Highways and Byways in the Border

Though the proportion of Borderers who followed Prince Charlie down into England, or throughout his campaign, was so very meagre, yet there lived among those solemn Border hills many faithful hearts, whose King he was to the end.

"Follow thee! Follow thee! Wha wadna follow thee?King o' our Highland hearts,Bonnie Prince Charlie,"

They were not only Highland hearts that were true to him. In her Border Sketches, Mrs. Oliver mentions a Hawick man, named Millar, who accompanied his master, Scott of Gorrenberry, all through the campaign of 1745-46, and who to the end of his days had an undying devotion to his Prince, and till the day of the latter's death, an imperishable faith that he would come to his own again. Long after the '45, Miller became "minister's man" in one of the Hawick churches, and his grief, one Sunday morning in 1788, was overwhelming when the news was told to him that the Prince was dead. "E-eh! Doctor," he cried brokenly to his * reverend informant, "if I'll get nae good o' your sermon the day; I wish ye hadna telled me till this afternoon. If it had been the German Lairdie, now, there wad hae been little mane made for him But there'll be mony a wae heart forby mine this day." Indeed, who even now can read of Bonnie Prince Charlie's end, and not have "a wae heart"?

Few of the Scottish Border towns in 1745 showed open hostility, or indeed anything but a luke-warm friendship, for the gallant young Pretender. Dumfries, however, was an exception. The inhabitants of that town, with men from Galloway, Nithsdale, and Annandale, full of zeal for King George and secure in the belief that the fighting men of the Prince's army were all safely over the March into England, hurried to intercept the rebel baggage train as it passed near Lockerbie, and carried off thirty-two carts to Dumfries. The Highlanders, however, getting word of this affair before the army marched from Carlisle, detached a party to Dumfries to demand the return of the waggons or the payment of an indemnity, "the notice of which has put Dumfries in greater fear and confusion than they have since the rebellion broke out, and expect no mercy." But the Prinnce's party was recalled before it had reclaimed the lost baggage-carts or exacted this alternative sum of £2,000, and Dumfries imagined that now all was weil. They had the waggons; and for a little time they triumphed. So triumphant, indeed, were they, and so filled with confidence in their own warlike powers, that when false rumours reached them that the Highlanders had been utterly routed and cut to pieces at Lancaster, not only were there "great rejoicings in Dumfries by ringing of bells and illuminating their windows," but "a considerable party of our light horse were sent off immediately, after the Chevalier," and "about three hundred militia, composed of townspeople and the adjacent paroches… are to go to the water of Esk to stop their passing and to apprehend any small parcels of them flying." Dumfries was not so warlike a couple of weeks or so later, when Lord Elcho at the head of five hundred men of the Prince's advance guard marched in and demanded the immediate payment of £2,000 in money and the delivery of a thousand pairs of shoes, two hundred horses, and a hundred carts. Not all that the Prince demanded was paid before the northward march was resumed, but his visit cost the town something like £4,000 – irrespective of what the Highlanders took. Whilst he remained in Dumfries, the Prince lodged in the Market Place, in a private house which is now the Commercial Inn. It is said that when his army marched up Nithsdale, halting for the night at the Duke of Queensberry's property, Drumlanrig, the Highlanders in the morning, to show their loyalty to King James, slashed with their swords portraits of King William and Queen Mary which had been presented to the Duke by Queen Anne, – an inconvenient method of declaring allegiance.

Though of minor interest, there are other houses in Jedburgh besides Queen Mary's and that in which Prince Charlie lodged, in which the townsfolk take some pride. There is the building in which Sir David Brewster was born in 1781; that where Burns lodged when he visited Jedburgh in 1787; that in Abbey Close in which Wordsworth and his sister had lodgings in 1803, when Sir (then Mr.) Walter Scott visited them and read to them part of the then unpublished "Lay of the Last Minstrel"; there is the old Black Bull Inn, – no lunger an inn, – and interesting only as the place where in 1726 Sir Gilbert Eliott of Stobs stabbed Colonel Stewart of Stewartfield with his sword one evening as they sat at supper. Claret was plentiful and good in. Scotland in those days, and Colonel Stewart had not given his vote to Sir Gilbert, who was candidate for the county. Swords flew out on slender excuse in the eighteenth century. This particular sword was long kept in the family of Sir Gilbert Elliot's butler, and after passing through the hands of a resident in the village of Denholm, became the property of Mr. Forrest, the well-known gun-maker of Jedburgh, by whom it was finally deposited in the Marquess of Lothian's museum at Monteviot.

Jedburgh, of course, amongst other claims to distinction was famed for its witches – as what place was not, indeed, in times when harmless old women were adjudged innocent or guilty of the charge of witchcraft according as they sank or floated when thrown into deep water. If they sank – well and good, that meant that they were innocent, and they went to Heaven, having at any rate the satisfaction of knowing beforehand that, in such case, at least their memory would be cleared of the suspicion under which they had lain; if they floated – again well and good; that proved conclusively that the charge against them was a true one, and they were rescued from the water only to be burned alive. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," was the text which our ancestors regarded as the Eleventh Commandment. We were not a whit better even at as late a date as the seventeenth century, than are those West African tribes of the present day whose medicine-men still "smell out" witches. Only, the West Africans practise the art now more or less in secret, and they are more humane in the death they inflict than were our ancestors; they do not burn.

Jedburgh's testing place for witches was a pool below the spot where now the Townfoot Bridge crosses the river. There is a story told of a notorious witch who was ducked here along with a batch of her sinful associates. No doubt they all floated right enough; their reputation as witches of the most mischievous description had long been almost too well established to need such a test as that of the river. But this is what led to their final overthrow. The chief witch of this "covine" had a husband, the village pedagogue, a man of repute for piety and for the rigour of his Sabbath keeping, and it was notorious that in season and out of season this good man would remonstrate with his wife – without doubt, people said, endeavouring to wean the woman from her sinful habits.

Now, one must of course admit that such continued efforts to save could not fail to be excessively irksome to any witch, and must goad not only her, but also her accomplices, as well as her Master, the Devil, to revenge. Hence, when the schoolmaster's dead body was found one fine morning floating in the river, the majority of the drowned man's neighbours had no hesitation in believing that his wife and her partners in iniquity had dragged him in the night from his hard-earned rest, and had thrown him into the deepest pool in Jed. And this was the more certain, because the deceased man had several times confided to friends a pitiful tale of how he stood in terror of his life, and how his wife and her "covine," had already more than once hauled him through the roughest streams of Jed. Sundry pious elders, moreover, affirmed that they had attended with him a sederunt of their church rulers the previous evening – when, perhaps, a trifle of something may have been taken in a quiet way to keep out the cold – and that at a late hour afterwards they accompanied him to his own door, whence, they admitted, they had come away in a hurry because of the wrathful and threatening tones in which they heard this witch addressing her husband. And this evidence was to some extent corroborated by the neighbours, who told how they had been awakened from sound sleep that night by the noise made by the poor victim loudly singing the twenty-third Psalm as the horrid troupe hurried him down the street towards the river – a rope about his neck, said some. Moreover, it was told, on evidence which people saw no reason to doubt, that at the time this poor man was being hurried to his death, a company of fairies was seen dancing on the top of the tower of Jedburgh Abbey, where after the drowning of the unfortunate schoolmaster by the witches, the whole company regaled themselves liberally with wine and ale. Certainly, both wine and ale were found to be missing from a neighbouring cellar the following day; and as the door of the cellar had been locked, obviously the loss could only be attributed to the schemes of fairies or witches. The one tale lent an air of truth to the others; therefore people were not backward in crediting both. He who accepted the story of the dancing fairies could have little difficulty in giving credence to that of the witches' "covine" dragging their unresisting prey through the streets. And so another wretched victim or two went to her long home by a fiery death. The schoolmaster was probably insane on some points, and trumped up the story of the witches having repeatedly ducked him. Our ancestors could swallow anything in the way of marvel. This story of the Jedburgh schoolmaster is told in "Historical Notices of the Superstitions of Teviotdale"; and it is added therein that popular tradition says that "a son of Lord Torpichen, who had been taught the art of witchcraft by his nurse," was of the party of witches, and that it was he who first gave information regarding the murderers.

The Ettrick Shepherd must have known this story well. Perhaps it suggested some of the verses in "The Witch of Fife," in "The Queen's Wake."

"Where have ye been, ye ill woman,These three lang nichts frae hame?What gars the sweit drap frae yer brow, 'Like clots o' the saut sea faem?"It fears me muckle ye have seenWhat guid man never knew;It fears me muckle ye have beenWhere the grey cock never crew."="Sit down, sit down, my leal auld man,Sit down and listen to me;I'll gar the hair stand on yer crownAnd the cauld sweit blind yer e'e."The first leet nicht, when the new moon set,When all was douf and mirk,We saddled our naigs wi* the moon fern leaf,And rode frae Kilmorran Kirk."Some horses were of "the broom-cow framed,And some of the green bay tree:But mine was made of a hemlock-shaw,And a stout stallion was he."We rode the tod doon on the hill,The martin on the law;And we hunted the hoolit out o' breath,And forcit him doon to fa'.""What guid was that, ye ill woman?What guid was that to thee?Ye wad better have been in yer bed at hameWi' yer dear little bairns and me.""And aye we rade and sae merrylie we rade,Through the merkist gloffs o' the night;And we swam the flood, and we darnit the wood,Till we cam to the Lommond height."And when we cam to the Lommond height,Sae blythlie we lighted down;And we drank frae the horns that never grewThe beer that was never brewin."And aye we danced on the green LommondTill the dawn on the ocean grew,Nae wonder I was a weary wichtWhen I cam hame to you.And we flew ow'r hill, and we flew ow'r dale,And we flew ow'r firth and sea,Until we cam to merry Carlisle,Where we lightit on the lea.="We gaed to the vault beyond the tow'rWhere we entered free as air,And we drank, and we drank of the Bishop's wine,Until we could drink nae mair."

If, however, our forbears were drastic in their manner of dealing with witches and warlocks, and rigid in the infliction of capital punishment on criminals guilty of very minor offences, they were extraordinarily lax as regards the condition in which they kept their prisons. It is told that, sometime during the eighteenth century, the chief magistrate of Jedburgh was waited on by the burgh gaoler, who complained that the main door of the gaol had parted company with its hinges – which, in fact, had long been eaten through with rust. He had no means of securing his prisoners. What was he to do? It was a question calculated to puzzle any ordinary person. But the magistrate was a man of resource. "Get a harrow," said he. "And set it on end in the doorway, wi' its teeth turned inwards. If that winna keep them in, – 'deed then they're no worth the keepin'." To as late a date as 1833, Selkirk also was not much better off than this, as regards its prison. The writer of the Statistical Account of the Parish at that date complains that prisoners "have been frequently in the practice of coming out in the evening, and returning again before the jailor's visit in the morning."

If by chance there was ever a period of his life when the Poet Burns was not susceptible, it certainly was not at the time when he visited Jedburgh in 1787. Regarding that visit he has left in his diary some very characteristic notes. He was "waited on by the magistrates and presented with the freedom of the burgh," he records; he meets and dines with "a polite soldier-like gentleman, a Captain Rutherfurd, who had been many years in the wilds of America, a prisoner among the Indians," and who apparently rather bored the poet. Captain Rutherfurd's adventures were assuredly such as could not fail to be well worth listening to, but what between Burns' respectful admiration of an armchair that the old soldier possessed, which had been the property of James Thomson, author of "The Seasons," and his latest attack of love's sickness, host and guest do not seem to have been quite in accord. Perhaps the old soldier prosed, and told his battles o'er again to too great an extent – it is a failing not unknown in old gentlemen; perhaps the poet wanted to compose a sonnet to his new mistress's eyebrows. – or whatever may have been Burns' equivalent. (He had just met by the "sylvan banks" of Jed a young lady possessed of charms that ravished his too tender heart). Anyhow, he left the district in a very despondent frame of mind, relieved only by such consolation as might be gleaned from presenting the lady with a copy of his latest portrait. In his diary is the following entry: "Took farewell of Jedburgh with some melancholy, disagreeable sensations. Jed, pure be thy crystal streams and hallowed thy sylvan banks! Sweet Isabella Lindsay, may peace dwell in thy bosom uninterrupted, except by the tumult throbbings of rapturous love! That love enkindling eye must beam on another, not on me; that graceful form must bless another's arms, not mine." Burns' loves were almost as many in number as the birds of the air, and scarcely less trammelled.

As one proceeds up Jed from the ancient royal burgh, probably the first thing that forces itself on the mind is that the old coach road was not constructed for present-day traffic. In less than a couple of miles the river is crossed no fewer than four times by bridges which are curiously old fashioned, turning blindly across the stream in some instances almost at right angles to the road, and in the steepness of their ascent and descent conveying to the occupant of a motor car a sensation similar to that given to a bad sailor by a vessel at sea when she is surmounting "the league-long rollers." Nor are some of the gradients on the road a few miles farther out such as entirely commend themselves to motorists, two or three of them being as abrupt as one in twelve, and one in thirteen. Nevertheless the beauties of road and country are great, especially if it should chance that a visit is paid to the district when the tender flush of early Spring lies sweet on Jed's thick-wooded banks, and the trout have begun to think at last of rising again freely to the natural fly. Or better still, perhaps, when the green and gold, the russet and yellow, the crimson of Autumn combine with and melt into the crumbling red cliffs, – surely more generous tinted than ever were cliffs before. Above, a sky of tenderest blue, an air windless yet brisk, and just a leaf here and there fluttering leisurely into the amber clear water that goes wandering by; and from the hushes the sweet thin pipe of a robin, or the crow of pheasant from some copse. That is the Indian Summer of Scotland, her pleasantest time of year, – if it were not for the shortening days, and the recollection that trout fishing is dead till another season.

It was a heavily wooded district this in former days, and one or two of the giants of old still survive, – the widespreading "Capon tree," for instance, that you pass on the road a mile from Jedburgh (but why "Capon" it passes the knowledge of man to decide); and the "King of the Woods," near Fernihirst, a beautiful and still vigorous oak, with a girth of 17 feet, four feet from the ground.

On the right, across the river, as you begin to quit the precincts of the town, there hangs the precipitous red "scaur" over which, that grim night in 1523, Surrey's horses came streaming, an equine cascade. Farther on, a mile or so, there perches Douglas's camp at Lintalee. But his "fair manor" is gone, and that great cave in the face of the cliff where he kept stock of provisions "till mak gud cher till hys men"; a fall of rock swept away that, or most part of it, in 1866. It was to this cave, within Douglas's camp, that in 1317 a priest named Ellis brought a body of three hundred English soldiers, whilst Douglas was elsewhere, dealing with Sir Thomas Richmond and his men. But, (as the song says), Father Ellis "had better have left that beggar alone." Douglas returned while yet the holy man and his unruly flock were feasting in the cave. And "then" – it is needless to say, – "there began a slaughter grim and great," and whatever else Father Ellis and his men had feasted on, at least they got now a bellyful of fighting. It was the last meal of which the most part of those Englishmen partook. The cave is gone, but there still remain, guarding the neck of the promontory – ruined indeed, and partially filled up, but still prominent to the eye – the double wall and fosse that Douglas threw across it six hundred years ago.

Of caves, such as this Douglas cave at Lintalee, there is a vast number scattered along the cliffy banks of Jed and Teviot, and by some of their tributary waters or burns. At Mossburn-foot, on Jed, there is a cave, others are at Hundalee, and elsewhere. Near Cessford Castle, on a small affluent of the Kale there is one, Habbie Ker's Cave, the same wicked Habbie – "a bloodie man in his youth" – whose ghost to this day walks by the old draw-well at the ruined castle of Holydene; on Kale itself there are several of considerable size; in the cliff overhanging Oxnam, near Crailing, are others, and at Ancrum, on the Ale; whilst at Sunlaws, near Roxburgh, in the red sandstone cliffs of Teviot, is a group of five caves, arranged in two tiers, some of them of fair dimensions, the largest about twenty six feet long, with a height of eight feet and a width of eight and a half feet. Another in the upper tier has a length of twenty three feet, but at the mouth is no more than three feet in height. In the lower tier, in one of the caves it is said in the Statistical Account that horses were hid in 1745, to save them from being taken for the use of the rebel army, when the detachment under Prince Charlie's own command marched from Kelso to Jedburgh. Many of the caves in different parts of the country are so well concealed that a stranger might pass very near to the mouth without suspecting their existence; some, on the other hand, force themselves on the eye. But probably in olden times thick undergrowth shut them from view. There is no doubt that most of them at various times have been used as places of concealment; probably during the cruel old English wars they were much resorted to; certainly some of them were places of refuge in Covenanting times. Very efficient places of refuge no doubt they were, so long as the entrance was not discovered, but many of them would probably be easy enough to smoke out. It is mentioned in Patten's "Account of Somerset's Expedition into Scotland," how "a gentleman of my Lord Protector's… happened upon a cave in the grounde, the mouth whereof was so worne with fresh printe of steps, that he seemed to be certayne thear wear some folke within; and gone doune to trie, he was redily receyved with a hakebut or two. He left them not yet, till he had known wheyther thei wold be content to yield and come out, which they fondly refusing, he went to my Lord's grace, and upon utterance of the tbynge, gat licence to deale with them as he coulde; and so returned to them with a skore or two of pioners. Three ventes had that cave, that we wear ware of, whereof he first stopt up one; another he fill'd full of strawe, and set it a fyer, whereat they within cast water apace; but it was so wel maynteyned without, that the fyer prevayled, and thei within fayn to get them belyke into anoothur parler. Then devysed we (for I hapt to be with him) to stop the same up, whereby we should eyther smoother them, or fynd out their ventes, if thei hadde any mor: as this was done at another issue, about XII score of, we moughte see the fume of their smoke to come out: the which continued with so great a force, and so long a while, that we coulde not but thinke they must needs get them out, or smoother within: and forasmuch as we found not that they did the tone, we though it for certain thei wear sure of the toother."

Who first made and used those caves, one wonders. The stone is soft, and easy to work, and I do not think it was beyond the skill and the tools of our very remote forbears to have patiently hollow'ed them out, in suitable places, from the solid face of the cliff. Tool marks may yet be plainly seen in some of them, marks not such as would be made by anything in the nature of a chisel, but such as are more suggestive of a pick, of sorts, an implement – single pointed – not unknown to even very primitive races.

Scattered all over the Jedburgh district are many ancient camps – hoary even in the day when Douglas fortified Lintalee; many old castles and peel-towers, all, or nearly all, now in ruins, some indeed with very little left save tradition to indicate where once they stood; and here and there are found vestiges of chapels or shrines, of which possibly there may remain hardly more in some instances than the green mounds which cover their fallen walls. The monks wandered far up this pleasant vale of Jed, carrying the Gospel of Peace through a land that knew of little save war, but the history of their resting places is even more vague than is now the outline of their chapel walls. At Old Jed ward, however, five miles up stream from Jedburgh, you may still in some measure trace the line of foundations of that venerable little building which is said to have been built here away back in the ninth century. Of camps, the number is legion. That near Monklaw, the writer has not seen, but it is said to be Roman, and its measurements are something like one hundred and sixty yards each way. At Scraesburgh there is a circular camp, with a diameter of about one hundred and eighty feet, and with ramparts still nearly twenty feet in height, – surely that "Skraysburgh, the greatest towne in all Teviotdale," which, according to the English version, seems in 1544 to have fallen almost as fell Jericho of old, when the enemy shouted and blew their trumpets.

Of castles and peel-towers the most are utterly ruined, but Fernihirst (to which we come presently), still stands, and, over the hill towards Teviot, Lanton Tower, the latter now incorporated with a comfortable modern dwelling. Lanton in the twelfth century was the property of Richard Inglis, who also owned the adjacent tower of Hunthill. Both these towers were sacked and burned in 1513, after Flodden, by an English flying column under Sir Roger Fenwicke, and its existence at the present day Lanton Tower may owe to the fact that when Evers swept the country side in 1544, and Hertford brought fire and sword in the following year, it had possibly neither been repaired nor was inhabited. It was over near Jedburgh, too, to have escaped the notice of Surrey in 1523. Hunthill was burned again in 1549, and had Lanton then been anything but dismantled, it could scarcely have escaped the attentions of the party sent from Jedburgh by the Earl of Rutland to attack d'Essé's rear-guard at Ancrum ford. A force coming over the hill from Jedburgh and making for Ancrum would necessarily pass within easy hail of Lanton. In any case, however, there it stands, its solid walls of a tenacity not shared by buildings put together with modern mortar. Strange are the vicissitudes of places and of people. Over this Forest of Jedworth, and here at Lanton, where of old too often were heard the blast of trumpet, shouts and oaths of fiercely striving men, the roar and crackle of burning houses, you will hear now no sound more startling than the "toot-toot" of the Master's horn and the babble of fox hounds; for at Lanton Tower are the kennels of the Jedforest Hunt, and many a glorious run is had with this pack, sometimes in enclosed country, sometimes among the great round backed Border hills towards Carterfell, over country that will tail off all but the best of men and horses.