Part 15

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.

The initial letter in the name of Haddington is a superfluity and a 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]