Highways and Byways in the Border

The chief tributary on the northern side as we mount the stream is Leader Water, where Homes had aince commanding."

Sing Erslington and Cowdenknowes,Where Humes had aince commanding;And Drygrange, with the milk-white yowes,Twixt Tweed and Leader standing:The bird that flees through Redpath treesAnd Gladswood banks ilk morrow,May chant and sing sweet Leader HaughsAnd bonnie howms of Yarrow.

It is scarcely possible to conceive a scene more beautiful than that where Leader winds her cheery way through the woods of Drygrange. When the Borderland is starred thick with primroses, and the grassy banks of Leader are carpeted with the blue of speedwell and the red of campion; when a soft air and warm sun hatch out a multitude of flies at which the trout rise greedily, then is the time to see that deep, leafy glen at the bottom of which sparkles the amber-clear water over its gravelly bed. In cliff or steep bank the sides tower up perhaps to the height of a couple of hundred feet, thick clad with rhododendrons and spreading undergrowth, and with mighty larch, beech, elm, or ash, and everywhere the music of Heaven's feathered orchestra smites sweetly on the ear. It is, I think, to this Paradise that good birds go when they die, where the ruthless small boy's raiding hand is kept in check, and every bird may find ideal nesting place.

The district is most famous in ballad, song and story, Leaderdale, being apparently equivalent to Lauderdale, giving a title to the Earl of Lauderdale, the chief of the Maitlands. "They call it Leader town," says the enigmatic ballad of Auld Maitland, speaking of the stronghold of a Maitland of the days of Wallace, a shadowy figure still well remembered in the folk lore of the reign of Mary Stuart. The ballad has some good and many indifferent verses. It was known to the mother and uncle of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. He copied it out for Will Laidlaw, Scott's friend and amanuensis, and this began the long and valuable association of Hogg with the Sheriff. The authenticity of the ballad has been impugned, Hogg and Scott, it has been asserted, composed it and Scott gave it to the world as genuine. This is demonstrably an erroneous conjecture, (as I have shown in Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy). Letters which had not been published refute all suspicions of forgery by Hogg or Scott or both. But the ballad had, apparently, been touched up, perhaps in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, probably by one of the witty and literary family of Maitland. It came to Hogg's mother from "auld Babby Metlan," (Maitland,) housekeeper to the last of the Scotts of Tushielaw; herself perhaps a reduced member of the impoverished family of "the flower of the wits of Scotland," Queen Mary's Secretary of State, Maitland of Lethington.

Though the legendary "Maitland or auld beard grey" may have stoutly held his house of Thirlestane against Edward I, (as he does in the ballad of Auld Maitland), I have found no record of the affair in the State Papers of the period. Thereafter the Maitlands of Lethington, though a family of ancient origin, play no conspicuous part in Scottish history, till we reach old Sir Richard, who died at the age of ninety in 1586. He was not openly recalcitrant against, but was no enthusiast for, the new doctrines of Knox and his company. A learned, humorous, peaceful man, he wrote Scottish verses and collected and preserved earlier poetry in manuscripts.

Of his sons the eldest, William, was – setting Knox aside – the most extraordinary Scott of his time. Knox was essentially Scottish in the good and not so good of his character, and was essentially an extreme Calvinist of his period; "judged too extreme," he says, by his associates. Young Maitland of Lethington, on the other hand, might have been French or Italian, hardly English. He was an absolutely modern man. In religion, even before the revolution of 1559, he was in favour of the new ideas, but also in favour of compromise and, if possible, of peace. We first meet him i i private discussion with Knox, – pleading for compromise, but yielding, with a smile, or a sigh, to the amazingly confident fallacies of the Reformer. He serves the Queen Mother, Mary of Guise, a brave unhappy lady, as Secretary of State, till he sees that her cause is every way impossible, and goes over to the Reformers, and wins for them the alliance of England, and victory. He had a great ideal, and a lofty motive, a patriotic desire for honourable peace and alliance with England. On all occasions when he encountered Knox, he met him with the "educated insolence" of his wit, with the blandest persiflage; Knox writhed and reports his ironies, and – Knox, in the long run, had the better of this smiling modern man, no fanatic, no believer in any preacher's infallibility.

Maitland served Queen Mary loyally, while he might; when things went otherwise than he wished, was behind the scenes of the murder of Riccio; but was frankly forgiven as the husband of the dearest of the Four Maries, Mary Fleming, and as Indispensable. He and his brother John, later the able minister of James VI, were in the conspiracy to murder Darnley; that is the central mystery in his career, his part In that brutal, blundering needless crime. He was partner with the violent Bothwell, a brute of culture, who hated, captured, bullied, and threatened him; for Maitland discountenanced, with remarkable and solitary courage, Bothwell's marriage. Escaping from Bothwell's grip, he fled to the nobles who had risen against Bothwell; he corrupted Mary's commander in Edinburgh Castle; when she was a captive, he is said, by the English agent, Randolph, to have urged that she should be slain, – for, as she said, "she had that in black and white which would hang Lethington." She escaped, and his policy was, in his own interests, to appear to prosecute her, and secretly to advise and aid her; to win, if not her forgiveness, an amnesty, if she returned to power, which he believed to be inevitable. She hated no man more bitterly, but she needed no man so much. As he had lost for her Edinburgh Castle, he gained it for her once more by winning to her cause the gallant Kirkcaldy of Grange, commanding therein for her enemies. He lived, a disease-stricken man. through the siege of the castle, meeting Knox once or twice with the old insolent smooth-spoken disdain of the prophet. He escaped the gibbet by a natural death, when the castle surrendered and Kirkcaldy was hanged. This "Michael Wiley," (Scots for Macchiavelli,) had trusted too absolutely to his own wit, his own command over violent men. – trusted too much to sheer intellect; been too contemptuous of honour There is no one who at all resembles him in the history of Scotland; he fascinates and repels us; one likes so much in him, and detests so much.

From a brother's descendants came the notorious Lauderdale of the Covenant and the Great Rebellion; a scholar; at one time professedly godly; the natural and deadly opposite of the great Montrose, the coarse voluptuary and greedy governor of Scotland, and the servile buffoon of Charles II during the Restoration. He paid a trifling pension to the descendants of Lethington, who are so impoverished that I guess at one of them in "auld Babby Metlan," "other than a gude ane," who handed on the ballad of Auld Maitland and was housekeeper to the last Scott of Tushielaw on upper Ettrick.

These two are the great men of Leader Water (an ideal trout stream if not poached out), Lethington and – St. Cuthbert! It was while he watched his flocks by night on the braes of Leader that Cuthbert saw, either some meteoric phenomenon which he misconstrued, or the soul of Bishop Aidan passing heavenward in glory. Next day he walked or rode to Old Melrose, leaned his spear on the wall at the portal, and confided to Boisil (St. Boswells) his desire to enter into religion. From his noble biography by the Venerable Bede (he has "got his step" now, I think, and is Blessed Bede, beatus), we know this great and good man, Cuthbert, chief missionary on the violent Border, who sleeps in Durham Cathedral. The English have captured him, the great glory of Leader Water, but m his region, in his day, the people were already English by blood to a great degree, and in language. Cuthbert, despite the Reformation, continued to be a favourite Christian name north of Tweed, witness Cuddie Headrig, whose mother, Mause, had nothing papistical in her convictions!

By a burn that takes its rise far up Leader near a summit of the Lammermuirs called Nine Cairn Edge, is the Well of the Holy Water Cleuch. It was here that St. Cuthbert spent his shepherd boyhood; here that he saw the vision which sent him to Mailros. And here, after Cuthhert's death, they built in his honour, beside the Holy Well, the Childeschirche, the name of which survives to us now as Channelkirk.

Were one of Border birth to quit "sweet Leader Haughs," leaving unnoticed "True Thomas," Thomas of Ercildoune, I do not know how he might again face his fellow Borderers. For, though Thomas may not have been a great man, in the same sense that St. Cuthbert and Lethington were great, yet to most of his countrymen he is better known than either. For one at the present day to whom the name of Cuthbert is familiar, or one to whom "Lethington" conveys any very definite idea, you will find a hundred who take an intelligent interest in Thomas the Rhymer, and who believe with Spottis-woode, who wrote of him early in the seventeenth century: "Sure it is that he did divine and answer true of many things to come." Fact regarding the Rhymer is so vague, and so beautifully blended with fiction, that I doubt if most Borderers do not more than half persuade themselves still to accept as fact much of the fiction that they learned of him in childhood. To Border children, not so very long ago, nothing was more real than the existence of a tree, still alive and growing somewhere about the enchanted land of Eildon, which must necessarily be the Eildon Tree:

"Syne he has kissed her rosy lipsAll underneath the Eildon Tree;"

nothing was more certain than that True Thomas, at the call of the Queen of Faëry, rose and obediently followed the hart and the hind into the forest, and returned no more.

"First he woxe pale, and then woxe red,Never a word he spake but three; —'My sand is run, my thread is spun,This sign regardeth me.'"

No spot was looked on, in early youth, with more awe than that Bogle Burn whose stony bed crossed over the St. Boswells and Melrose road in the cheerless hollow beside a gloomy wood; it was here that True Thomas beheld things unseen by mere mortal eye. Who could doubt? Was there not still standing in Earlston the remains of his old tower to confute all scoffers!

"The hare sail kittle on my hearth stane,And there never will be a Laird Learmunt again."

And, a hundred years ago and more, did not a hare actually produce its young on the shattered, grass-grown hearth-stone of the Rhymer's dwelling? So everybody believed. But if doubt yet lingered anywhere regarding some portion of True Thomas's story, it was easily set at rest by the words cut on that old stone built into the wall ot the church at Earlston.

"Auld Rymer's raceLyes in this place,"

it says; and somehow it gave one a peg to hang one's faith upon. The whole, or at least a sufficient part of it, is quite real in that countryside by the Rhymer's Glen where True Thomas lay "on Huntlie bank." and where flourished the Eildon Tree; and that True Thomas's still unfulfilled prophecies will yet one day come to pass, is a sound article of belief. Though how the ruthless prediction is to come about regarding the house of Cowdenknowes, (which is not far removed from the Rhymers old tower,) one does not quite see. But it was a doom pronounced against a pitiless Home who there "had aince commanding." And the Homes are gone.

"Vengeance! Vengeance! when and where?On the house of Coldingknow, now and ever mair!"

Perhaps, too, that was not of True Thomas's foretelling. One prefers rather to think of Cowdenknowes in connection with the ballad:

"O the broom, and the bonny, bonny broom,And the broom of the Cowdenknowes!And aye sae sweet as the lassie sang,I' the bught, milking the ewes."

CHAPTER VIII ST. BOSWELLS GREEN, MELROSE, DARNICK, ABBOTSFORD, AND THE ELLWAND

All the way up Tweed from a mile below Mertoun Bridge, up past the cauld where the pent water spouts and raves ceaselessly, along the bank where lies St. Boswells Golf Course, round that noble sweep where the river holds Dryburgh lovingly in the crook of its arm, up by the boulder-strewn streams above, and round the elbow by the foot suspension-bridge, past the lofty red scaurs and the hanging woods to the Monk's Ford, trout fishing – at least from the right bank – is free. And though it goes without saying that pool and stream are "sore fished," yet it is not possible by fair angling to spoil Tweed. Many a fisher may depart, empty and downcast, but if he persevere, some day he shall have his reward. To him who patiently teaches himself to know the river and the whims of its inhabitants, to him who studies weather and time of day – or, may be, of night – there must at length come success, for many are the trout, and large. The writer has known a yellow trout of 8 lbs. 12 ozs. to be killed with fly hard by the golf course. The weight is of course exceptional, but many a beauty of 2 lbs. and over is there to be taken by him who is possessed of skill and patience; and to me is known no more enticing spectacle than one of these long swift pools of a summer evening, in the gloaming, when the water is alive with the dimples of rising trout.

And what a river it is, however you take it! And what a river it is, however you take it! What a series of noble views is there for him who can withdraw his attention from the water.

Let him climb, in the peaceful evening light, to the top of the red and precipitous Braeheads behind the long single street of St. Boswells Green, pleasantest of villages, and there gaze his fill at the beautiful Abbey far beneath his feet, sleeping amongst the trees across the river. Or let him go farther still, up by the leafy path that overhangs the rushing water, till he come to the little suspension-bridge. And let him stop there, midway across, and face towards the western sky and the three peaks of Eildon that stand out beyond the trees clear-cut against the warm after-glow. At his feet, mirroring the glory of the dying day, a broad shining sweep of quiet water broken only by the feeding trout; on his left hand, high in air the young moon floating like lightest feather; above the fretful murmur of some far-off stream, a bird piping to his mate. And over all, a stillness that holds and strangely moves the very soul. I think that if there be one with him attuned to his mood, an hour may pass and the gloaming have deepened almost to dusk, and neither of them shall have spoken a word, or noticed that the time has sped. And still they will linger, unwilling to break the spell.

At Leaderfoot the river is crossed by two stone bridges, one, the lofty naked viaduct of the Berwickshire Railway; the other, older and more pleasing, carries the picturesque road that, breaking out from the leafy woods of Drygrange and leaving on its left hand the hallowed site of Old Melrose, leads past St. Boswell's Green and the Kennels of the Buccleuch Hunt, over by Lilliard's Edge to Jedburgh. Between, and immediately above, the bridges at Leaderfoot are some glorious salmon casts, where nigh on a century ago Scrope was wont to throw a fly. Strange that during twenty years, in all that magnificent water fished by him, from Kelso to Caddonfoot, he never once landed a salmon of thirty pounds, and but few as heavy as twenty. There may have been more fish in his day, – one cannot judge; they got more, but then they took them not only with fly, but by "sunning" and by "burning" the water, and by many another means that now is justly considered to be poaching. But they seldom caught a salmon approaching in weight those which are now commonly taken in Tweed every season. Thirty pounds is a weight by no means noticeable now-a-days, and scarcely a year passes that fish of forty pounds and over are not taken by some fortunate angler; even above Melrose cauld, an obstruction that checks the ascent of many big fish, they have been got, far up the river, as heavy as thirty-eight pounds. Floors Water, at Kelso, I believe holds the record as regards size; in 1886 a fish of fifty-seven and a half pounds was captured. And as to numbers, though it is of course possible to labour for a week or more in Tweed – as elsewhere – even with the water apparently in good order, and with plenty of fish up, fresh from the sea, and meet with no manner of success, on the other hand there is on Makerstoun Water the pleasing record of twelve, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen salmon killed by one rod on four consecutive days; fifty seven fish in all, and seventy-three for the week.

And in a similar period in November, 1903, Upper and Lower Floors Water produced between them one hundred and forty-three fish, the average weight for Lower Floors being nineteen pounds. A little above Leaderfoot, on the opposite bank, is Newstead with its Roman camp, – though the visitor will be disappointed with what he may now see; there are no walls, no remains of buildings, such as exist at Bremenium, or down on the Roman Wall in Northumberland.

Behind Newstead, high on the nearest peak of Eildon, are well-defined remains of a Romo-British station. Where they got a sufficient supply of water at that elevation is puzzling: it is a large camp, and could not possibly be held by a numerically weak body of men.

From the head of that "brae" by Newstead that overhangs the river, you will look on a scene typical of Tweed. Far through the broad and smiling valley the river winds towards you, like a ribbon shot with silver; a mile away, across green fields, lies the venerable abbey, dreaming in the sunshine – "thy ruins mouldering o'er the dead." And, up stream, the distant belching chimneys of Galashiels cause one fervently to thank Heaven that beside the old monastic pile there are no tweed mills to foul the air, and to pollute the lovely stream more even than is now the case.

Mercifully, as regards trade, it is still at Melrose as it was when the "solemn steps of old departed years" paced through the land with youthful vigour. The little town is yet guiltless of modern iniquities – except as regards the railway and the inevitable Hydropathic, both of which are no doubt necessary evils (or blessings?) of these latter days. And except, also, that the modern villa is overmuch in evidence. A hundred years ago, when there was little of a town but the open Market Place hedging round the Old Cross of Melrose, it must have been a better, or at least a more picturesque place. On to the Abbey itself now the town's houses jostle, treading on its skirts, pertly encroaching. Therefore it lacks the charm and solitude of Dryburgh. Yet is its own charm irresistible, its beauty matchless, – "was never scene so sad and fair."

To the halting pen, it is the indescribable. In the deathless lines of the Wizard himself, its beauty lives to all time. But a thousand years of purgatory might not suffice to wipe from their Record of Sin the guilt incurred by Hertford, and Evers, and Laiton, in 1544 and 1545 when they wantonly profaned and laid waste this dream in stone and lime, wrought by "some fairy's hand." Nor in later days were our own people free from offence in this respect. The number of old houses in the immediate neighbourhood is probably very small into which have not been built stones from the ruined abbey. Even across the river they are found; in the walls of a mouldering old farm house there, pulled down but a few years ago, were discovered many delicate bits of scroll work and of finely chiselled stone.

A mile to the west of Melrose lies the village of Darnick. Here is a fine old tower dating from the sixteenth century, the property still of the family that originally built it. Fain would Sir Walter Scott have bought this picturesque old building after he moved to Abbotsford, and many another has looked on it with longing eyes, but no offer has succeeded in divorcing it from the stock of the original owner, though the surrounding lands have melted away. Somewhere about 1425 a Heiton built the earliest tower. That, naturally, could not stand against the all-destroying hand of Hertford in 1544, but the Heiton's descendant repaired, or rebuilt, it in 1569, and ever since it has remained in the possession of the family, still, I believe, is occasionally inhabited by them. It is now probably the finest existing specimen of the old bastel-house. From its watch-tower may be had a glimpse of Tweed at Bridgend, where Father Philip, Sacristan of St. Mary's, took his involuntary bath. This is the Bridgend mentioned in Sir Walter's Notes to The Monastery. The ancient and very peculiar bridge over Tweed which gave to the hamlet its name is described in the text of the novel. There is now no trace of such a bridge, but in the early part of the eighteenth century the pillars yet stood. They are described in Gordon's Itnerarium Septentrionale (1726), and in Milne's account of the Parish of Melrose published in 1794, there is a full description. Those pillars yet stood, he says. "It has been a timber bridge; in the middle pillar there has been a chain for a drawbridge, with a little house for the convenience of those that kept the bridge and received the custom.

On this same pillar are the arms of the Pringles of Galashiels." In Sir Walter's day, only the foundations of the piers existed. He tells how, "when drifting down the Tweed at night, for the purpose of killing salmon by torch light," he used to see them.

A Heiton of Darnick fell at Flodden. His successor played no inconspicuous part in the bitter fight by his own tower side, on Skirmish Field, scene of that memorable encounter in 1526 between Angus and Huccleuch, when the stake was the person of the young king, James V. Turn-Again, too, is in the immediate neighbourhood, on the lands of Abbotsford, where the Scotts turned fiercely on their pursuers, and Ker of Cessford was slain. It is curious to note that beneath what is now a lawn at Darnick Tower many skeletons were dug up some years ago, and beside them were swords. Doubtless the skeletons were those of men slain in this fight; but why were their swords buried with them? Over the hill, at Holydene, an ancient seat of the Kers of Cessford, there was also unearthed years ago within the walls of the old castle, a gigantic skeleton, by its side a very handsome sword. Were their weapons, in the sixteenth century, laid convenient to the grasp of the dead warriors, as in Pagan times they were wont to be?

Bowden Moor and Halidon are but over the hill from Darnick. It was from this direction, by the descent from Halidon (or Halyden, modern Holydene), that Buccleueh came down on Angus, after Cessford and Fernihirst and Home had ridden off. But the Homes and the Kers returned, and spoiled the play for the outnumbered Scotts.

"Now Bowden Moor the march-man won,And sternly shook his plumed head,As glanced his eye o'er Halidon;For on his soul the slaughter redOf that unhallowed morn arose,When first the Scott and Carr were foes;When royal James beheld the fray,Prize to the victor of the day;When Home and Douglas, in the van,Bore down Buccleuch's retiring clan,Till gallant Cessford's heart-blood dearReek'd on dark Elliot's border spear."

Less than a couple of miles to the west from Darnick, we come to that which Ruskin pronounced to be "perhaps the most incongruous pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed." I fear that even the most devoted Borderer must admit that Abbotsford is an incongruous pile. Nevertheless it is hallowed ground, and one may not judge it by common standards. It reminds only of the gallantest struggle against hopeless odds that ever was made by mortal man; it speaks only of him whom everyone loved, and loves. "The glory-dies not, and the grief is past."