In the Border Country Part 9

Earlston, the Ercildoune of olden time--name much better suited to the quiet beauty of its charming situation--has no unimportant place both in Scottish history and romance. It has been honoured by many royal visits.

Here David the Sair Sanct subscribed the Foundation Charter of Melrose Abbey in 1136, and his son the Confirmatory Charter in 1143. Other royal visitors followed; there James IV. encamped for a night on his way from Edinburgh to Flodden; Queen Mary made a brief stay at Cowdenknowes as she pa.s.sed from Craigmillar to Jedburgh; and lastly came Prince Charlie (unwelcome) on his march to Berwick-on-Tweed. But above all it is renowned as having been the residence (and birthplace probably) of Thomas the Rhymer, or True Thomas, or simply, as literary history prefers to call him, Thomas of Ercildoune. The Rhymer's Tower, a.s.sociated with this remarkable personage, stands close to the Leader.

Only a mere ivy-clad fragment remains (some 30 feet in height), but the memories of the place stretch back to more than six centuries, when Thomas was at the height of his fame as his country's great soothsayer and bard--the _vates sacer_ of the people. His rhymes are still quoted, and many of them have been realised in a manner which Thomas himself could scarcely have antic.i.p.ated. Scott makes him the author of the metrical romance "Sir Tristrem," published from the Auchinleck _MS._ in 1804, but the Rhymer is unlikely to have been the original compiler.

With his Fairyland adventures and return to that mysterious region, everybody is familiar. A quaint stone in the church wall carries the inscription:

Auld Rymr's Race Lyes in this place,

and the probability is that Thomas sleeps somewhere amidst its dark dust, unless, indeed, he be still spell-bound in some as yet undiscovered cavern underneath the Eildons, waiting with Arthur, and Merlin, the blast of that irresistible horn which is to "peal their proud march from Fairyland."

Mellerstain in Earlston Parish, is the burial-place of Grisell Baillie, the Polwarth heroine and songstress, and author of the plaintive "Werena My Heart Licht I wad Dee." Cowdenknowes, "where Homes had ance commanding," one of the really cla.s.sical names in Border minstrelsy is the scene of that sweetest of love lyrics, the "Broom o' the Cowdenknowes":--

"How blithe, ilk morn, was I to see My swain come o'er the hill!

He skipt the burn and flew to me: I met him with good-will."

Sandyknowe, Scott's cradling-ground in romance, and Bemersyde, one of the oldest inhabited houses in the Tweed Valley (partly peel), still evidencing the Rhymer's couplet:--

"Tyde what may betyde, Haig shall be Haig of Bemersyde,--"

are both in the near neighbourhood.

A charming bit of country road lies between Earlston and Dryburgh, pa.s.sing Redpath, the Park, Gladswood, and round by Bemersyde Hill, from which Scott had his favourite view of the Tweed--the "beautiful bend"

shrining the site of the original Melrose, and the graceful Eildons--and by which his funeral procession wended its mournful way just seventy-four years ago. Half-way between Earlston and Melrose (by road 4-1/2 miles), and close to

"Drygrange with the milk-white yowes, Twixt Tweed and Leader standing,"

the latter stream blends its waters with those of the Tweed, where the foliage is ever at its thickest and greenest; and looking up the glen towards Newstead and Melrose, another vision of rare beauty meets the eye. Framed in the tall piers of the railway viaduct (150 feet high)--not at all a disfigurement--the gracefully-bending Tweed, no more fair than here, with the smoke rising above the Abbeyed town, Eildon in the foreground, and the blue barrier of the hills beyond, make up a picture such as may come to us in dreams.

VII. LIDDESDALE

_From the Author's chapter in Ca.s.sell's "British Isles."_ (_By permission._)

The Liddel rises in the Cheviot range, close to Jedhead, at an alt.i.tude of six hundred and fifty feet above sea level, and after a course of seven-and-twenty miles, with a fall of five hundred and forty-five feet, it joins the Esk at the Moat of Liddel, below Canonbie, near the famous Netherby Hall, twelve miles north of Carlisle and about eight from Langholm. It is fed by a score of affluents, of which the chief are the Hermitage and Kershope Waters, the latter const.i.tuting for nine miles or so the immediate boundary between the two countries. From its geographical position as cut off from the main division of the county, Liddesdale has little in common with the valleys of the Tweed and Teviot. A Liddesdaler, for instance, seldom crosses over to Tweedside, nor can a Tweedsider be said to have other than a comparatively slight acquaintances.h.i.+p with his southern neighbour of the s.h.i.+re. Indeed, Liddesdale has been described as belonging in some respects more to England than to Scotland, and in a sense, it may be said to be the very centre of the Border Country itself.

PLATE 25

CAERLAVEROCK CASTLE

FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH

PAINTED BY

JAMES ORROCK, R.I.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

If now-a-days one may roam through Liddesdale with some degree of comfort, it was a very different matter for Scott and Shortreed little more than a hundred years since. They knew scarcely anything of the district, which lay to them, as was said, "like some unkenned-of isle ayont New Holland." But Scott was bent on his Minstrelsy ballad-huntings. And it was the very inaccessibility of the Liddel glens which inspired him with the hope of treasure. For seven autumns in succession they "raided" Liddesdale, as Scott phrased it, and, as he antic.i.p.ated, some of the finest specimens in the Minstrelsy were the outcome of these excursions. Evidence of the utter solitariness and roadlessness of the region is found in the fact that no wheeled vehicle had been seen in Liddesdale till the advent of Scott's gig about 1798.

Nor was there a single inn or public-house to be met with in the whole valley. Lockhart describes how the travellers pa.s.sed "from the shepherd's hut to the minister's manse, and again from the cheerful hospitality of the manse to the rough and jolly welcome of the homestead, gathering wherever they went songs and tunes and occasionally more tangible relics of antiquity." But a hundred years have wrought wondrous transformation on the wild wastes of the Liddel. The "impenetrable savage land" of Scott's day, trackless and bridgeless, is now singularly well opened up to civilisation and the modern tripper.

The Waverley Route of the North British Railway pa.s.ses down the valley within a few miles of its best-known landmarks. The Road Committees are careful as to their duty, and a well-developed series of coaching tours has proved exceedingly popular. From a miserable expanse of bleak moors and quaking moss-hags, the greater portion of lower Liddesdale, at least, has pa.s.sed into a picturesque combination of moor and woodland with rich pastoral holms and fields in the highest state of cultivation.

But the main glory of Liddesdale is the romance that hangs over it.

There is probably no parish in Scotland--for be it remembered that Liddesdale is virtually one parish--which could show such an extraordinary number of peel-houses to its credit. Their ruins, or where these have disappeared, the sites are pointed out with surprising frequency. A distinctively Border district, this was to be expected, and the like is true of the English side also. A Liddesdale Keep, still in excellent preservation--"four-square to all the winds that blow"--and far and away the strongest and the most ma.s.sive pile on the Border frontier is Hermitage, in the pretty vale of that name, within easy reach from Steele Road or Riccarton stations, three and four miles respectively. Built by the Comyns in the thirteenth century, it pa.s.sed to the Soulises, the Angus Douglases, to "Bell-the-Cat" himself, the Hepburn Bothwells, and the "bold Buccleuch," whose successor still holds it. Legend may almost be said to be indigenous to the soil of Hermitage, and one wonders not that Scott found his happy hunting-ground here. The youngest child will tell us about that "Ogre" Soulis, who was so hated by his va.s.sals for his awful oppression of them, that at last they boiled him alive--horrible vengeance--on the Nine-Stane Rig, a Druidic circle near by. In part confirmation of the tragedy it is a.s.serted that the actual cauldron may still be seen at Dalkeith Palace. Scott was constantly quoting the verses from Leyden's ballad:

"On a circle of stones they placed the pot, On a circle of stones but barely nine; They heated it red and fiery hot Till the burnish'd bra.s.s did glimmer and s.h.i.+ne

They rolled him up in a sheet of lead, A sheet of lead for a funeral pall; They plunged him in the cauldron red, And melted him, lead, and bones, and all."

The Nine-Stane Rig is the scene also of the fragmentary "Barthram's Dirge"--a clever Surtees forgery undetected by Scott. Leyden's second Hermitage ballad--two of the best in the "Minstrelsy"--deals with the Cout or Chief of Keeldar, in Northumberland, done to death by the "Ogre"

in the Cout's Pool close to the Castle. In the little G.o.d's-acre at Hermitage the Cout's grave is pointed out (Keeldar also shows what purports to be the Cout's resting-place). Memories of Mary and Bothwell come to us, too, at Hermitage. Here the wounded Warden of the Marches was visited by the infatuated Queen, who rode over from Jedburgh to see him, returning the same day--a rough roundabout of fifty miles--which all but cost her life. Dalhousie's Dungeon, in the north-east tower, recalls the tragic end of one of the bravest and best men of his time--Sir Alexander Ramsay, of Dalhousie, who was starved to death at the instance of Liddesdale's Black Knight, here anything but the "Flower of Chivalry." One may wander all over the Hermitage and Liddel valleys without ever being free from the romance-feeling which haunts them.

Relics of the Roman occupation are in abundance on every hillside--

"Many a cairn's grey pyramid, Where urns of mighty chiefs lie hid."

This was the homeland of the Elliots, "lions of Liddesdale," and the st.u.r.dy Armstrongs, of the crafty Nixons and Croziers--"thieves all":

"Fierce as the wolf they rushed to seize their prey: The day was all their night, the night their day."

It is to be regretted that so few of the dozens of clan-strengths which at one time studded the district are any longer in evidence. Hartsgarth, Roan, (so named from the French Rouen), Redheugh, Mangerton--"Kinmont Willie's" Keep--Syde--"He is weel kenned Jock o' the Syde," Copshaw Park--the abode of "little Jock Elliot"--Westburnflat--an "Old Mortality" name--Whithaugh, Clintwood, Hillhouse, Peel, and Thorlieshope, have mostly all disappeared since Scott's day. A generation more utilitarian in its tastes has arisen, and the stones taken to set up d.y.k.es and fill drains. Near the junction of the Liddel and Hermitage stood the strongly posted Castle of the "Lords of Lydal,"

and the important towns.h.i.+p of Castleton--not unlike the Roxburghs between Tweed and Teviot; and, like them also, both have long since pa.s.sed from the things that are. Only the worn pedestal of its "mercat-cross" and a lone kirkyard have been left to tell the tale. Two miles farther down is the village of Newcastleton, formerly Copshawholm, planned by the "good Duke Henry" in 1793, a rising summer resort with a population of about a thousand.

We cannot quit Liddesdale without recalling that this is "Dandie Dinmont's" Country. In writing "Guy Mannering" Scott drew largely from his earlier experiences amongst the honest-souled store-farmers and poetry-loving peasants of Liddelside. At Millburn, on the Hermitage, he enjoyed the hospitality of kindly Willie Elliot, who stood for the "great original" of "Dandie Dinmont."

THE END.