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AT Coldstream, whose railway
station is at Cornhill, over the bridge on English soil, the quiet byway on
which we have more or less followed the banks of Tweed from Ladykirk becomes
one of the highways from England into Scotland. This added importance,
however, so far as may be gathered from two or three leisurely journeys
along it on summer days, is not very insistently borne in upon the
traveller, even in this restless age of the motor. Salmon pools famous in
angling literature swish beneath the alders by the quietest of roadsides.
Spots famous in history, like the Field of Flodden, might seem almost to
cultivate oblivion. There would assuredly be "nothing to see" for that
fatuous portion of the touring world who would express disappointment, and
doubtless do so unabashed, at the Field of Waterloo, at Birgham, where
Edward the First made that treaty of marriage between the first Prince of
Wales and the infant heiress to the Scottish throne, which, had fate
allowed, might possibly have altered British history.
Just across the river from
Birgham stands Carham with its church, standing high above the bank and its
little stream which takes up for a short distance the role of boundary now
abandoned by the Tweed. Here, almost within hail of the scene of Edward's
attempt in 1290 to unite for ever the two unnaturally severed kingdoms, was
fought, nearly three centuries before, the battle of Carham, in which
Malcolm IT., King of Scotland, or such parts of it as conferred the title,
defeated Earl Edulph of Northumbria. This battle occasioned or confirmed the
cession of Lothian, then the northern portion of the Earldom between Forth
and Tweed. Malcolm's victory over the Bernician province of Northumberland,
otherwise that represented by the modern county, was complete and bloody.
The news of it is said to have killed the pious Bishop Earldhun, who had
almost completed the Cathedral at Durham which preceded the present noble
pile. All this fell about at the beginning of King Canute's reign, when his
Danish Earls were set up over the outlying provinces, and Edulph, according
to Freeman, was a poor and timorous specimen of them.
Carham was not as Flodden.
Neither Scot nor Southron could feel a thrill for a battle, howsoever
fierce, whose details we know nothing about, and which was fought in the
interest of chieftains before patriotism had dawned in this part of Britain.
however, our interest in Carham does not lie in any misty picture of the
fight, but from its far-reaching results. For on the cession of Lothian and
its conditions hung that whole future dispute of homage by the Scottish to
the English king. So at least the Scottish historians hold, though Freeman
is not quite in accord with them. However that may be, it is remarkable that
two secluded spots facing one another across the Tweed, like Carham and
Birgham, should be so vitally concerned with two momentous occasions, and
those far asunder, in the long wrangle over Anglo-Scottish relations. This
fortuitous contiguity may furnish apt food for the reflective soul who finds
himself between them. Let us hope that the salmon fisher, who is often such,
and to good purpose, finds compensation for his sometime ineffectual labours
in an atmosphere so heavily charged upon both banks with the shades of
epoch-making heroes. Sir Herbert Maxwell, than whom no better authority on
heroes, salmon, or the Tweed could be desired, regards the cast below Carham
church as one of the surest on the whole river. So here is a happy
combination for the fortunate wights whose lines are cast, to put the matter
in both figurative and literal guise, in a spot so favourable to fish and
fancy.
But here we are in the last
parish of Berwickshire, that of Eccles, to whose church and village a turn
inland from Birgham quickly leads. And as I have designed all the space
between the covers of this book for the two counties whose attractions no
outsiders but a few golfers in their limited sense know anything about, I do
not propose to trespass seriously upon the soil of Roxburgh, celebrated as
it has been by so many pens, famous and otherwise. Being geographically of
the Lowlands and not of the Highlands, that beautiful county watered by
Tweed and Teviot would possibly he little more familiar to the Southron than
its eastern neighbours, but for the possession of Abbotsford, Melrose, and
most of what the tourist understands by the "Scott country." As a matter of
fact, the wizard's bones rest just the breadth of Tweed outside his adopted
county. This, after all, is but a portion of all the shire of Roxburgh
means. For the rest, it includes the whole long stretch of the Scottish
Cheviots. It comprises nearly all the raiding dales of famous name, and
confronts practically the whole of the "Riding" country of equal fame upon
the English side. The Scott country of postcards and railway posters, with
its absurd limitations, would be a standing irritant if you were foolish
enough to quarrel with the inevitable and the material. But at any rate, the
home of Scott for so much of his life has rightly the first claim on the
stranger, who seldom has, or at any rate makes, much time for any other
enterprise. So Abbotsford, Melrose, and Dry-burgh comprise a sort of
physically glorified Stratford-on-Avon. In the one case the reality and
nearness of association, personal and literary, is intense; with the other
the greater glory of the man has to serve for most of these things according
to faith. But I am quite sure the inspiring surface of Roxburghshire gets
nothing like the attention that the prosaic pastures of Warwickshire receive
from the pilgrim. This partly arises front the fact that the latter comes
mainly from overseas; and the fat green opulence of middle England, with its
picturesque village garniture, appeals most strongly, as is natural, to
persons from new and ill-groomed countries, whether of flat or alpine
surface. Nor again would very many of them come properly equipped for a due
understanding or appreciation of what lies beneath the surface of a Border
county.
But one other great business
was transacted, or rather attempted, at Birgham, besides those of Malcolm
and Edward. For in 1188, when the call of the Holy Land was urgent upon
Western Europe, and Henry II. in council assembled had levied a tax of
one-tenth on all English property for the support of a Crusade, he sent the
Bishop of Durham to see what could be done in Scotland. So William the Lion,
with a great assembly of nobles and bishops, met the Durham deputation at
Birgham; for this was before the days of Anglo-Scottish asperities. But the
meeting fell flat. Even William the Lion failed to persuade his subjects to
unbutton their pockets—a great disappointment to that enterprising warrior.
But if peradventure any reader of this book follows up the Tweed as far as
Birgham, he will, and assuredly should, pursue the next four miles of
riverside road to Kelso. In so doing he will pass through the parish of
Ednam, where the poet James Thomson, a son of its manse, was born. Most of
his life, as in those days of the early eighteenth century was almost
inevitable to an aspirant for high honours, or at least their meet rewards,
was spent in the south. His fellow-countymen have within recent years raised
an obelisk here to his memory. His name is rarely mentioned in print
nowadays without the saving clause that he has no place among present
readers and no hope among future ones, which is possibly true; it would have
been equally so at any period within ordinary memory. For I have some reason
to remember how a youthful affection not yet quite scotched for the
Roxburghshire bard was a subject of no little banter on the part of such
companions, male and female, of those distant years, who fancied themselves
as entitled, or perhaps bound, to treat with contempt the blank verse of a
discarded age and method. But I treated the criticisms of these more bookish
contemporaries of my callow teens with silent contempt, and flattered myself
that they were incapable of appreciating this outdoor atmosphere of the
Seasons and the fidelity of their imagery. At any rate, I carried about a
well-thumbed pocket edition, which survives to this day, and, with an
execrable memory for things printed, can still say by heart many passages
that save for association I would gladly have replaced, had I been able,
with verse more worthy of remembrance. One of these fragments is out of
"Spring," where the poet retiring in fancy to his youth in Scotland goes
a-fishing in April among the Cheviots. But after all the genius loci, to
whose influence, wherever he may preside, I admit a lifelong susceptibility,
may have had something to do with this devotion. For the sarsen stone, upon
which local tradition stoutly maintains that the poet was accustomed to sit
when composing his "Spring," had been hauled down from its ancient perch
overlooking "the plains of fair Augusta," alias Frances Lady Hertford, to
whom he dedicated it, and set up beneath the very windows of those panelled
chambers that had sheltered Thomson and have since witnessed the classical
struggles and triumph of generations of British youth. This had been done
doubtless when his cult was in vogue, in proud memory of his associations
with the place. A nicer taste perhaps would have left it in undesecrated
honour upon the green down above the Kennet. Monoliths to the superstitious
in all countries are the very incarnation of occult influence. The spirit of
Thomson could hardly have altogether neglected that tributary boulder on the
public highway, which kept his memory if not his poems green, though shaved
and scraped by the wheels of over-merry marketers and London and Bath
coaches for many decades. For Lord Hertford, or rather his lady, as an
amateur versifier as well as a great hostess, were among the poet's patrons
and entertainers at their stately mansion at Marlborough, then recently
rebuilt. By a curious turn of fortune it now forms the heart of the present
School, and remains cherished and intact with its lawns, groves, and
terraces, one of the most beautiful architectural specimens on a great scale
of the Queen Anne period in England. The young Scots bard was enlisted to
assist her Ladyship's compositions, and incidentally, as it turned out, to
get forward with his own. But in course of time, so says a familiar
tradition, the poet showed such a marked preference for his Lordship's
company at the convivial board over the perhaps stilted intellectual
atmosphere of the lady's boudoir, that his invitations to Wiltshire ceased.
There had been many Hertfords there since the days of the Protector
Somerset, but it was a strange chance that a poet from the Scottish Marches
should find a niche in the halls of the most destructive and merciless
ravager of that country, if only as the cold-blooded agent of a truculent
king, who ever lived.
Kelso is of a truth a goodly
place to look upon, lying in the lap of a luxuriant undulating vale and on
the very edge of the broad, brimming river, all astir here with the recent
inrush of the Teviot. A clean, pleasant little town, with the most spacious
of market squares in the centre, while the ruinous tower and shattered
gables of the once great Norman abbey, brutally destroyed by successive
English raids, still rise pathetically above its roofs. The opulent woods of
country seats almost enclose the town. To the south of the river is
Springwood, through whose pleasant glades the last reaches of the Teviot
sparkle in bright coils, with the ruins of Roxburgh Castle, an English
outpost for long and frequent periods, perched on the steeps above. .
Adjoining the town on the farther side the umbrageous grounds of Floors
Castle spread far and wide, while further to the north the woods of Stichell
mantle upon their long, upstanding ridge. Unlike Melrose, which is pressed
down between lofty hills, the Cheviots are some eight miles to the south of
Kelso, and the Lammermoors, a little more to the northward, with Mersian
territory filling the interval. The prospect from the long stone bridge at
Kelso is charming, for the river is here expanded to a trifle beyond its
natural width, and, running apace over a gravelly bottom, displays in the
sunshine that touch of amber contributed perhaps by Teviot; while at the
head of the reach, by a mill where the rivers unite, there is the bright
gleam of rapids spreading across from the meadowy shore on one side to the
bowery garden walls of the town on the other. Facing downstream the river
runs away to the foot of high, wooded steeps, to disappear from view.
But to return to Berwickshire
and the road from Birgham which passes the village of Eccles, with its old
kirk and general flavour of bygone importance. There was a flourishing
nunnery here before the Reformation, which, like everything else in the
country, was destroyed, together with the village, by Hertford in 1545. Some
fragment of it, I believe, remains in the walls of the present
mansion-house. The villages and little towns which Hertford and other
raiders, official and private, burned were no doubt poor enough collections
of huts, easily rebuilt and of small value compared to the stock and grain
destroyed. But it was cruelly. hard on the Scots, who had not yet accepted
the Reformation and were still a Catholic country, to have had their
splendid monasteries and quite tolerable store of good parish churches
destroyed. For through all the bitter wars between the nations, with rare
exceptions, Hexham Abbey, if I remember rightly, being one, these noble
buildings on both sides of the Border were held inviolate. That Cromwell or
Knox should do these things, was logical if deplorable, but that a set of
unprincipled soldiers, whose quarrel with a faith they had practically not
abandoned themselves had nothing religious about it, should wreak their
iconoclastic rage upon a Catholic country with which they had no serious
cause of quarrel at the time, was a blot upon the name of England. The
unpardonable havoc wrought upon the sacred buildings of the Scottish Border,
which is felt so grievously to-day, was a scandalous outrage. It is quite
true that Scottish fanatics at a later period did some further mischief upon
what was left, spreading across from the meadowy shore on one side to the
bowery garden walls of the town on the other. Facing downstream the river
runs away to the foot of high, wooded steeps, to disappear from view.
But to return to Berwickshire
and the road from Birgham which passes the village of Eccles, with its old
kirk and general flavour of bygone importance. There was a flourishing
nunnery here before the Reformation, which, like everything else in the
country, was destroyed, together with the village, by Hertford in 1545. Some
fragment of it, I believe, remains in the walls of the present
mansion-house. The villages and little towns which Hertford and other
raiders, official and private, burned were no doubt poor enough collections
of huts, easily rebuilt and of small value compared to the stock and grain
destroyed. But it was cruelly. hard on the Scots, who had not yet accepted
the Reformation and were still a Catholic country, to have had their
splendid monasteries and quite tolerable store of good parish churches
destroyed. For through all the bitter wars between the nations, with rare
exceptions, Hexham Abbey, if I remember rightly, being one, these noble
buildings on both sides of the Border were held inviolate. That Cromwell or
Knox should do these things, was logical if deplorable, but that a set of
unprincipled soldiers, whose quarrel with a faith they had practically not
abandoned themselves had nothing religious about it, should wreak their
iconoclastic rage upon a Catholic country with which they had no serious
cause of quarrel at the time, was a blot upon the name of England. The
unpardonable havoc wrought upon the sacred buildings of the Scottish Border,
which is felt so grievously to-day, was a scandalous outrage. It is quite
true that Scottish fanatics at a later period did some further mischief upon
what was left, and destroyed, I believe, a good deal in the North that no
English invaders ever reached. But that was Scotland's concern, at any rate.
It is curious, in view of these other performances, that Henry's policy
towards Wales should have been so conspicuous for the wise measures by which
it terminated the domestic turbulence and the political disabilities from
which the Principality still suffered. But then this Tudor king was a
Welshman—in Welsh eyes, at any rate, he stood for the triumph of their race
and the fruition of their long-sounded prophecies. There are two
"Borderlands" in the United Kingdom, and their respective prophets, so far
as I know them, are singularly oblivious of one another's story. But
contrasts and analogies are irresistibly tempting if one happens to have
rambled a good deal in both the Welsh and Scottish Marches.
But let us hasten now, if
with the mixed feelings inevitable to the occasion, to hail the amazing
battlements of Hume Castle, which, lifted 600 feet upon its rocky perch
above the distant bed of Tweed, proudly dominates a now wide-opening
landscape. Nothing could be in more perfect harmony with the fitness of
things than the pride of pose enjoyed by the empty shell of what was once
the stronghold of the ruling House of the Eastern March. For the Merse here
begins to shake itself free of its luxuriant enclosures, to shed much of its
timber, and to break out anon into tracts of poorish upland that even the
Scottish plough has flinched from. Here and there, too, are ridges of craggy
outcrop, where the gorse blooms and Cheviot sheep nibble the short sward
between the rocks. On one of these stands the shell of Hume Castle, the four
curtain walls, that is to say, with portions of the corner-towers which
formed, together with the interior offices, the usual plan of a Scottish
feudal castle. Below its feet, standing precisely where it should stand for
proper effect, is the little tributary village of a dozen ancient cottages,
all, strange to relate, in the unusual head-dress of thatched roof, wavy and
moss-grown and of the most approved picturesque type. It must be added, in
all candour, that they do not look as if they would long justify their
maintenance in so utilitarian an atmosphere as regards these things as that
of the Merse. Indeed, one of their occupants informed me that the last man
who understood thatching had recently deceased, which seems to settle the
matter. When I last saw them, too, they were ablaze with flowers, as if the
inmates felt a proper sense of responsibility in occupying such picturesque
survivals.
On every side green carpets
of sward slope sharply upward to meet the grey walls of the four-cornered
pile. But, alas! truth must prevail, and these imposing walls were in great
part re-erected out of the old material on the original foundations a
century or so ago. This was a wholly laudable and artistically legitimate
enterprise: but why those terrible mock battlements that must make the
passing traveller of ordinary perception upon far-distant ways—so
conspicuous is Hume Castle—rub his eyes and wonder if he had eaten something
perilous at his dinner over night? There surely never were such nightmare
crenellations even on the comic opera stage. I wonder what Sir Walter
thought of the last Earl of Marchmont's antiquarian equipment; for he must
have been many a time and oft confronted by this specimen of it. But with a
little determination, one can forget these pinchbeck accessories, some
twenty feet long and ten feet high I should guess, seeing that there is only
space for three of them on each of the four curtain walls! The effect
otherwise, having in view the historic significance of the Castle, is
altogether satisfying. Yet why does the owner not hurl the excrescences down
the steep and leave the parapet flat, like any other old castle that time
has robbed of its battlements?
Hume or Home Castle—for the
middle vowel is virtually transmutable, the old pronunciation verging, I
believe, between the two sounds—was built by the Earl of Dunbar, who in the
thirteenth century married the estates of Home and took the name. To relate
the story of the building would be to tell that of Berwickshire. For the
Homes, with the various branches that sprang from the original stock, were
paramount in that county through all its lively times, and owned a goodly
share of the land and of the pele towers and fortalices that still lift
their shattered heads or show their grass-grown foundations all over it.
Hume Castle seems to have been the chief abode of the head of the clan, and
the rallying-place in times of stress to all of the name. It was more even
than that. For as the chief Scottish fortress in the Eastern March,
everybody who was anybody in the heart or Border of Scotland must have
sheltered there in peace or war at one time or another; and a good many
illustrious Englishmen, who had no business there at all, paid it the
compliment of a short visit. The heads of the clan became barons in the
fifteenth century and earls at the Union of the Crowns. The prominent and
mysterious part taken by Lord Home at Flodden will be fresh in the reader's
memory. When the Lord Home of the day took sides in the ever-shifting
turmoil of Scottish politics, which were generally in the end settled by the
sword, most of Berwickshire followed him. But the men of the Merse, as
Borderers, were not precisely on the same footing, just as they were not
quite the same sort of men as the pastoral people of the dales—of the Middle
and Western Marches, that is to say. Even the dialect differs. Every
schoolboy, whether English or Scotch, knows that the Percies fought the
Douglases. But they and their successors did not usually go due north across
the Tweed, nor yet raise the bulk of their hardy following in East
Northumberland. They went up through the dales and glens of the Cheviots,
through Tyne and Rede and Coquet, against the dalesmen of Roxburgh, who
visited them in like manner by the same rugged ways. The barrier of the
Tweed was, in fact, tolerably well guarded against private feuds and forays.
Berwick, with its strong English interests and garrison and the strong
castles of Norham and `Nark, to say nothing of the often-unfordable river,
made the Eastern March a rather awkward country for light-hearted foragers.
The common folk of the Merse were tillers of the soil, stolid and brave
enough, but they were not "riding men" in the sense of those who followed
the Scotts and Kerrs and Douglases, and regarded such enterprises both as
their pastime and as a branch of business. In regular international wars the
Mersemen bore the chief brunt, and for obvious reasons suffered most when
things went wrong. Undoubtedly they took part in a good deal of desultory
fighting, but forays were not the distinguishing feature of the Eastern
March that they were further westward. The Berwickshire hind followed the
plough and would probably not have fretted if left in peace to follow it.
His superiors, though war was their trade and fortified towers their
habitation, found martial entertainment in rather different sources, and
were not accustomed to cross the Border when the moon was full or the larder
was empty—partly, no doubt, for the good reason already given, that the line
of Tweed was difficult to get through. In short, the Mersemen, as they were
not generally graziers or experts at driving cattle through a wild country
in the wrong direction, so they were not raiders in the same sense as their
neighbours, and had little share in that heady existence which song and
story has so illuminated. The dalesmen to the westward, as we know, were on
such intimate terms of hostility with their Northumbrian neighbours, and so
like them in word and deed and thought and outlook, that a sort of
camaraderie existed of which neither the men of Coldingham or Swinton on the
one side, nor those of Bamburgh or of Belton on the other, knew anything. We
arc told that the Charltons, Swinburnes, Robsons, and the like of the one
side, the Kerrs and Scotts and Elliots of the other, shouted each other
"to-names" and bandied about rude chaff as neighbours familiar with one
another's idiosyncrasies, as they cracked each other's skulls. It is common
knowledge that these lawless souls, a scourge very often to their respective
governments, were under a half-suspicion of not always regarding a national
war from a national point of view. In short, though they lived in almost
perpetual conflict with one another in their own fashion, they were not so
much concerned with high politics, and might conceivably be lukewarm or even
succumb to a common and fraternal instinct if some tempting convoy of
baggage-carts or the like loomed near. Men who even played football matches
with one another in interludes of amity, it is quite evident, had a code as
well as a method of life which placed them apart and often as much at odds
with their nominal rulers in Edinburgh or Westminster as with the "auld
enemie."
Hume Castle, to be sure, is
getting on towards the westerly country. From its high rock you can look out
towards the old forests of Jed and Ettrick, blue and diin beyond the rich
vale of Tweed. But it is the symbol of rather a different past, bloody as it
was, and a different order of people, as any Borderer will tell you they are
to-day. I take it that, with their neighbours of East Lothian and East
Northumberland, the I1lersemen are as pure Saxon with as little else in
there as any breed in Britain. Beyond Kelso a Scandinavian colony settled,
coining up from the west coast. And as a last word on that meeting-place of
the waters of Tweed and Teviot, and an important one in Border defence, it
may be noted that Roxburgh Castle was held for generations as an English
outpost and this little bit of Scotland regarded as English ground. This
made it, of course, a fierce bone of contention, and James II. of Scotland
was killed by the bursting of a gun before its walls in a siege which
finally restored it to the Scotch, who destroyed it. The king's widow
meantime mourned his fate and her own up here in Hume Castle. The sixteenth
century, which cost the Verse so dear, was naturally a strenuous time for
its chief fortress. The widow of the fourth Lord Home held it for a time
against the Protector Somerset. Her son, the next heir, regained it and
killed the English garrison. This was the time of improved artillery, and
the old castle got a succession of hammerings, the Earl of Sussex giving it
a severe one in 1569 with heavy guns and taking possession. After the
English Civil War, Colonel Fenwick of Northumberland appeared before Hume
Castle and demanded its surrender in Cromwell's name. It was in the charge
of a Cockburn, who returned a defiant answer, enclosing with it some
doggerel that still has the ear of the local swain. In his letter Cockburn
intimated that he knew nothing about Cromwell, and that Hume Castle "stood
upon a rock." This significant statement was thus further emphasised:-
"I, Willie Wastle,
Stand firm in my Castle,
And a' the dogs o' your town
Will no bring Willie Wastle down."
Willie Wastle unfortunately
climbed down with great celerity on this occasion, and the castle was
finally sleighted, and his great poetic effort flatters his memory. The
hapless but energetic Queen Mary, like her cousin of England, though often
in far different fashion, visited so many castles within her domain that the
irreverent tourist is tempted to the same trite pleasantries with the Iocal
handbook. But the beds this poor lady slept in, are at any rate nothing like
so numerous as those still held sacred to the great but deplorably mean
Eliza. I do not think Mary ever stopped at Hume, but the accomplished
Maitland of Lethington, so long her faithful adviser, was here on one
occasion at least, eon-ducting that protracted correspondence with Cecil
during that crisis in Anglo-Scottish affairs of which Mr. Skelton has given
us so many illuminating fragments. But what will touch the ordinary
imagination much more than this, is the fact that Hume Castle always carried
ready for the torch upon its ramparts one of the bale, or beacon fires of
the Scottish Border. Macaulay, when he fired our youthful souls with his
stirring lines on the Armada, fired at the same time with the utmost
dramatic effect the misty summits of the Welsh mountains and the top of
Skiddaw.
He must have had in his mind
a Georgian jubilee or a Coronation! It would have been of small practical
utility laying beacon-fires which took an hour and a half to reach at the
critical moment and were rather more likely than not to be wrapped in
clouds. The official bale-fires kept ready for use in South-Eastern Scotland
began at St. Abb's Head; the next was on Dowlaw Hill; the third and fourth
were North Berwick Law and Tranent, in East Lothian, which we shall meet
with later. Whether Hume Castle, which was another, could respond to Dowlaw,
I doubt; perhaps it had its own signal in the Tweed valley. The last time
the beacon-fire blazed from its ramparts has stamped itself upon the memory
of the north for all time, and the incident is, of course, elaborated by
Scott in the closing chapter of The Antiquary.
The author himself, as an
enthusiastic volunteer and participant in that exciting twenty-four hours,
gives in the appendix the actual occurrences on which he based the invasion
scare which so delightfully closes our acquaintance with Jonathan Oldbuck.
At the moment of extreme tension and expectation of invasion during the
Napoleon wars, and when the volunteers all round the coast of Britain were
on the alert and the old beacon-fires ready for the torch, that of Hume
Castle suddenly blazed forth into the night—that of February 2, 1803. The
inland and northern beacons taking up the signal, the volunteers, cavalry
and infantry, of the whole Border on both sides sprang to arms with such
despatch and enthusiasm that Dalkeith and Berwick, the two rallying-posts,
were crowded with soldiery from several counties by the following mid-day,
when it was realised that it had been a false alarm. Scott himself, as an
officer in the Edinburgh Light Horse, which he had helped to raise, was
there; and it was probably, at least till the mistake was discovered, the
happiest day of his life. It seems that an accidental fire in
Northumberland, near the spot where a beacon was situated, was the cause of
an unintentional practical joke that at any rate proved the practical
patriotism of the North; for the distances ridden and the long marches
covered at an inclement season by some of these zealous Borderers are worthy
of remembrance.
Easily visible, indeed
prominent enough four miles away to the south-westward, is another knubbly
upstanding ridge, on whose higher summit a dim object can be just descried.
This is Smailholm Tower, upon the farm of Sandy Knowe. I don't know whether
the pulse of the Scott Vlover will quicken at the sound of the names—it
ought to. But I frankly admit that to myself, hitherto unfamiliar with this
corner of Berwickshire, and with but a vague memory of Scott's early
association with it, Smailholm came as a delightful revelation. We will
dispense with the four miles of twisting byway through a ridgy country
which, after crossing the Eden, lands one at the homestead of Sandy Knowe. I
don't think this spot is included in the route laid out for visitors to the
Scott country, though it is only five miles from Dryburgh, nor catered for,
nor mentioned in the programme. Certainly there is no trace of them, nor
mark of pilgrim feet. But Sandy Knowe, with its uplifted pele tower, is
surely at the very heart of things ! For here abode Scott's uncle, the
tenant of the farm to whose care the delicate and partially crippled lad
used frequently to be consigned for long periods, as a salutary change from
the close atmosphere of his father's house in the Old Town at Edinburgh.
Here he breathed in deep draughts the strong breezes of that
Border atmosphere which
possibly made him, physically and intellectually. The south of Scotland
might almost have been ransacked for an abode more calculated to inspire an
imaginative child than this one here. Not for what it is in itself, but for
the significance of its situation, for its suggestive foreground, for its
gloriously expansive outlook. A comfortable-looking, fair-sized farm-house
near the ridge of a long, windy sweep of fields, but itself snugly sheltered
in a grove of trees, it looks out to the south and west over the whole
Border country and the long course of Tweed. But even this can hardly have
been so potent an influence on the childhood and youth of such a man as the
extraordinary distinction with which the foreground of his then limited
sphere of action had, as it were, composed itself. It seemed to me, on
walking out at the back of the homestead on to this rocky upland pasture for
the first time, as if the secret of Scott's life and work were suddenly
revealed, and it was altogether a surprise and a delight. What scene—" meet
nurse" indeed "for a poetic child"—could be imagined more calculated to
kindle the germ of a genius like that of Scott. The outlook from Sandy Knowe
might stand for an actual illustration of half his work. For the immediate
foreground upon one side was bounded by the wall of high craggy ridges in
which the sweep of the farm lands terminated, and at their highest point,
thrust far up against the whirling clouds, was a massive and perfect Border
pele. A few minutes' walk over the rocky sheep pasture, where Scott as a
merry, precocious child, backward in the use of his legs, was wont to be
laid on a plaid all day with the shepherd's eye upon him, brings you to the
more precipitous crag on which the tower is set. If the view southwards from
the house itself, over the vales of Tweed and Teviot and the Northumbrian
hills, was a fitting one for the future prophet and poet of Scotland, that
from Smailholm Tower adds to it the whole tempestuous and romantic heart of
the Scottish Marches—that sea of dim hills and ranges which, seen from here,
fills all the visible portion of the counties of Peebles, Selkirk, and
Roxburgh. But that grim tower, as it would appear from the windows on a wild
day against a wild sky, must have made a background indeed to those tales of
olden days with which Scott tells us his grandmother at Sandy Knowe used to
fascinate him.
On summer days, too, how
accessible was this old pele to the solitary imaginative child, with no
sound about it but the hum of wild bees, the bleat of sheep, and the tinkle
of the "wee burnie" that runs down into a large pool in the cleft, and with
half the Marches lying at his feet! Smailholm had been a mere name to me
hitherto—just a farm in the country where Scott was sent for his health as a
boy ; nothing that I remembered to have heard or read, to my shame, had
prepared me for anything like this and the significance of the whole thing
in relation to Scott's temperament.
The reader may be reminded
that Scott's father, a lawyer, lived in the sombre and cramped precincts of
the " Old Town " at Edinburgh, and had a large family. Walter for some years
was the weakly one of the flock, and country air was the treatment
prescribed. His grandfather, though of good blood, had been tenant of
Smailholm, which was still occupied by the widow and a daughter, while a
son, who was a factor near-by, overlooked the farm. So the boy Walter was
practically adopted for the time by these good ladies, and though for the
sake of his lame leg absent at Bath for a year or two, was back again at
Sandy Knowe for a period before finally rejoining the family circle in
Edinburgh, at the age of eight. But there were constant visits afterwards to
his good aunt, though she moved later to Kelso. Scott credits both Sandy
Knowe and Kelso, practically within sight of one another, as being the main
source of that inspiration which made him what he was and delighted a world
for generations past and to come. At Sandy Knowe he seems to have absorbed
no small amount of Border lore and tradition from various veterans of the
neighbourhood, in addition to that emanating from the prolific memory of his
relatives. If Sandy Knowe is not included in the "Scott country," for which
I have no doubt the occupant is devoutly thankful, the pilgrim does
occasionaIIy come here; for in the top storey of the tower I found a small
tradesman from Glasgow and a young daughter. The opportunity for a chance
test of the modern Scotch schoolgirl's attitude towards her patron saint was
naturally embraced, or at any rate served as an excuse for a passing
civility. So, feigning ignorance as to whether Smailholm Tower was the
subject of any of the poet's verse, I was promptly referred to the "Eve of
St. John," which was satisfactory. The tower is architecturally a good
specimen of its class, and in better condition than most, and of three
storeys. A spiral stone staircase leads up to the first and second, which
are both floored. The fireplaces are tolerably perfect and the stonework of
the windows uninjured, while in one of them the original ironwork remains.
It belonged in old days to the Pringles. Nature has limited and prescribed
the size of the barmykin, the entrance to which still survives, for one side
of the crag on which the tower stands is precipitous. But its chief glory is
its lonely and uplifted site, and its character as a memorial to Scott more
truly significant than the proudest which a grateful world has raised.
"And still I
thought that shattered tower
The mightiest work in human power
And marvelled, as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitched my mind
Of forayers, who, with headlong force,
Down from that strength had spurred their horse,
Their southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviots blue,
And, home returning, filled the hall
With revel, wassail-rout and brawl
Methought that still with tramp and clang
The gateway's broken arches rang;
Methou lit grim features, seamed with scars,
Glared through the window's rusty bars.
And ever by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lovers' sleights, of ladies' charms,
Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms
Of patriot battles, won of old
By Wallace Wight and Bruce the bold."
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