Part 15

Carlyle once, in a memorable outburst, declared that “the picturesque” to him was “a mere bore,” and that “simple knolls and fields, with brooks and hedges among them,” were best of all for his taste. If this was genuine, and not sheer Carlylean perversity, why then Ecclefechan, his native village, was the ideal birthplace, for it is the mere negation of beauty and the picturesque. Yet it has a certain interesting quality. It has “character.” For you could not pick out any individual house and point to its comeliness, but although Ecclefechan is in its component parts made up of precisely the same materials as fifty other Annandale villages, there is a distinctive personality in it which would be evident even if the stimulating association with Carlyle were not present. A rushing burn goes down one side of the street and the swifts fly and scream overhead. Among the unassertive white-faced and grey houses is one with an archway and above it a quaint window of quasi-Jacobean character. It is the dwelling-house built by Thomas Carlyle’s father and uncles about 1791, and over the doorway is the plain inscription, “Birthplace of Carlyle, 4 Dec. 1795.” Beside the doorway itself stands a boulder-stone, now graven with a characteristic Carlylean quotation: “That idle crag”; and always, above the shrilling of the swifts, you hear the murmur of the stream a few feet away: “the little Kuhbach gushing kindly by.”

“The arch-house,” as it is known locally, was built with that central archway for the convenience of those three mason-brothers, James, Frank, and Tom, in storing the materials of their trade. There they reared their several families.

“This umbrageous Man’s nest,” Carlyle styles it: and a very well-filled nest it was, too. To-day it is freely open to all comers, and many and diverse are those who come here. In the year ending August 31st, 1905, the house was visited by 1,700 people, who gazed with reverence, with curiosity, or with mere vacuity of mind—after their several sorts—upon the humble interiors.

“And is this really the room in which Carlyle was born?” asked one in that first category, a good many years ago, in an awestruck voice.

“Aye,” said the gudewife, who to be sure did not rightly comprehend the inner meaning of all this hero-worship; “an’ oor Maggie was born here, too.”

Homeric laughter, doubtless, at this, in that place where the literary immortals foregather.

[Sidenote: _IN THE BIRTHPLACE_]

Professor Wilson, “Christopher North,” and his fellow-contributors to the _Edinburgh Review_, claimed to cultivate literature on a little oatmeal, but the claim might better be made for the author of “Frederick the Great” and “Sartor Resartus.” Plain living and high-thinking, you cannot fail to see, formed his life. A very simple-living, homely man indeed, as all his intimate belongings clearly show. His plain, commonplace inkstand, with the last pen he used, his simple writing-table with its original table-cloth, his tobacco-jar, together with a tobacco-cutter with which he sliced his own tobacco, are all of the least expensive kind, and, looking upon them, I feel vicariously ashamed for the modern authors of “masterpieces” who, according to the literary journals of the day, cannot feel “inspired” unless they are lapped round with every luxury. Carlyle’s felt hat is enclosed under glass: his straw hat hangs upon the wall, and you may put it on your own head. Most people do. Prominent among the many tributes to his genius is the great laurel wreath sent in 1895 by the German Emperor to mark the centenary of his birth. It was, of course, primarily a tribute to the hero-worshipping author of “Frederick the Great.”

Carlyle himself lies in the dour little graveyard of Ecclefechan, among his kin and away from his wife, whose grave is in the roofless nave of Haddington Abbey. Like most Scottish kirkyards, the gates of it are chained and locked.

“Entepfuhl” as Carlyle in “Sartor Resartus” styles Ecclefechan, is proud of him, largely, I suspect, because it perceives that the world beyond Annandale thinks so much of “Tam Carl.” There is a “Resartus Reading Room,” rather shabby with decrepit chairs, themselves sadly wanting reseating, or, better still, renewing altogether.

An oddly designed old house-tablet recently uncovered from the many coats of plaster and whitewash that had long concealed it, is now a feature of the house adjoining the Carlyle birthplace, and is perhaps the only curious item in the village.

There is a railway station nowadays at Ecclefechan, but the village is probably a quieter place than it was in Carlyle’s early days, when the Glasgow Mail dashed by, and the local coaches enlivened the street twice a day. For one thing, the station lies at a considerable step away, up along what was the new road when Telford made it, so long ago, and called new to this day.

It is a kind of mild hog’s-back ascent out of Ecclefechan and so along the six miles to Lockerbie, passing on the way the farmhouse of Mainhill, where Thomas Carlyle’s father at the age of fifty-seven started to be a farmer, striving there ten years, from 1815 to 1826. Then comes the beautiful park of Castlemilk, seat of the Jardine family, followed by Milk Bridge crossing the river of that name, and the smart suburban entrance to Lockerbie.

[Sidenote: _LOCKERBIE_]

The town of Lockerbie is a thriving place, of a neatness and cleanliness altogether remarkable: a change indeed from the time when this rhyme was possible:

Lockerbie is a dirty place, A kirk without a steeple, A midden set at ilka door— But a cantie set o’ people.

New in appearance, with a modern Town Hall in a florid version of the Scotch baronial style, and an air of abounding prosperity. Here, in this considerable place of shops, the Southron who knows not Scotland first discovers what the Scottish nation can do in the way of scones, seed-cakes, plum-cakes, baps, and bannocks, to say nothing of shortbread. It is a liberal education, in its especial way.

Five miles north of Lockerbie, Jardine Hall is passed, with the haunted ruin of Spedlin’s Tower away across the park. In another mile, at Dinwoodie Green, the road again divides into old road and new. The old road, running to the right hand, through the town of Moffat, over Ericstane Brae and down to Elvanfoot Bridge, a distance of twenty-three miles, is an excellent road still, but it ascends rugged and mountainous heights, while the “new road,” avoiding Moffat altogether, is at its highest altitude 500 feet below the summit of the old. Between the two roads on the way to Moffat runs the river Annan, and here and there are glens that at different times gave shelter to Covenanters and horse-stealing rascals. Wamphray Glen was one of the fastnesses of the Johnstones: the locality having from time immemorial been rich in Johnstones and Jardines. There was a Johnstone who lived in the old days at Lockerbie, in one of the numerous defensible towers of the district. He bore a more or less knightly part in the battle of Dryfe Sands, hard by, while at home his gentle lady with her own fair hands dinged in the head of Lord Maxwell with the castle keys.

The new road continues, with few features on the way, on a gradual rise, to Beattock, crossing the Annan at Johnstone Bridge, a pretty wooded scene, with wayside post-office. Beattock was important in the old coaching days, for here, beside the road, in a spot otherwise lonely, stood Beattock Inn. Two miles down the road was Moffat. There was nothing else but that change-house for mail-coach and stage. The house remains even now, but no longer an inn, and adjoining it stands the Beattock station of the Caledonian Railway, which abolished coaching on this road over fifty years ago.

Nowadays there is no house of public entertainment in all the thirty miles between Lockerbie and Crawford, on this modern road avoiding Moffat, except the refreshment room at Beattock station: the village that has in latter days sprung up here being quite innocent of anything of the kind.

XXXII

[Sidenote: _THE CARLISLE AND GLASGOW ROAD_]

The town of Moffat, down below, had no place in the scheme of Telford’s Carlisle and Glasgow Road. It had very little importance in the councils of the Post Office; Glasgow, Carlisle, Manchester, and London being places whose needs far outweighed any local discontent; and the new road went straight away from Beattock, leaving the little town aside.

[Sidenote: _RE-MAKING THE ROAD_]

Before the beginnings of coaching, when Glasgow made its need of direct and speedy communication with the south heard, the London mail went by mounted post-boys, through Edinburgh. At that time the road to Glasgow went through Moffat and steeply up over Ericstane Brae, where it was improved or “turnpiked,” about 1776, but improved, it would seem, in no very substantial manner, for it is recorded that “seventy carts of merchants’ goods” using it weekly had caused it to fall into disrepair. Such remained the condition of affairs when mail-coaches were established elsewhere, and gave the growing commercial city of Glasgow hopes of acquiring a direct service of its own. Such a service meant much to the Glasgow of that day, already grown commercially important. It was pointed out to the Post Office that already, since 1776, the Glasgow and Carlisle Diligence had found it possible to travel this route; and what was possible to private enterprise should be possible also to Government. To induce the Post Office to establish a mail by this route, through Carlisle, the Glasgow merchants and the Chamber of Commerce went so far as to subscribe handsomely to eke out the slender pay offered contractors, and on this basis the mail was established in June 1788. But the Post Office was not content. The road in general was rough and stony, and the Secretary was for ever threatening to withdraw the coach, if the worst places were not repaired. In 1795, Provost Dunlop was informed that the Carlisle and Glasgow mail might have to be discontinued in favour of the old route by Edinburgh, involving a loss of one whole day. Glasgow appealed to the Government to stay this threatened calamity, and to repair the road south of Elvanfoot. It was pointed out that Lord Douglas had expended £4,000 on the road between Lesmahagow and the Hassockwell Burn, near the Devil’s Beef Tub, and that the city had already done much for it. The road, it was added, was not, after all, a local highway, but part of the great national route, north and south, and, as such, rightly the especial charge of the Government. Going through the wild, little-travelled watershed between Clyde and Annan, it could never be adequately repaired from the proceeds of any tolls it was possible to charge. It was further urged that the Government had itself impoverished the road, the mail-coaches being by law exempt from all tolls, and thus being able to carry passengers more cheaply than the stage-coaches, which paid heavily, and, unable to compete on equal terms, had, between 1788 and 1795, been driven off the route. Thus the turnpikes lost their dues at every turn.

To all this the Post Office turned a deaf ear. The Department knew perfectly well how greatly Glasgow appreciated the expediting of its mails by one day, and was convinced that its merchants would make considerable sacrifices to retain the advantage. The Department was entirely correct. An Act was obtained, at the instance of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, empowering the Evan Water Trustees to make and maintain a new road over the watershed, in place of the old road at Ericstane Brae, described in the Act, George the Third, c. 21, 1798, as “very steep and hazardous for all wheel carriages, and dangerous for travellers.”

But it was one thing to “empower” the Trustees to do this, and quite another, and not so easy an one, to find the money. It was eventually raised by subscriptions. The merchants of Glasgow, the public institutions of the city, and a number of English mill-owners between them subscribed £6,000, and the road was begun; firstly from Elvanfoot to Summit Level, and thence down Evan Water to Beattock, there joining the Edinburgh, Moffat, and Dumfries turnpike; and secondly, a continuation of this road by a diagonal line across the level Dale of Annan to Dinwoodie Green, eleven miles south of Moffat, on the Glasgow, Moffat, and Carlisle turnpike.

The works, as already said, were begun, and the first section, from Elvanfoot to Beattock, was completed in 1808; but then the funds became exhausted, and the Dumfriesshire people, who had been expected to do the rest, would not, or could not, do it. So the road had to go, after all, round by Moffat; turning sharply to the left at Langbedholm, two miles north of Beattock, and thence made its way by the Chapel Brae to Moffat, and south, as before, by Wamphray, Woodfoot, and Dinwoodie Green.

Even this half-realised plan was preferable to the rugged round by Ericstane Muir; but no sooner was the new road made than the old question of repairs was again raised. The tolls were insufficient to pay expenses, and the wear and tear of the elements and the traffic could not be made good. What it was like in 1812 we learn from the writings of Colonel Hawker, who, travelling this way at that time, describes it as having been mended with large soft quarry-stones, at first like brickbats, and afterwards like sand. Bad as this was, it was the best that could be done with the resources available; and the Post Office continued hard-hearted, Hasker, the Superintendent of Mail Coaches, threatening continually to withdraw the mail and send it round by Edinburgh. In 1810, the various Trusts concerned had approached Parliament for a redress of their grievances, without result, but at last, in 1813, an Act was passed repealing the exemption of mail-coaches from toll in Scotland, where the population was (it was at length conceded) scanty, and tolls yielded a miserably small sum.

[Sidenote: _CHECK AND CHECKMATE_]

But the Post Office had as many turns as an old and often-hunted dog-fox, and, declining to be baulked, violated the spirit of this concession by an ingenious trick. What had been given by the Act, the Department took away again by the simple expedient of raising the postage on letters to Scotland by one halfpenny each, aggregating an increase of £6,000 per annum. It was quite like a game of chess.

To this move the Scottish Trusts replied by raising their tolls against the mails, with the result that the Post Office was made to pay £12,000 per annum more. They cried metaphorically, if not actually, “Check!” The next move was with the Superintendent, who responded by taking off a number of the mails, by way of warning to Glasgow.

Checkmate!

This was, of course, very interesting as a trial of strength and endurance, but was, after all, a little unworthy, and scarcely the way to conduct the business of a nation. The fact, indeed, seems to have been soon realised, for the Government, on December 7th, 1814, took the whole matter up, and the Treasury instructed Telford to “make a proper survey, plan, and estimate” for amending the whole course of the road between Carlisle and Glasgow, and to report to a special House of Commons Committee. Telford surveyed the road, and in 1815 reported: “The existing declivities, direction, and construction are so bad that for many years the road has been with difficulty kept open.” He submitted detailed plans for its improvement, and assured the Committee that they would, if adopted, shorten the distance, then 102-1/2 miles, by nearly 9 miles, and the time occupied in travelling by at least the equivalent of 9 more.

Hasker’s evidence before the Committee showed that the Post Office seriously contemplated sending the mail by Edinburgh—a six-hours’ longer journey each way.

A commendable feature of those times was that when it did at last come to a Committee being appointed, results were very soon shown. On June 28th, 1815, not long after Telford’s report had been received, the Committee in its turn reported unanimously that his plan ought to be carried out, and that the Government should grant substantial aid towards the cost, estimated at £80,000. A year later—July 1st, 1816—an “Act for a grant of £50,000 for the Road from the City of Glasgow to the City of Carlisle” was passed; the work to be managed by the already existing Commissioners of Highland Roads and Bridges. Voluminous reports, with plans, exist, among the Parliamentary papers of that age, showing how the work progressed to its completion; and the traveller of to-day who explores the districts between Carlisle and Glasgow will see for himself, in the contrast between the extravagant gradients of the old road in the neighbourhood of Moffat, and the easy rise and fall of Telford’s new stretches of highway, how thoroughly the work was done.

XXXIII

[Sidenote: _MOFFAT_]

Moffat, in these days a neat and quiet townlet relying upon the waters of its Sulphur Well for its prosperity, lies in a hollow of the mountains. As to which is the neater and cleaner of the two—Lockerbie or Moffat—I will not be so rash as to hazard an opinion, but no one is likely to dispute the fact that “Moaffet” is the quieter. For one thing, this quietude is one of its principal assets, and although it has a railway station, the fact of its being merely the terminus of a two-mile branch from Beattock will be sufficient to prove that the quiet is not greatly disturbed by trains.

There is nothing very striking in the appearance of Moffat, beyond this remarkable neatness and the breadth of its High Street; the centre of the town, in its mingling of shops and villas, and the ever-present spaciousness, indeed, resembling the ordinary suburbs of less restful places. But one singular object that has claims neither to antiquity nor beauty, stands in midst of the broad street and tells the stranger that Moffat and its neighbourhood are celebrated for something else than a medicinal spa and a great hydropathic establishment. This is the Colvin Fountain, presented to the town by William Colvin, of the neighbouring Craigielands, and surmounted by the effigy of a contemplative-looking ram, in allusion to the sheep-farming that has given prosperity to the district.

The Auld Kirk of Moffat, belonging to an era very different from this, stands appropriately secluded in the old kirkyard that is locked and barred against casual entry. The Auld Kirk is in ruins, and that is appropriate too; for what bond of sympathy can there be between the rather smug, self-satisfied character of the modern hypochondriacs who, metaphorically (and sometimes actually) lapped in cotton-wool, now resort to Moffat, and the stern Covenanters who were dragooned in the surrounding braes and on the inclement fells, and passed a night in prison in the Auld Kirk, before being conducted to the small mercies awaiting them in Edinburgh? No: the historic building is rightly left alone to its memories.

But this thorough locking of the old churchyards in Scotland is a little revolting to an Englishman. It seems to emphasise, to the point of callousness, the fact that the day of the dead is indeed done; and hints that they not only have no part in the world, but none in the thoughts of their own kin.

Here lies the great road-reformer, John Loudon Macadam, and few are those who, turning aside to seek his epitaph, trouble further to have the gates unlocked. Macadam was born at Ayr in 1756, and died at Duncrieff House, Moffat, in 1836, after having made an imperishable name in the annals of the road, and contributing a new verb, “to macadamise,” to the language.

[Sidenote: _BURNS_]

Situated on one of the two roads from Carlisle to Edinburgh, Moffat had of old-time a goodly number of inns. Among them the “Annandale Arms” and the “Spur” were immediate competitors. There are Burns associations with the “Spur,” but much more intimate ones with the “Old Black Bull” inn, which remains very much the same plain whitewashed stone house it was in the poet’s day. The tale is told how he, with some cronies, was drinking in a window-seat of the inn when they saw two ladies ride by on horseback; one of them so pretty and so small that she was known as “one of the Graces in miniature.” “Odd,” said one of the public-house loungers, “that one should be so little and the other so big”; whereupon Burns wrote on a window-pane:

Ask why God made the gem so small, And why so huge the granite? Because God meant mankind should set The greater value on it.

A very pretty compliment to the little lady, but uncommonly hard, by implication, on the full-sized one. The pane of glass was long ago removed, and is supposed to be now at Dumfries.

The famed Sulphur Well is situated a mile and a half away from Moffat, in a Swiss-like châlet on a rugged hillside 300 feet above the town. Some walk to it, others ride, and for two-pence you can drink as much of the almost incredibly nasty water as you please. The first tumbler is, to taste and smell (it smells like “election eggs” or assafœtida), more than enough for the strongest stomach, and seems to be brewed in an inner laboratory of the infernal regions. But the second glass—if you are ill enough or courageous enough to take a second—seems not so bad, and visitors by degrees become perfect gluttons for it. The water is a specific for rheumatism and gout, among other things, and was known so long ago as 1633, when Rachel Whiteford, daughter of the parson of Moffat, benefited by it. In 1659, Dr. Matthew McKaile, of Edinburgh, wrote a pamphlet in Latin about its virtues, and thereafter the fame of the Well has taken care of itself. But the invigorating air of the mountains has, no doubt, at least an equal share in restoring many of the invalids to health.

The rugged and forbidding scenery around Moffat culminates on the Edinburgh Road at the gloomy hollow of the hills called the “Devil’s Beef Tub,” which is said to have acquired its name from this being a favourite place among the cattle-thieves of yore to hide their stolen cattle. The “Beef Tub” is really a deeper and more rugged version of the “Devil’s Punch Bowl” on the Portsmouth Road. Sir Walter Scott, who romantically says “It looks as if four hills were laying their heads together to shut daylight from the dark, hollow space between them,” tells in “Redgauntlet” how a prisoner being marched past the spot, breaking from his guards, escaped by throwing himself down and _rolling_ to the bottom.

[Sidenote: _TRAGEDY OF THE SNOW_]

This wild country was the scene of a mail-coach tragedy on February 1st, 1831, when the Dumfries and Edinburgh mail was snowed up at Moffat. Eager to perform their duty, the driver and guard procured saddle-horses and flung the mail-bags across them, but a few minutes’ effort proved that it was impossible to proceed with the horses, and the two undaunted men sent them back to Moffat, and went on by themselves, afoot. It was an enterprise of the most hopeless kind, impossible to be accomplished. They sank down exhausted, near this gorge, and perished in the snow. Their bodies were found, a week later, and the mail-bags they had carefully hung upon a wayside snow-post, hard by.

To-day, in the old kirkyard of Moffat, two stones to the memory of these brave men, “faithful unto death,” may be found, with the inscriptions:

Erected by Subscription in 1835.

Sacred to the Memory of James MacGeorge, Guard of the Dumfries and Edinburgh Royal Mail, who unfortunately perished at the age of 47, near Tweedshaws, after the most strenuous exertions in the performance of his duty, during that memorable snowstorm 1st February 1831,

and