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St Mary's Loch
WHEN the glare of summer sunshine and the rush of
summer tourists is over, when the autumn winds are sighing through the
woods, and the heavens and the hills are soft and grey, then is the time
to see the "Dowie dens o’ Yarrow." In the end of October the
coaches have ceased running, the tide of sightseers has ebbed, and
nature is left, lonely, to her own still spirit of reflection. Then best
can be summoned back in thought the scenes of bygone days—the deeds of
dule and sorrow whose story seems so native to these grey and rounded
hills, and to the loneliness of their wan waters. Then, too, the great
cloud-shadows that slowly move along the mountain-sides complete the
harmony of thought and scene.
The hills of Yarrow are
peculiarly reminiscent of the past; and the memories that haunt their
aspect, like thoughts in the sweet, sad face of his mistress, can only
be read by the lover of them who wanders there in quiet. Here, each in
his own time, have come the poets, to catch with their delicate instinct
the subtle, sweet melancholy that lingers, like an old and nameless
fragrance, amid these solitudes—the memory
Of old, unhappy,
far-off things,
And battles long ago.
Here every summer, year
after year, comes the quiet angler, most reflective of men, whose
pleasure is not more in the lapse of the brook or the leap of the
occasional trout, than in the old-world thoughts that rise to people his
reverie at every turn of the stream. And here sometimes by the fire in
one of the little inns, when the autumn dusk has fallen, the belated
tourist, fingering through some old book of Border story, suddenly has
the veil lifted, and catches a transient, far-off glimpse of the inner
beauty of mediaeval life, woven of love and sorrow.
On foot and alone, or
with a single congenial friend, is this storied and solitary valley-land
best to be visited; for the spots are many where it is pleasant to
linger and to leave the beaten track; and the pages of Hogg and Scott,
the ballads of more ancient bards, the lines of Wordsworth, and the
diary of Burns, with the fitful narrative of history, and the
unchronicled local legends, form company enough. Nowhere, perhaps, is
the wanderer better pleased to be left to his own reflections than among
these lakes, and glens, and streams. They are the Provence of Scotland,
and about them remain, still undisturbed, mellowed only by the lapse of
time, rich memories of ancient Border chivalry.
When the traveller,
brought by rail to the upland strath at the foot of the mountains,
grasps his staff of stout hazel, and sets out from the steep street of
Moffat town, he seems to be setting foot into the Past itself. On Moffat
bowling-green it was, he remembers, that the meeting occurred between
the Rev. John Home and James Macpherson, the Highland tutor, which led
to the discovery and preservation of the works of Ossian, the Celtic
Homer—a circumstance by itself suggestive of the pregnance of
forgotten haps. Before the traveller, wrapt in mystery and sadness, lie
the defiles among the hills, with the lonely road winding upward, to be
lost in their recesses. And everywhere around, from the upland solitudes
that climb into the blue, to the yellow vistas of late-shorn strath, the
landscape is eloquent of a past that has filled many pages of history
and poetry with a strange glamour of romance. Few trees are to be seen,
and the only evidences of human presence are the humble shielings lodged
at far intervals under the mountain-side. The foam-flecked Moffat Water,
as it comes down beside the road, seems telling its own tale of silent
tarns far up among the hills, and of glens known long ago in story. Its
first feeding torrent on the right, indeed, the Craigieburn, opens at
once into the remotest past an avenue of memories. The woods about it
are believed to be a surviving portion of the ancient Ettrick Forest,
itself part of the primeval Caledonian Forest. It was to this part of
the Wood of Celyddon, or Caledon, that, in the sixth century, after the
great tribal battle at Ardderyd, now Arthuret, near Carlisle, in which
the Christian faction under Rydderch Hael and Kentigern were victorious,
the actual Merlin, bard of the pagan British tribes, retired to mourn
the fall of Gwenddolew, his chief. Here, the last of the northern
Druids, he sang his song Avallenau, or The Apple Tree; he sang of
himself, once a princely entertainer, now sleeping alone with shield on
shoulder and sword on thigh in the forest; he sang of his sister
Gwenddid, the delicately fair; and he sang of that other, Hwimleian—the
"lovely nymph with pearly teeth, fair, sportive maid," who was
to become the Vivien of our modern Arthurian romance. And over the
hills, not many miles away, at Drummeizier, by the Tweed, he was finally
stoned to death as a wizard by the shepherds of Meldred, and his body
thrown upon a sharp stake in the stream. [The songs of Merlin may be
found translated in Skene’s Four Ancient Books of Wales." See an
interesting article on Merlin in the "Scottish Review" for
October, 1892.] At a later day "Black Douglas of the
Craigieburn" was a name of terror and power on the Borders. And in
the latter part of last century, in the old house whose walls in time of
flood are washed by the stream as it leaps down the mountain chasm, was
born the fair, unfortunate Jean Lorimer, the "Chioris" to whom
Burns wrote his "Lassie wi’ the lint-white locks," and eight
other lyrics. Dr Currie states that Burns met her in these woods, which were
a favourite haunt of his, and that a cottage in the wood was pointed out
as the place where he visited her. But his first verses to her were
written to express, not his own feelings, but the
passion of a friend:
Sweet closes the evening on Craigieburn
wood,
And blithely awaukens the morrow;
But the pride of the spring in the Craigieburn wood
Can yield to me nothing but sorrow.
Laggan, the nearer of the two little cottages,
farther on, was the scene of one of those lurid flashes of mirth
that ever and anon flared across the life of the sad-fated
peasant-bard, when, with "honest Allan Masterton," he
strolled up from Dalwhinnie, and induced William Nicol, the
Edinburgh schoolmaster, who was rusticating here, to "brew a
peck o’ maut!" The scene, destined to be made immortal, can
be imagined when the poet, glancing up during a pause in the mirth,
beheld through the small knotted glass panes of the cottage window
the silvery shape of the new moon drifting across the clear sky—
It
is the moon—I ken her horn,
That‘s blinking in the lift sae hie;
She shines sae bright to wile us hame,
But, by my sooth, she‘ll wait a wee!
And, still further on, the farm-house of Bodseck,
where the road branches to the right, was the haunt of the Brownie
chronicled by Hogg.
Memories like these add to the landscape that human
interest which is the charm of old countries, and the lack of which
makes to the reflective traveller the dulness of newer lands.
Within the pass the air itself seems lonely. On each
hand rise the mountains, huge and dark against the sky, while the
stillness is only broken by the distant rushing of the waters in their
rocky bed below, and occasionally by the far, faint bleat of sheep. High
on the hillsides, like silver threads, after the heavy rain, appear the
slender torrents, each singing to itself, doubtless, its own quiet tune.
And once and again sweep, wide and clear across the road, the waters of
some swollen streamlet.
Details like these, as the shadows of the night begin
to fall, become more and more expressive of the awe that dwells in the
solitude of the hills; and amid such surroundings one ceases to marvel
that the poetry of mountain lands is so generally cast in a plaintive
key, for sombre and remote from boisterous mirth are the emotions that
they stir within the heart.
Presently, as the road ascends higher
and higher among the hills, mists begin to drift together, grey and silent
like ghosts, in the glens; the air grows colder, and the solitude more
desolate. The outer world is shut off behind, while in front the mountains,
dark and threatening, guard the narrowing pass. The latter might almost
serve for that passage to Elfland long ago followed by Thomas of Ercildoune
with the Queen of Faerie, when, as the ballad tells,—
They rade on and
further on,
And they waded through rivers
abune the knee,
And they saw neither sun nor moon,
But they heard the roaring of
the sea.
Even the last detail is all but
fulfilled here, for from the recesses of a rugged ravine on the far left there
comes through the gathering darkness the sullen roar of a waterfall. It is the
famous "Grey Mare’s Tail," the highest waterfall in Scotland,
pouring its torrent in an immemorial dirge beside the "Giant’s
Grave." The cataract descends from the dark Loch Skene, on whose lonely
islet the ern still builds her nest. Cataract and lake together are
picturesquely described by Scott in his prelude to the second canto of "Marmion"
:—
Yet him whose heart is ill at ease
Such peaceful solitudes displease.
He loves to drown his bosom’s jar
Amid the elemental war:
And my black Palmer’s choice had been
Some ruder and more savage scene
Like that which frowns round dark Loch Skene.
There eagles scream from isle to shore;
Down all the rocks the torrents roar;
O’er the black waves incessant driven,
Dark mists infect the summer heaven;
Through the rude barriers of the lake
Away its hurrying waters break,
Faster and whiter dash and curl,
Till down yon dark abyss they hurl.
Rises the fog-smoke white as snow,
Thunders the viewless stream below,
Diving as if condemned to lave
Some demon’s subterranean cave,
Who, prisoned by enchanter’s spell,
Shakes the dark rock with groan and yell.
And well that Palmer’s form and mien
Had suited with the stormy scene.
Just on the edge, straining his ken
To view the bottom of the den,
Where deep deep down and far within
Toils with the rocks the roaring linn;
Then, issuing forth one foamy wave,
And wheeling round the Giant’s Grave;
White as the snowy charger’s tail,
Drives down the pass of Moffatdale.
Notwithstanding its remote
desolation, however, this region is by no means lacking in human memories
which are stirring enough. Many a fugitive Covenanter has sought refuge
amid its wild glens. In the sombre recesses of these hills, during the
latter years of the doomed House of Stuart, the persecuted people, like
hunted deer, held their conventicles; and at the door of the little
Birkhill Inn, then merely a shepherd’s shieling by the road, tradition
runs that four of them were shot by Claverhouse.
A solitary spot is that
little dwelling of Birkhill, and the shepherd’s wife there has been
sorely put to it more than once by later marauders than Dundee’s
dragoons. They tell how a rough-handed tramp entered the humble doorway
one summer afternoon, and, seeing only a single woman in possession,
threatened to make free with the movable property. He was about to lay
hands on one of the hanks of yarn that were hanging from the kitchen
rafters, when Janet, the shepherd’s wife, stopped him with the sudden
question, "My man, did onybody see ye come in here?" The
fellow gruffly answered "No!" "Then," said the good
woman, with ill-boding energy, "deevil a ane‘ll see ye gang oot.
Lassie, bring me the axe!" The tramp at this intimation, they say,
displayed an unusual amount of activity in disappearing up the road, and
the worthy Janet made no endeavour to call him back. The inhabitants of
so lonely a spot have need to be able to care for themselves.
Less and less grows the
light as the road ascends, for the night falls fast among the mountains;
and more and more impressive becomes the silence, as the rushing of the
stream in the channel below diminishes towards its source. At last there
is no sound but the gentle sigh once and again of the wind rising out of
Yarrow—the summit of the pass has been reached. Presently the streams
begin to run eastward with the road, and that sign declares that the
first steps have been taken in the cradle-land of the Douglas.
Mournful memories of
bygone glory linger here about the springs of Yarrow. The air itself
seems sighing for the memory of "Douglas! Douglas! tender and
true." [These words, familiar to most readers as the refrain of a
modern song, occur in the famous old Scottish poem, "The Houlate,"
believed to be written by Sir Richard Holland, a partisan of the
Douglases, during the reign of James II.] Yet long, long it is since the
valley used to rise and follow that chivalrous race
of king-makers, long since the hoofs of the Douglas steeds rang here in
haugh and dene, and long since the vespers floated up the dale from the
bells of St Mary’s Kirk. Close by these springs of Yarrow the monks of
Melrose in ancient times had a chapel, and at Chapeihope farm near,
silent now in the darkness, the ring of carbines once and the shriek of
a woman proclaimed a terrible deed, when the Flower of Yarrow of her
day, who had waited ten years for her lover, saw him torn from her side
at the bridal moment, and shot for his subscription to the Covenant. The
pitiful story has been woven by Hogg into his "Brownie of Bodsbeck."
Still another Covenanting
reminiscence remains near the spot. On the hillside at Riskenhope the
youthful Renwick, last of those to suffer death for the cause of the
Covenant in Scotland, preached one of his last sermons in 1688. The spot
and its memory have been described in vigorous verse by Professor
Blackie :—
Mark well yon white
house ‘mid the trees;
There, chased
from glen to glen
By bloodhounds
of a despot race,
Young Renwick
found a sheltering place,
With looks of love and deeds of
grace,
From simple, plaided men.
Up we clomb, and down we slid,
Sheer to a mountain brook;
Where on a
sloping grassy mound
The people sate in circle round,
And pulpit
free the brave youth found,
To preach from holy book.
Mark well that stump, where once
there grew
A thorn, a goodly tree;
Even there he stood, and ‘gan to
sing
A powerful psalm, on faithful wing,
Most like to David,
shepherd-king,
Ruddy and fair to see.
So preached the fair-faced boy, and
knew
His preaching meant a deed;
When in
his ear the fierce halloo
Sounded of Clavers and his crew,
Who all
God’s people did pursue
To death with murtherous speed.
These are some of the tragic episodes
which, accumulated during the centuries, enrich with their sorrowful
memory every mile of Scottish soil.
The mountains on each hand have become
only great black shadows in the darkness; but when the mists lift, and
the wind, blowing soft and heavy out of the east, drives back the
curtain of rain, a steady light, the promise of all comfort, appears
shining among trees far in front. Meanwhile, low on the right, rushing
dim and sullen in the darkness, lies the "wan water" of which
the ballads speak. It is the Loch o’ the Lowes—an eerie sight
enough, with its bodeful lapping and its drifting streaks of foam. The
rush of a descending stream makes itself heard under the road among the
shadows, and once or twice a few drops of rain are scattered from the
edge of some trailing cloud; then a path turns off to the right, and
there, on the narrow neck of land between this upper sheet of water and
St Mary’s Loch, glows the welcome light of Tibbie Shiel’s Inn.
And bright, after the
outside darkness, seems the pleasant fire and lamplight in the little
low-roofed room to which the guest is ushered; and hospitable sound the
voices that come along the clean stone passage from the kitchen. Many a
famous angler has been housed under this humble roof; for the loch and its
streams are historic fishing-ground. Here, many a time, has come the great
Christopher North—not the "musty, fusty Christopher" Tennyson
has called him, but the large-souled poet, who could land a salmon or a
sea-trout as well as he could draw tears and laughter with a Border tale.
Here "the Shepherd" and he have foregathered for many a hearty
supper after long, quiet days by the loch side; and the cosy parlour was
the scene of at least one of the famous Noctes. And here it was, on
the morning after one of these great carousals, that Tibbie was startled
by the Professor shouting to her to "bring in the loch," as he
was "here at the back o’ Jeems, and unco dry." The ancient
hostess, a celebrity in her time, is now no more (many a bit of
sententious wisdom she would impart as she sat in her latter days by the
ingle neuk); [Tibbie, whose married name was Richardson, had been in her
youth in the household of the Ettrick Shepherd’s mother. She knew the
poet well, and was wont to say of him that he "was a gey sensible
man, for a’ the nonsense he wrat."] but a comely lass, fresh-coloured
and kindly-voiced, does for the stranger the first hospitalities of
Yarrowdale.
In the inn at this time of
year the visitor may find perhaps a single guest or so beside himself—some
solitary angler who, wandering the countryside, rod in hand, for a week,
has exhausted his stock of news and literature, and who, over the pipe of
peace by the evening fire, is glad to fraternise with new-corners from the
outer world. And for the viands— never, surely, was a meal so welcome as
supper here after the "caller" air of the hills; and the
steaming tea and smoking ham and eggs, with the thick white scones and
fragrant butter, disappear with startling rapidity. Afterwards, when the
house has gone to rest, it is pleasant to lie in the little recessed bed
(for parlour and bedroom are the same thing), and watch, before falling
asleep, the red fire sink on the hearth, hearing nothing but the gentle
pressure of the wind sometimes against the deep-set casement, and
conscious that the first steps have been taken in the land of Border
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