Part 4

At Oakwood we are back again beside Selkirk, and at Selkirk we are near where, each skirting the grounds of Sunderland Hall, Tweed and Ettrick meet, and where we can resume our course up the larger stream. With the delightful section of the Tweed between The Rink and Elibank, Walter Scott had many close ties. The right bank, and part of the left, were within his jurisdiction as Sheriff, in which office he succeeded his friend, Andrew Plummer of Sunderland Hall, in 1799. But even earlier he made familiar acquaintance with the district, on angling and walking excursions, and had visited the Russells and “Laird Nippy”, at Ashestiel. The Rutherfords of Fairnilee—the old house in which was born Alison Rutherford, the author of the popular version of “The Flowers of the Forest”, stands roofless and deserted, but a new mansion has risen in its neighbourhood—were of his kin. He was a welcome guest also with the Pringles of Yair, whose home, bound about by the woods and hills, is across the river, with the “sister heights of Yair”, otherwise known as the “Three Brethren”, as background. It may be remembered that it was with a son of “the long-descended lord of Yair”, Alexander Pringle of Clovenfords, that in later days he went over the field of Waterloo. Clovenfords was the nearest point of his Sheriffdom to town, and it was convenient for him to take up occasional residence there. Leyden had been schoolmaster in the village, which stands high above the rocky den of the Caddon, on the Peebles and Galashiels road, a mile from the “bonny bit” of Caddonfoot. While raising grapes and other fruit it piously preserves the memory of the author of _Marmion_ in the form of an effigy set up before the door of the inn, where, besides Scott, William and Dorothy Wordsworth and other famous travellers have sojourned.

In 1804, Scott found it convenient to take a lease of Ashestiel; and that leafy cover became his home for the next seven years. It is within a couple of miles of Clovenfords and Caddonfoot. Under Caddonlee, where William the Lion waited with his bands from the Highlands and the Lothians, until he was joined by the Forest men on his ill-fated invasion of England, Tweed is crossed by a single wide arch to where “Glenkinnen’s rill” and glen open a short cut, oft traversed with the “Yair boys”, to Yarrow. Near the Peel burn is a knoll shaded by oak and birch—the “Shirra’s Knowe”—where part of _Marmion_ is said to have been written. The house, much changed since Scott’s day, turns its front and two extended wings away from the Tweed; but its most attractive aspect is perhaps that towards the river. The little stream, that with its hoarse roaring in spate used to keep the great author, then just blossoming into fame, from his sleep, still tumbles through the garden. His armchair, which came back from Abbotsford after his death, and the window through which his favourite dogs sprang in or out at his call, are still shown. In these Ashestiel years he saw the last volume of the _Minstrelsy_ through the press, published the _Lay_, completed _Marmion_ and _The Lady of the Lake_, edited Dryden, and began but laid aside _Waverley_. His legal work was not absorbing, and he had time, aside from literature, for following the hounds, “burning the water”, making raids into the Forest, and holding convivial meetings with his friends. They were perhaps the happiest, if not the most brilliant, years of his life.

At Elibank, a couple of miles above Ashestiel, we leave Selkirkshire and enter Peeblesshire. The bare grey walls of the old castle of Gideon Murray, of the Black Barony branch of the name, a lord of Session and trusted Councillor of James VI, stands well above the tree-line, against the background of the hills, and commands a wide view of Upper and Lower Tweeddale. History, in this region, arranges itself in strata, with the oldest at the top—by the river margin are road and rail, farms with their fertile haughs, and the houses and tweed-mills of Walkerburn and Innerleithen; fragments of peels and bastiles of the fighting times when Thornielee and Holylee were onsteads of the monks or of the king’s forest vassals, are perched on the ridges, or hide in the folds or “hopes” of the hills, on whose summits are found the forts and cairns of a still earlier day. The outposts of the Moorfoots come to the left bank of the river, and behind them are the broad shoulders of Windlestraelaw; while over against them are steep outliers of Minchmoor—Elibank, Bold and Plora Laws. “Juden” Murray’s tower is of feudal date and aspect. Scott tells the story of how Young Harden, son of Auld Watt and the “Flower of Yarrow”, and presumably a personable young man, was captured by the owner of the tower and was about to be hanged, when the more politic lady pointed out that she had three ill-favoured daughters to dispose of, and the prisoner was happily married to the youngest and plainest, “Mucklemou’d Meg”. An injudicial proceeding; but not more so than the transaction by which Murray’s neighbour, Lord Traquair, had the President of the Court of Session carried off from Leith Links, by a Border freebooter, Christie’s Will, and kept in a dungeon of Hermitage Castle, until a case was decided in Traquair’s favour. Doubt has been thrown on both stories, and in particular it has been objected that Gideon Murray, whose descendants, the Lords Elibank of to-day, are established at Darn Hall on Eddleston Water, had only one daughter, that her name was Agnes, and that, although she married Young Harden, the alliance was with full consent of all parties concerned.

Lee Pen and Kirnie Law stand sentinels at the entrance of Leithen Water, up which the houses of Innerleithen straggle for a mile or more, along a road which runs across into Lothian, by the Piper’s Grave, the Heriot Water, and Carcant. It is a way by which Walter Scott, walking or driving, has often reached Tweedside, and he would note in passing Leithen Hopes, where his friend Hogg was once a herd laddie, and on the lower slope of the Pen, south of Lee Tower and above the village, the beginnings of the new “Spa”. The topographical resemblances of “St. Ronan’s” to Innerleithen are not very close; and Sir Bingo Binks, Lady Penelope Penfeather, Dr. Quackleben, and other types in Scott’s solitary attempt at a satiric portrayal of the social manners and humours of his own day, are not of local growth. One looks in vain, also, for a “Cleikum Inn” nearer than Peebles. Yet the spirit of Meg Dods pervades the place, the inhabitants of which eagerly accepted the identification and “recognized some of the characters as genuine portraits”. They have even adopted the device, on the inn-sign, of “St. Ronan and the Devil” as the burgh arms.

Geologists—who, “knappin the chucky stanes to pieces wi’ hammers”, reminded Meg of “sae many stane masons run daft”—still frequent the locality, along with anglers and tourists; for at Thornilee, as well as across Tweed at Grieston and the Glen, are celebrated beds of fossiliferous rocks. The bridge is not far above the pool—the “Droon-pouch”—from which the body of the young son of King Malcolm the Maiden was drawn by the Innerleithen people, in gratitude for which its church was made a “Sanctuary” with privileges equal to those of Stow and of Tyninghame. On the farther side is the entrance to the valley of the Quair, and the woods surrounding the venerable form of Traquair House. Its claim to be “the oldest inhabited house in Scotland” applies specifically to its western wing, which is said to date back fully nine centuries. However this may be, the antique character of Traquair is written on its outward features as well as inscribed in its record. It passed through the hands of a succession of royal favourites, of whom the last was James III’s musician and “familiar shield-bearer”, Rogers, who was among those hung over Lauder Bridge by the jealous nobles, before it came into the possession of a branch of the Stewart Earls of Buchan. The Traquair Stewarts have been of mixed reputation; but the tradition of loyalty to the cause of their Royal kin now clings to the house and is symbolized in the great Bear Gateway—the prototype of that of the “Barons of Bradwardine” in _Waverley_—which is not to be opened until a Stewart King comes again this way.

Like the house itself, all its surroundings breathe of the poetry and romance of the past. For was it not behind Plora Craig that “Bonnie Kilmeny gaed up the glen”? Are there not some scrogs of birch left by the waterside of the much besung “Bush aboon Traquair”? Were not the dwelling of Willie Laidlaw, and the scene of “Lucy’s Flitting” in the upper valley, in which stands the lordly mansion of Lord Glenconner—“The Glen” _par excellence_? And above all, is it not by the road along the Quair that one “turns aside to Yarrow”?

In the nine miles between Innerleithen and Peebles the full current of Tweed winds through a country brimfull of beauty and story. Whether the road followed upstream be that on the right or that on the left bank, one passes the ruins of ancient strongholds and modern country-seats, set among trees and lawns—on the south side, after Traquair, Cardrona, Kailzie, Haystoun, and Kingsmeadows, and on the north Glenormiston, the two Horsburghs, and Kerfield—and, behind these, high hills of grass and heather, Lee Pen, Dunslair and the Makeness Kips, over against the Glenrath Heights and the Dun Rig, from which on a clear day can be seen, it is said, the Calton Hill in Edinburgh and the Isle of May. The little country-town of Peebles is in a level space where Eddleston Water, side by side with rail and highway, meets Tweed; and from time immemorial it has been a resort of royalty, a place for pastime and relaxation—“Peebles for pleesure!”—and, in a modest way, for trade. It had a reputation for sanctity, also, in witness whereof there are the remains of the two mediæval churches—those of St. Andrew and of the Haly Rude. The house of the Archdean of Glasgow is represented by the Lodging, in the High Street, of the Dukes of Queensberry, now become a public library, whose name, the Chambers Institute, recalls the fact that the founders of the publishing house of Chambers were born in a humble cottage in one of the cross streets. Peebles has outgrown the limits marked by the fragment of the town wall, and has spread northwards to the foot of the hills, where on Venlaw—part of its lost patrimony—it has public walks and a “Hydro”; while it has crossed, by the handsome stone bridge, to the southern bank of Tweed; whence a branch railway follows the course of the river to Broughton, on the way to Clydesdale.

A mile out of the town, to the west, is Neidpath Castle, the most commandingly and romantically situated, and, in spite of the yawning gaps made in its walls by Cromwell’s cannon, the best-preserved—Traquair excepted—of the strongholds of the olden time on Tweed. The river is here constricted by the bare cairn-strewn ridge of Caidmuir—once Peebles Common—on the south, and by the Edston heights on the Neidpath side, and has cut a deep ravine through which has drained the great lake that once filled upper Tweeddale. The water swirls around rock and boulder below the castle base; and the screen of trees, whose destruction by that “degenerate Douglas”, Old Q., provoked Wordsworth’s indignant sonnet, has been partially restored. Access to the lofty thick walled double tower, still partly occupied, is by a gateway and courtyard; and over this outer portal are the arms of the early owners—the strawberries of the Frasers of Oliver Castle, from whom are descended the Frasers of the North; and the goat’s head of the Hays of Yester, who here entertained James VI, defied the Commonwealth, and were created Lords of Tweeddale. Afterwards the castle and lands came into the possession of the Douglases of Queensberry, and they now belong to the Earl of Wemyss and March. From the window, now built up, over the arch, as has been sung by Scott and by Campbell, the dying “Maid of Neidpath” looked forth to watch the return of her undiscerning lover. Still discoverable is the casement in the Justice Room of the tower, out of which wrong-doers were hung after summary trial.

As Pennecuik sang two centuries ago:

“The noble Neidpath Peebles overlooks With its fair bridge and Tweed’s meandering crooks”.

But it overlooks much else; and a short distance above it there open up, to right and left, the subsidiary vales of the Lyne and the Manor. The former comes from the “Cauldstaneslap”, in the heart of the Pentlands, and passing on its way, at the meeting with the Tarth, Drochil Castle—built as a retreat by the Regent Morton, who was shortened by a head with a guillotine of his own contriving before he had time to complete his work—enters Tweed below the remains of the great Roman Camp of Lyne. The Manor Water draws its springs from the neighbourhood of Yarrow. Once it was defended by eight strong peels, only one of which, Barns—where Mr. John Buchan has laid the scene of his “John Burnet of Barns”—stands erect. Posso Craigs, where the Stewart Kings bred their falcons, and the sites of St. Gordian’s Kirk and Cross and of “Macbeth’s Castle” can be pointed out. But Manor’s chief memorials are the grave and the cottage of David Ritchie, the prototype of the “Black Dwarf”, the “recluse of Meiklestane Moor”. Scott, as a young visitor to Manor with Adam Ferguson, received an impression which never left him when the deformed and eccentric being, who built his own hut with its doorway three feet high, took him into its arcana, and locking the door and seizing his hand, asked him earnestly: “Hae ye the pooer?”—the power of divination!

The “Thieves’ Road”, by which the Border reivers made their way into Lothian, strikes athwart the hills enclosing the valleys of Manor and Lyne, descending to the Tweed from the slopes of the Scrape to the woods of Dawick. Veitches were succeeded in this sheltered place by Naesmiths, whose fortunes were built up by an indefatigable seventeenth century lawyer known as “the Deil o’ Dawick”. It boasts possession of the oldest larches in Scotland, brought hither on the suggestion of Linnæus, though the honour is disputed by Kailzie lower down Tweed. Across the river is another fine wooded domain—Stobo—whose ancient church preserves a Norman doorway, a saddle-back tower, and a “jougs”; while, from the hills behind, this level strath seems to be menaced by the fragments of Tinnis Castle, set, like a robber tower on the Rhine, on the summit of an almost inaccessible rocky spur. It is believed to have been the original hold of the Tweedies of Drummelzier, a race whose fabled descent was from a Tweed water-nymph, and whose conduct towards their neighbours, the Veitches of Dawick and the Geddeses of Rachan, sadly belied the motto on their tomb at Drummelzier Church—“Thole and Think”. Hard by that edifice at the meeting of the Powsail and the Tweed, and not far from the ruined castle of the Hays of Drummelzier, is another grave of which tradition has much to say—that of “Merlin the Wild”, who prophesied on the spot the Union of the Kingdoms.

Beyond Drummelzier and Broughton, an estate and parish which in the eighteenth century belonged to two historical personages of dubious repute—“Secretary Murray” of the ’45 and M‘Queen of Braxfield, Stevenson’s “Lord Justice Clerk”—the Tweed is found to have dwindled almost to the dimensions of a moorland burn, enclosed among smooth brown “hills of sheep”. Smaller streams pour down in headlong course on either hand; and there are not wanting places of historic and literary note by the river banks and in the tributary valleys. Every burn and haugh has its story of old feuds, in which Frasers and Tweedies, Hunters and Murrays, Scotts and Hays, and other clans of Upper Clydesdale have had a part; and “forts” and “rings” and “chesters” are plentifully sprinkled on the hill-tops. They are especially rife on the heights looking down on the Holms water, which comes from the grassy and heathery folds of Culter Fell and Cardon, and, after joining the Broughton burn, falls into the Tweed below Rachan. For in this neighbourhood, by the “Pass of Corscrine”, ran for a time the frontiers of the Kingdom, as fixed between Edward I and Edward Baliol. Like many other old families of the district, the Geddeses of Rachan, “chiefs of the name”, passed out of the Upper Tweed in poverty and litigation. The like fate, or worse, befell the Murrays of Stanhope, whose representative, after the laird who lost his head in the ’45, was the “Judas” of the Rebellion, for whom Scott’s father showed his contempt, by flinging out of the window the cup from which his caller had partaken of tea in George Square. The fact that they claimed to have received their lands, “for a Bow and a Broad Arrow, when the King comes to hunt in Yarrow”, from Malcolm Canmore did not prevent the Hunters from parting with the estate of Polmood, after one of the longest lawsuits in the annals of even the Scots law.

Stanhope and Polmood have streams tumbling down to Tweed from the heights of Dollar Law and Broad Law, 2800 feet above sea-level; and on the opposite, or right bank, above the fragment of Wrae Castle, which once belonged to the Tweedies, is the site of “Lincumdoddie”, where dwelt “Willie Wastle’s wife”, whose face, according to Burns’s song, “wad fyle the Logan Water”, which runs by it. Beyond the Kinkledoors burn is the “Crook Inn”, beloved by the many anglers who have sought sport and recreation in this solitude among the hills, where, besides Tweed itself, there are many wild side streams—Hearthstane, Menzion, Fruid, and Fingland; Glencraigie, Glenbreck, and Glencor—frequented by brown and yellow trout. But, chief of all, there is the Talla, which, from its springs in lonely Gameshope, rushes down the rocks at Talla Linnfoot, and rests in the two-mile-long reservoir of the Edinburgh Water Company, before joining the Tweed at Tweedsmuir Church, nearly opposite the scant remains of Oliver Castle, where the Frasers first planted themselves on Tweedside.

The Frasers had fled the scene long before the Hunters and the Hays, the Geddeses and the Tweedies, and other families have succeeded and followed them in their flight. Few, and set far apart, are houses and “bields” of any kind, on the lonely road that keeps high up the hillside above the valley floor, until, at “Tweed’s Well”, passing over into Annandale, it parts company with the “Scott Country”.

Footnotes

[1]“Penmanscore” is the correct reading, though “Permanscore” is given in the _Minstrelsy_.

BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND

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_Attractively Produced_ _Coloured Jacket_

_Descriptive Text by_ The Thames. G. E. Mitton. Bath and Wells. Arthur L. Salmon. The Peak District. R. Murray Gilchrist. In London’s By-Ways. Walter Jerrold. Winchester. Sidney Heath. The Shores of Fife. John Geddie. Heart of London. Walter Jerrold. Cornish Riviera. Sidney Heath. Loch Lomond. George Eyre-Todd. Dartmoor. Arthur L. Salmon. Edinburgh. John Geddie. Canterbury. Canon Danks. Shakespeare-Land. Walter Jerrold. The Scott Country. John Geddie. Oxford. F. D. How. Cambridge. Noel Barwell. York. George Benson. English Lakes. A. G. Bradley.

Transcriber’s Notes

--Research into publication date and location determined that this book is in the public domain.

--Corrected a few palpable typographical errors.