terrible broadswords of the Highlanders. Colonel Gardiner and a
brave few were cut down defending themselves on the field of battle. One
story, of a piece with many others, relates how a Highlander, pursuing
alone a party of ten soldiers, struck down the hindermost with his sword,
and shouting, “Down with your arms!” called upon the others to surrender.
They threw their weapons away without looking behind them, and the
Highlander, his sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, drove
them—nine of them!—prisoners into camp. Everywhere Cope, so
helter-skelter was his flight, himself brought the first news of his
defeat. He reached Coldstream that night, and did not rest until the
next day he was within the sheltering fortifications of Berwick.
We will not further pursue the fortunes of the Young Pretender, but hurry
on into Levenhall.
Where that battle was fought, there is to-day the most extensive
cabbage-plant cultivation in Scotland. It is a usual thing in the early
part of the year for almost daily special cabbage trains to be despatched
to all parts of Britain.
And so downhill, and then over the awful cobbles into the accursed town
of Musselburgh. “Accursed,” not by reason of those self-same cobbles,
but for the sacrilegious doings of its magistrates who rebuilt their
Tolbooth, burnt after the battle of Pinkie, with stones from the Chapel
of Loretto. Now that chapel, which stood at the entrance to the town,
was the place of business of one of those roadside hermits of whom we
have in these pages heard so much (would that he had a successor in these
times, for then the road would perhaps be in better condition), and the
Pope, indignant at the injury done to the wayside shrine, solemnly
anathematised town and inhabitants in sleeping or waking, eating and
drinking, at every conceivable time and every imaginable function. No
Pope since that period seems to have removed the curse, and no one is
particularly anxious that it should be removed, Musselburgh being rather
proud of it than otherwise. When it begins to take effect will be quite
time enough. There were those who at the close of the coaching days
perceived the beginning of it, although then three hundred years overdue,
but as the town has rather increased in prosperity since that period, the
time evidently is not yet. Nor do the burghers anticipate it, for they
still repeat the brave old rhyme:—
Musselburgh was a burgh
When Edinburgh was nane;
And Musselburgh shall be a burgh
When Edinburgh is gane.
This, however, is a quibble, for Musselburgh derived its name from the
“broch,” or bed, of mussels at the mouth of the river Esk. Looked at in
this light, the statement is true enough and the prophecy a not
particularly rash one. The sponsorial shell-fish have an honoured place
in the town arms, in which three mussels are seen in company with three
anchors: the motto “Honesty” writ large below. This was probably adopted
at some period later than the purloining of the stones of the Loretto
Chapel.
[Picture: Musselburgh]
The Town Hall, with that tower whose building brought about the curse,
forms the centre of Musselburgh, a fishy, stony, picturesque place with
four bridges over the Esk, leading to the western bank, where the fisher
quarter of Fisherrow straggles towards Joppa, two miles distant. Joppa
Pans are gone now, just as those other pans at Preston, but factories of
sorts, with clustered chimney-stacks, are still grouped about the
melancholy sea-shore, where gales set the very high-road awash on
occasion. Not vulgar, modern factories, but of a certain age; old enough
and grim enough to look like the scene of some thrilling story that yet
awaits the telling. Somewhat thrilling is the report as to the condition
of the road here in 1680, a complaint laid before the Privy Council
stating that, four miles on the London side of Edinburgh, travelling was
dangerous, and travellers to be pitied, “either by their coaches
overturning, their horses falling, their carts breaking, their loads
casting, or horses stumbling, and the poor people with burdens on their
backs sorely discouraged; moreover, strangers do often exclaim thereat.”
All this reads with a very modern touch to those who know the road
to-day, for it is as bad now as it could have been then, and so
continues, in different kinds of badness, through adjoining Portobello
into Edinburgh itself. Here seas of slimy mud, there precipitous setts,
here again profound holes in the macadam, or tramway rails projecting
above the road level, make these last miles wretched. Portobello, that
suburban seaside resort of Edinburgh, fares in this respect no better
than the rest of the way, and the original road across Figgate Whins, the
lonely moor that was here before the first house of Portobello was built,
could have been no worse. That house was the creation of a retired
sailor who had been at the capture of Portobello in Central America by
Admiral Vernon in 1739. He named it after that town, and when the
present seaside resort began to spring up, it took the title. Now it has
a promenade, a pier, hotels, and crowds of visitors in summer upon the
sands, and calls itself “the Brighton of Scotland.” Observe that
Brighton does not return the compliment, and has not yet begun to style
itself “the Portobello of England.”
XXXIII
LEAVING the “Brighton of Scotland” behind, we come to the flat lands of
Craigentinny, stretching away from the now suburban highway down to the
wind-swept and desolate seashore, where the whaups and the sandpipers
make mournful concerts in a minor key, to the accompaniment of the noise
of the sullen breakers and the soughing of the wind amid the rustling
bents. Overlooking the road, within sight and sound of the tinkling
tramcars passing between Joppa, Portobello, and Edinburgh, is that
singular monument, “Miller’s Tomb.”
William Henry Miller, whose remains lie beneath this pile of classic
architecture, was an antiquary and bibliophile, and obtained his nickname
of “Measure Miller” from his habit of measuring the margins of the “tall
copies” of the scarce books he bought. His beardless face and shrill
voice led to the lifelong belief that he was really a woman. The tomb is
elaborately decorated with a carved marble frieze representing the Song
of Miriam and the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. Miller
and his father were both Quakers, and the wealth of which they were
possessed derived from a prosperous seedsman’s business in Canongate,
Edinburgh. To the father came an adventure which does not fall to many
men. He was married in 1789 for the third time, when nearly seventy
years of age, to an Englishwoman, who conveyed him against his will in a
post-chaise from Edinburgh to London.
Passing Craigentinny and Jock’s Lodge we are, in the words of the old
song, “Within a mile of Edinburgh town.” The more modern and acceptable
name of Jock’s Lodge is Piershill, but it has been known by the other for
over two hundred and seventy years. Who the original Jock was seems open
to doubt, but he is supposed to have been a beggar who built himself a
hut on this then lonely road leading to Figgate Whins. Even in 1650,
when Cromwell besieged Edinburgh, the spot had obtained its name, and is
referred to as “that place called Jockis Lodge.” Towards the close of
the eighteenth century a Colonel Piers had a villa here, pulled down in
1793, when barracks—known as Piershill Barracks—were built on the site.
It is a district slowly emerging from the reproach of a disreputable
past, when footpads and murderers haunted the muddy roads, or took refuge
amid the towering rocks of Arthur’s Seat, Crow Hill, or Salisbury Craigs,
or hid in the congenial sloughs of the Hunter’s Bog. Close by the road,
at the entrance to the Queen’s Park of Holyrood, is Muschat’s Cairn, the
place where Scott makes Jeanie Deans meet the outlaw Robertson. This
heap of stones marks the spot where Nicol Muschat of Boghall, a surgeon,
a man of infamous character, murdered his wife by cutting her throat in
1720, a crime which, with Scottish old-time mysticism, he said was
committed by direct personal instigation of the devil. All the same,
they hanged him for it in the Grassmarket, where martyrs “testified” of
old and the criminals of “Auld Reekie” expiated their crimes.
Of course the approach to Edinburgh has, from the picturesque standpoint,
been spoiled. Ranges of grim stone houses and sprawling suburbs now hem
in the road and hide the view of Arthur’s Seat and its neighbouring
eminences; but a few steps to the left serve to disclose them, the little
loch of St. Margaret, and the ruined walls of St. Anthony’s Chapel on the
hillside, once guarding the holy well. St. Anthony’s Chapel, within the
rule of the Abbey of Holyrood, served another turn, for from its tower
glimmered a beacon which in the old days guided mariners safely up the
Forth, a service paid for out of the harbour dues.
The so-called “London” and “Regent” Roads that now lead directly into the
New Town of Edinburgh are modern improvements upon the old approach
through Canongate into the Old Town. If steep, rugged, and winding, the
old way was at least more impressive, for it lay within sight of Holyrood
Palace and brought the wayfarer into the very heart of Scott’s “own
romantic town,” to where the smells and the dirt, the crazy
tenement-houses and the ragged clouts hanging from dizzy tiers of
windows, showed “Scotia’s darling seat” in its most characteristic
aspects.
As Alexander Smith puts it, Scott discovered the city was beautiful, sang
its praises to the world, “and he has put more coin into the pockets of
its inhabitants than if he had established a branch of manufacture of
which they had the monopoly.”
The distant view of Edinburgh is magnificent. The peaked and jagged
masses of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Craigs, the monument-cumbered
Calton Hill, the Castle Rock—all these combine to make the traveller
eager to reach so picturesque a spot. Approaching it and seeing the
smoke-cloud drifting with the breeze away from the hollow from which
Edinburgh’s million chimneys are seen peering, one instantly notes the
peculiar appropriateness of the Scots endearing epithet, “Auld Reekie.”
But it was not only—if indeed at all—an admiration of the picturesque
that made the sight of Edinburgh so welcome to old-time travellers. It
was rather the prospect of coming to the end of their journey, and almost
in sight of a comfortable hotel, that rendered the view so welcome to
those who in the last thirty years or so of the coaching era made this
trip of almost four hundred miles; but those who had come this way at an
earlier period had no such comfortable prospect before them. Instead of
putting up at some fine hospitable inn, such as they were used to even in
the smaller English towns, they were set down at a “stabler’s,” the
premises of one whose first business was to horse the coaches and to let
saddle-horses, and who, as in some sort of an after-thought, lodged those
who were obliged to journey about the country.
[Picture: Calton Hill]
A traveller arriving at Edinburgh in 1774, for instance, had indeed
little comfort awaiting him. “One can scarcely form in imagination the
distress of a miserable stranger on his first entrance into this city,”
says one writing at this period. No inn better than an alehouse, no
decent or cleanly accommodation, nor in fact anything fit for a
gentleman. “On my first arrival,” says this traveller, “my companion and
self, after the fatigue of a long day’s journey, were landed at one of
these stable-keepers’ (for they have modesty to give themselves no higher
denomination) in a part of the town which is called the Pleasance; and on
entering the house we were conducted by a poor girl without shoes or
stockings, and with only a single linsey-woolsey petticoat which just
reached half-way to her ankles, into a room where about twenty Scotch
drovers had been regaling themselves with whisky and potatoes. You may
guess our amazement when we were informed that this was the best inn in
the metropolis, and that we could have no beds unless we had an
inclination to sleep together, and in the same room with the company
which a stage-coach had that moment discharged. ‘Well,’ said I to my
friend, ‘there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be
able to repose ourselves at some coffee-house.’ Accordingly, on inquiry,
we discovered that there was a good dame by the Cross who acted in the
double capacity of pouring out coffee and letting lodgings to strangers,
as we were. She was easily to be found out, and, with all the
conciliating complaisance of a _Maitresse d’Hôtel_, conducted us to our
destined apartments, which were indeed six stories high, but so infernal
in appearance that you would have thought yourself in the regions of
Erebus. The truth is, I will venture to say, you will make no scruple to
believe when I tell you that in the whole we had only two windows, which
looked into an alley five feet wide, where the houses were at least ten
stories high and the alley itself was so sombre in the brightest sunshine
that it was impossible to see any object distinctly.”
Private lodgings, just as those described above, were the resort of those
who had neither friends nor acquaintance in Edinburgh at that time; but
travellers in Scotland were nearly always exercising their ingenuity to
come, at the end of their day’s journey, to the house of some friend or
some friend’s friend, to whom before starting they had been careful to
obtain letters of introduction. So old and so widespread a custom was
this that, so far back as 1425, we find an Act of James the First of
Scotland actually forbidding all travellers resorting to burgh towns to
lodge with friends or acquaintances, or in any place but the
“hostillaries,” unless indeed he was a personage of consequence, with a
great retinue, in which case he might accept a friend’s hospitality,
provided that his “horse and meinze” were sent to the inns.
Of course such an Act was doomed to fall into neglect, but the
innkeepers, equally of course during a long series of years, almost
ceased to exist. A few “stablers’” establishments became known as “inns”
at about the period of Doctor Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh. They were
chiefly situated in the Pleasance, or in that continuation of it, St.
Mary’s Wynd (now St. Mary Street). These inns, such as they were, burst
upon the by no means delighted gaze of the wayfarer from England as he
entered the historic town of Edinburgh, and when he saw them he generally
lifted up his voice and cursed the fate that had sent him so far from
home and into so barbarous a country.