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A VERY frequent utterance of
both speech and pen has it that the most attractive scenery in Britain is to
be found among the foothills of moors and mountains. In Scotland, as already
noticed, the charms of this neutral zone- between the wild and the tame are
often obliterated by the zeal of the northern farmer, and the plough at
times brushes the very edge of the heather. But the East Lothian wall of the
Lammermoors, where we closed the last chapter, is too steep and broken and
rent by ravines to suffer greatly in this way at the hands of the most
soaring agriculturist. On the Berwickshire side, it was noticed how the
moors are apt to dip to the Merse in long sombre sweeps of reclaimed moss
and straggling fir woods. But from Longformacus to Ellemford and Abbey St.
Bathansat the back of Duns in short -- the Lammermoors break into the low
country amid a delightful confusion of valley, woodland, and heath-clad
heights, a very labyrinth of bosky glens so intricate that in spite of one
or two tortuous narrow roads which crawl laboriously into it around the
obstructing mass of Cockburn Law, a more secluded bit of Arcady would be
hard to find. The Whiteadder, which here breaks through with resounding
voice in many miles of twisting tempestuous course, and not seldom in deep
rocky gorges not lightly to be seriously bridged for a scant traffic by
prudent county authorities, contributes to this seclusion as much as to its
scenic glories.
Abbey St. Bathans, locked
deep within it, is the heart of the region, and in the whole orbit of the
Lammermoors there is no more delightful retreat. The Whiteadder has run down
its four-mile course from Ellemford in a succession of pools and streams,
and, after a sharp bend, spreads out in a broad, straight reach, where its
waters, chastened in spirit by a low weir at the foot, roll in even current
between the lawns and groves of the laird's house on one side, and on the
other by mossy knowes clad with fern and indigenous oak woods. Hard by the
bank nestles the ancient little church which serves a parish ranging far
over hills an I moors to the edge of East Lothian. A cluster of cottages, a
manse, and some farm buildings make up the hamlet, while across the river,
where a lusty burn comes pouring down a turf-carpeted oak-shaded glen,
stands the schoolhouse and the post office. From this brief inadequate
description it may be gathered that Abbey St. Bathans satisfies every claim
to the idyllic. Moreover, it presents precisely the same appearance, if
memory serves me, save for some ornamental planting, and has practically
altered nothing since I knew it forty years ago, and used to cross the foot
bridge, still swung high over the river, on the way from Grant's House to
Ellemford. Yet this is only four miles from a great main line, and the roar
of the Edinburgh and London trains can be heard in still weather from the
hilltop above. But when the Whiteadder is high and the ford unnegotiable,
which it may be for days together, wheel traffic is entirely cut off from
the four miles of perpendicular by-way that leads to Grant's House station.
Some habitations are perennially isolated from even that steep outlet by the
picturesque arrangements of nature in which their lines are cast. `'ever
before have I seen `ilIagers in quite fine clothes trundling a wheel-barrow
with a trunk upon it a mile uphill over a moor to meet a trap as the most
expeditious method of getting to a comparatively near station, and that one,
too, on a great main line. For this is not the Hebrides! Yet I have here
watched, nay walked beside, this archaic "outfit," as the Americans would
say, more than once in a fortnight's sojourn as it proceeded laboriously up
the long, gently-sloping moor from the village to the wind-swept cross-roads
where I was domiciled.
It may be said at once that
in the whole length and breadth of the Lammermoors, from the Soutra Pass to
Grant's House, there are next to no facilities for the entertainment of the
stranger, even of the most primitive kind — a condition of things which, as
we have seen, did not obtain in former days. If he wants to explore them he
must clamber through their outer barriers with every fresh returning morn,
for with the exception, perhaps, of the pass into Ellemford, wheels of any
kind will be found more toil than profit. I was fortunate, however, in
finding a solitary exception. Now right on the very top of what in my youth
was a heathery moor, but is now partially encroached upon by pastures and
barley fields, there stood a half-ruinous house. It was the remnant, I
believe, of a small wayside coaching inn. For on a road from Duns to
Cockburnspath still existing, but in parts grass-grown, a coach is credibly
reported to have once upon a time travelled, continuing thence, no doubt, to
Edinburgh. In a portion of this tumble-down haunt of former revelry, a
strange solitary being, much given to liberty and whisky and the illegal
pursuit of game, had rigged up sufficient protection against the weather,
and sat, no doubt, free of rent. I regret very much that I had not the
pleasure of his personal acquaintance, but he had the reputation of being a
sort of chartered libertine in the rural sense of the word. Ile was
indispensable to anglers for one thing, above all in assuring a good basket
to those whose own skill was not equal to the achievement. He must also have
been useful, or was possibly so formidable to the game owners that they
winked at his notorious practice of potting grouse, partridges, or hares
—with discreet limitations no doubt —out of his drawing-room window,
together with other free - and,- easy practices. Shooting was not
arithmetically so solemn a business as it is everywhere now; and if I have
said that time has stood still on the Lammermoors, this statement must be
modified in so far that the heather in those days all over the hills grew
for the most part rankly at its own sweet will, whereas it is now
systematically burned, as everywhere else. And it must be admitted that the
young plant in bloom has a more gorgeous effect on a hillside than where it
is older and ranker. The lines of butts, too, are novelties, and undeniably
disfiguring ones, since that time, when driving was scarcely anywhere
practised. But of the poacher who provoked the insertion of this saving
clause, his weird lair had long disappeared, and in its place a small
shooting-box, in type if not literally such, had arisen amid a pleasant
little garden, and a screen of quick-growing poplars were already rustling
high all round it. A veritable little oasis was this acre of fruit and
vegetables, and flowers, amid the wide waste of sweeping sheep pastures, and
purple grouse moors, for the bloom of the heather still lingered, though
August was fast drawing into September.
It had fallen to other
occupancy, which is of no import here except for the fact that it provided
us with snug and comfortable quarters, and, of its kind, as ideal a perch
for any one who loves the moors and all that in them lies as I ever
encountered. For from the wicket-gate of the little walled garden the
Lammermoors rolled away to the westward for miles interminable, while in the
foreground we looked right down over Abbey St. Bathans and the
deep-channelled, woody
vale of the Whiteaddcr. The
intermittent call of grouse could be heard all day, and at evening they
would come flying past the windows for a brief turn on the grass pastures;
while partridges, which flourish greatly on the tillage fringes of the moor,
were calling from all sides on the seeds or barley stubbles. At the back of
us two great farms heaved up and down in big ridges to Grant's House and the
railroad three miles away. But it might have been forty for any suggestion
of a murmur from the outer world that ever reached us. I take it there was
no higher ground between us and the Ural :,)fountains to the eastward, and,
indeed, the air of the eastern Lammermoors is absolutely the most
invigorating I know of anywhere. It ought to be. A person knowledgeable in
such things would at once pick them out upon the map as geographically
calculated to enjoy the highest distinction in this particular. They are
also unenviably distinguished for perhaps the severest snowstorms that
strike the British islands. When the Storm-God is on the rampage in the
winter season, the newspaper reader with his toes on the fender probably
does not notice that almost invariably the Lammermoors and their sheep
farmers are quoted in the weather reports as among the most heavily
punished, or, at any rate, the most deeply buried in the whole country.
We started in our moorland
quarters with a thirty hours' rain —not ordinary rain, but unrelenting,
lashing torrents, borne upon a south-west gale. Now rain in Kent, or Essex,
or Warwickshire, and the like, is merely a necessary evil. It has scarcely
any aesthetic compensations at all—just a veil drawn down upon everything
out of doors that is good to look upon. Such are pre-eminently fair-weather
countries, and afford, in short, little scope for the great qualities of the
Tempest. Now, on the Wiltshire Downs a wild wet day begins to be uplifting;
on the moors it reaches the sublime. At least, it has always thus seemed to
me. To some temperaments, I know, all this is horrible. The very qualities
that brace the fancy and touch the imagination in one case depress some
other equally susceptible soul to the very depths of despondency. My
companion suffered greatly in spirits from the shrieking of the wind as it
buffeted our snug, aerial fortress of good stone and slate, and lashed the
little belt of tossing trees that fringed us out from the moors, and hurled
the rain in spasmodic douches upon the window panes for a whole night and a
day. To one of us, all this, with the chasing of the low clouds across the
endless sweeps of lonely moor, the whirling of the restless storm-harried
birds, gulls, crows, plovers, and such like, that have no shelter for their
heads, was a mild inferno. To the other, this elemental frenzy let loose in
an appropriate and responsive playground was a delight.
There were other points of
view in the establishment, of course. Our host, for instance, a genial
little man, great at a crack, whose spare hours were mainly spent by the
riverside, took a thoroughly cheerful view of the storm, though it was
blowing his apples about sadly. "Aye, but the burns 'ull fush gran' the
morrow's morn, an' I've a fine lot o' worms tae." And so they did. The
womenfolk obviously took the same view of the storm as my depressed
companion, though upon purely practical grounds natural to housewives. We
were all at one, however, in enjoying the mild excitement as to whether the
postman would cross the ford of the river Eye, whose infant streams ran down
through moorish and boggy pastures on the station side of the house. But if
a stormy day upon the moor has its sombre and weird sort of fascination for
some of us, when the clouds roll away and the sun bursts upon the battered
spongy waste, there can be no two opinions. Divergent temperaments which a
display of elemental forces thrust for the moment so mysteriously far apart
forget their difference when the curtain of morning rises on another scene;
a scene radiant with sunshine, canopied with blue skies, and balmy with soft
scent-laden zephyrs. Such, indeed, are days worth living for upon the moors,
and this was one of them. The waning heather had gathered a new lease of
life, and glowed with reinvigorated glory. The sheep pastures glistened with
a fresh touch of verdure. The brown burns shone brimming and lusty in the
valleys, and from every side came that delicious sound of gurgling waters.
Our host was away after breakfast, with "a piece " in his pocket and a bag
of worms dependent from his waistcoat button, and didn't come home till long
after dark. His family were just beginning to get anxious about him when he
turned up, still full of enthusiasm, and a basket of trout into the bargain.
As we went down the long
glistening slope towards the Whiteadder in the morning sunshine, its angry
voice away in the woods below was plain enough, keeping up, as it were, the
orgy of the preceding day, when everything else in the earth below and the
heavens above had shaken off their delirium and relapsed into a sunny dream.
It had already sunk many feet, but was still over its banks and rolling
finely down the comparatively unobstructed reach which divides the scattered
dwellings of St. Bathans. Just below the hamlet, however, the encompassing
hills begin gradually to close upon one another, their sides breast-high
with dense mantling bracken, shaggy with scattered growths of birch and oak,
ash and alder, and their feet rudely shod with huge crags and boulders. It
is just here that the river, having by this time gathered the waters of its
many tributary burns into its bosom, begins its long struggle out of the
Lammermoors into the Merse. Pent in at places by precipitous walls of rock,
from whose mossy crests gnarled and twisted trunks shake out their canopy of
varied foliage, birch and rowan, oak and alder, above the dark waters, the
whole volume of the river rushes in deep narrow fumes that in normal times
you might almost compass in a leap. Then comes a breathing space in some
wide heaving pool, where from one shore a silvery beach shelves gently away
into unknown depths, and upon the other, far out of reach of the angler's
tormenting fly, the trout. rise peacefully beneath the pendent boughs of
great forest trees.
The rush of the water in a
flood through these gorges is a sight well worth encountering many
difficulties to enjoy. And when the river has run down again, when its first
yellowy-brown fury has modified, and the succeeding "black water" stage dear
to the local worm-fisher has run gradually down through subtle shades to the
clear amber which is its normal colouring, the infinite beauty of these few
sequestered miles of river scenery can be of all times the best appreciated.
More than one warm sunny day we wiled away in delightful lazy fashion upon
the banks of one or other of these glorious sylvan pools. A lunch-basket, a
book, and a rod, not carried with serious or agitating intent, made a
complete equipment. Our resting-place was a clean grassy bank fenced about
with bracken, whence a white gravelly shore shelved into a broad heaving
pool radiant with many hues from its varying depth and its varied bottom and
flecked by the swaying shadows of oak and willow, flung over it from a woody
cliff beyond. A rush of white water above, and a long white vista of
glancing water below, vanishing into more woods and crags, beneath the
purple shoulder of a mighty upstanding hill—what better haven could there be
on a summer day? The resident population of the pool edges, too, begin in
time to tolerate the intruder. The white-breasted dipper ceases to duck and
bow at you from his mossy rock in mid-stream, and settles comfortably down,
and even ventures a ' time or two. The belated sandpiper ceases to scud on
frightened wings, but halts anon upon the silvery strand, where the perky
yellow wagtails have long been friendly. A kingfisher flashes by, a streak
of glory, and a heron beats his slow way over the trees where the cushats
stir and rustle. Not that I allowed the river to run down out of fishing
order after such a glorious spate, without anymore serious onslaught upon
the trout than intermittent contests with rising fish in one or other of
these pools of enchantment. Furthermore, I felt it a sort of pious
duty,—almost a tribute to the memory of departed youth and its friends,—to
fish once at least over the old familiar reaches between Abbey and Ellemford.
I was anxious, moreover, to see if the Whiteadder, after four more decades
of attention from a nation of fishermen, could really be the prolific
White-adder of old. It may interest the angler upon this account, if it
bores the layman, to know that about sunset the day's spoil of a companion
and myself just filled one large creel, with which we made glad the hearts
of several riverside cottagers, while the third of our angling trio had
enough in his basket to supply our house on the moor. Like every one else
here, we used the same old patterns, the spider hackles, that Stewart
popularised and swore by half a century ago, and ours were dressed by my
companion with a sapient touch as to shade and size that a sustained
acquaintance with the Whiteadder had taught him. I might add that we
returned to the water far more fish of the smaller variety than we kept. And
these rivers, be it remembered, have to stand the onslaught of skilful bait
fishermen (too much worm is the Scotsman's failing), who basket almost
everything relentlessly. I commend this little extract from a veracious
angler's diary to the reflection of some owners of mountain rivers--not to
the dog-in-the-manger sort of man, he is hopeless—hut to the generous and
well-intentioned, who is more than apt to be unduly timid about
over-fishing.
Far above these fretting
channels, upreared on a sharp shoulder of Cockburn Law, stands the Broch or
supposed Pictish camp of Edinshall. It is well calculated to astonish a
visitor unprepared for the spectacle and only familiar with the usual
prehistoric encampment concealed under centuries of turf. It certainly
astonished me, for scarcely any of my acquaintances in the Border country
seemed to know much about it, and, indeed, I had almost begun to consider
before achieving the summit whether the result would duly reward a rather
perpendicular scramble of three or four hundred feet, much of it through
dense bracken shoulder-high, though this, by the way, is not the right
approach. I breathed a note of thankfulness, however, when the top was
reached, that a worthier instinct had prevailed. For I had certainly never
seen the like before, which is not altogether surprising, as there is, I
believe, no counterpart in the whole of England and `ales, and only three or
four in Southern Scotland, of which this one is the finest specimen. Instead
of the usual grassy ditches and ramparts of an ordinary British camp, I
beheld a circular building of beautifully laid dry stone, about six feet
high and about seventy-five in diameter. It suggested the commencement of an
enormous stone tower, suddenly interrupted in the construction, and of any
period—a recent one for choice, one might conceivably imagine, so perfect
and undisturbed and even moss-free is the work. The foundation is of large
flat stones projecting beyond the face, while the filling of the interstices
by small stones is very neatly done. The walls, of whinstone from the same
hill, are about fifteen feet thick. You may walk about with ease on their
flat surface into which two or three neatly constructed chambers are built,
while the only entrance is at the east side. But this mysterious building is
merely the centre—the citadel of refuge perhaps—of a large camp and the
house of the chief. For scattered round about are quite a large number of
circular or oval stone huts of various sizes, all of them cast down, but the
broken walls remaining to the height in many cases of a foot or two. These
of course, are familiar enough, south of Tweed, as the Cytiav Gwaeddelod of
the Welsh, and numerous, I believe, in Cornwall. Around the camp, on the
three accessible sides are two deep ditches and two high ramparts. On the
northeast side, the brink of the projecting ledge, there is but a single
ditch between two low ramparts, while the steep face of the declivity has
been obviously scarped in places. It is a noble and commanding site, looking
away over to the outer hills of the Lammermoors upon their south-eastern
fringe, while far below the White-adder flashes amid crags and woods. The
name is derived from Edwin, King of Northumbria, to which province all this
country at that time appertained. But it can surely have been only as an
occupant that a Saxon was concerned with such a fortress as this? Papers
have been read and printed upon it, but, so far as I am aware, no first-rate
authorities have taken in hand or made pronouncement upon this remarkable
place.
The country people have their
legend, which, though interesting as folklore, hardly assists in the
solution of the problem. According to them, it was the lair of an altogether
troublesome giant, whose reputed achievements in the way of raiding and
rieving cast those of the Kerrs and Armstrongs, the Charltons and Robsons of
the Middle Marches into the shade. He appears to have made life intolerable
in the neighbourhood for all his days, and giants lived long. On one
occasion he was carrying away a bull on his back and a sheep under each arm
from Blackerstone, near Duns, and as he crossed the Whiteadder at the
"Strait loup" a pebble washed into his shoe, which so worried him as he
breasted the hill, that he plucked it out and tossed it down into the river,
where it still stands, weighing about two tons. I am afraid the education of
the hundred and fifty souls who inhabit the parish of Abbey St. Bathans has
been too much for the faith in such beautiful stories, though it is happily
preserved in their memory. Eighty years ago, I find by the reports of the
then minister of the parish that the schoolmaster taught not only Latin but
Greek, and charged seven shillings a quarter for this extra. No giant could
live against this. I should judge, however, from my passing intercourse both
to-day and yesterday with these dwellers in Arcady, that the old-time
flavour of classical learning, which touched this like other Scottish
parishes, had passed out of mind, and that utility holds the field. If Greek
is threatened at Oxford and Cambridge, it could hardly be expected to
maintain itself on the Lammermoors.
St. Bathans, colloquially
known as "Abbey," as will doubtless be surmised, derives its name from a
Celtic saint. There were several of the name, who appear to be distinguished
by a slight difference in the spelling of their respective navies, almost as
though they had been Edinburgh worthies and contemporaries of Sir Walter
Scott. When seventeenth-century scholars were in the habit of spelling their
own names in two or three different ways on the same page, I don't profess
to understand how these various St. Bathans of the early Celtic Church have
been disentangled from one another by their signatures, if they had any. But
no doubt there are further and sufficient reasons for identifying this
particular St. Bathan with a cousin and disciple of St. Columba and his
successor as Abbot of Iona. The missionary achievements of the great Irish
Saint in Scotland about A.D. 560 extended from the west coast all across the
country into the kingdom of Northumberland. Among the many disciples who
followed him in his wanderings was this young cousin, whom he had himself
taken charge of and reared from a boy. St. Bathan showed himself worthy of
his rearing, and performed many miracles by land and sea, and founded many
churches in what we now call Scotland, of which this was one. Merely as
evidence of their extraordinary enterprise when mischief was afoot, it may
be mentioned that it was burned by the Danes when they destroyed Coldingham.
It is much more interesting to remember that a convent of Cistercian nuns,
under the title of a priory, was founded here in the end of the twelfth
century by Ada, daughter of William the Lion, and wife of Patrick, Earl of
Dunbar. Liberal gifts of land, both by the founders and succeeding
benefactors, were deeded to the priory, and the list of them if now resumed
would show an immense rent-roll. As usual, at the Reformation they were
"alienated," in this case by the priors, and, as one would expect, the Earl
of Home had the disposal of them, and naturally gave them to a near
relation. It is in keeping with the spirit of the wholesale robbery which
distinguished this upheaval in both kingdoms, that Elizabeth Home, who thus
annexed the profits of the Abbey, assumed the title of prioress, and even
her husband, apparently without any jocular intent—perhaps because he was
the son of a bishop—took on the name of prior. Thus sanctified they
proceeded to retail the property in lots to various people, or in other
words, no doubt, to the highest bidders.
The last stones of the priory
buildings, which adjoined the church on the river bank, were carried away
more than a hundred years ago, and no doubt many walls and barns and
cottages in the hamlet indirectly owe much of their substance to the piety
of William the Lion's daughter. Part of the walls in the little church are,
I believe, remains of the original building, while the site of a chapel is
pointed out a few hundred yards to the east of the church in an enclosure,
which is still called "the chapel field." Near by, too, is St. Bathans
spring, held of old as a sacred well with all the suitable healing
properties attached to the character. The assertion that the religious
orders showed an extraordinary partiality for the most beautiful and
romantic spots is a sufficiently trite one, though undoubtedly a combination
of the necessary water and the desirable seclusion all made for this
delectable result. I know many infinitely grander and more conspicuously
beautiful monastic sites than this one of St. Bathans. But for its quite
exceptional atmosphere of peace and unchanged, undisturbed seclusion from
the world; for its situation on the verdant edge of a broad, untainted,
sonorous stream, instinct with the life and freshness of the moors; for the
grouping of the gnarled oak woods, clinging to the mossy, ferny knowes in
the foreground; for the many little wild and woody burns that come pouring
in here from far moorland sources; and lastly, for the happy decorative
touch contributed by the pleasant gardens of the laird, neither too
elaborate nor overwhelming for the picture;—in short, for its harmony in
every feature, one does not readily forget this haunt of ancient peace,
however widely one has wandered. For myself, I had carried it about through
life, but always with a more than half=suspicion that the natural
limitations, together with the fond associations of youth, all made for the
usual measure of disenchantment. But there was nothing of the kind here. I
felt, on the contrary, an almost impersonal respect for the perceptions of
callow immaturity, and an inclination to apologise for the unjust but
natural suspicions I had harboured of an unsophisticated self.
Just above the village the
large burn of the Dlonynut pours its waters into a broad, tumbling pool at
the bend of the river. A mile or so up its twisting glen, which gradually
sheds the woodland that decorates its lower reaches, once stood the church
of Strafontane, attached successively to the Abbeys of Alnwick and Dryburgh.
Originally a hospital, founded in the reign of David II., church services,
though not burials, seem to have ceased there at the Reformation, when its
parish was merged in that of St. Bathans. Within the memory of old people,
known to inc in former days, its ruins and some crumbling gravestones still
survived, but have been long since swept out of existence by the plough. Of
legendary giants, Abbey St. Bathans, as we have seen, boasts a most
efficient one. At Godseroft, a farm above the Monynut, there dwelt in the
seventeenth century something of a literary giant in his way, and the father
of a family who maintained the tradition. This was David Hume—not, of
course, the other and better-known David Hume of the Merse, but a person of
note all the same in the Scotland of his day, chiefly for his Latin poems.
He was a son of the house of Wedderburn, and furthermore wrote many tracts
on the Union of England and Scotland, though he died years before the
consummation of that long-impending political marriage, so emphatically one
of convenience, if not of necessity, rather than of love.
But I have said nothing yet
of the fine woods of larch, fir, ash, and other trees of a century's growth
that adorn the hollows and gentler slopes of the left bank of the river
below Abbey. Dating from an old quaintly-fashioned sporting seat of the
Earls of Haddington, now a farmhouse on the river bank, these groves of
large trees are grouped irregularly for two or three miles along the lower
hill slopes, and upon grassy hollows carpeted with ferns and flowers, and
abounding, like all this country, with wild raspberries of delicious4
flavour, tons of which must rot ungathered and unseen in these secluded
haunts. Since the great storm of a fortnight earlier, we had revelled in
almost continuous sunshine. But the morning upon which we bade a reluctant
farewell to the house on the moor, the heavens were descending in a steady
torrent without any of the inspiring accessories of their former outbreak.
It was barely four miles to the station, but miles of the sort that in a
storm a heavily-laden horse has practically to walk nearly every yard.
Again, too, our thoughts were turned to the ford of the river Eye, not this
time for the trifle of a postman and his light mail bag, but for ourselves.
The little Eye, however, which courses through a boggy valley between the
big farms of Quixwood and Butterdean, whose large steadings in their snug
firwood shelters are the only dwellings on the route, had considerately
deferred its serious rage. But there is no more untoward preliminary to a
railway journey than to sit in an open trap, even for three-quarters of an
hour, with buckets of water being emptied on you the whole way.
The philosopher will always
console himself for such minor mischances by reflecting how much worse they
might have been. I recalled for my own comfort a lamentable scene, witnessed
upon this very same day of the month just a year before. For upon the
platform at Haverfordwest, I had witnessed the open brake which runs daily
over the seventeen miles and the sixteen hills from the remote cathedral
town of St. David's disgorge a dozen or more passengers, drenched to the
very skin by just such a downpour as this. These wretched beings, many of
them ladies, had not a trifling railway journey like ourselves on this
occasion, but one of eight or ten hours, being all bound for London. Heaven
knows how they fared! Butterdean, now Mr. Arthur Balfour's property, perched
high on the ridge overlooking the main-line, was the last seat held by the
extinct and forgotten race of Ellem alluded to at Ellemford. There is
nothing feudal left in the comfortable and typical Berwickshire farmhouse,
approached by a carriage-drive through a grove of firs as black as night.
Probably the Ellems, who vanished from here and from ken in the sixteenth
century, lived at Kilspendie Castle, the site of which, but nothing more,
lies a few hundred yards away.
The North British railroad,
to which belongs the Berwick to Edinburgh section of this international
artery, is not prodigal of slow trains. It is all very fine to live on a
famous main-line, but there is no particular privilege in watching express
trains bounding along from London to Edinburgh, and from Edinburgh to
London, or in admiring the earth-shaking speed at . which they travel, and
the prodigious distances they run without stopping. They do not stop for
you, and, indeed, the opportunities for local pilgrimage upon this classic
highway are extremely limited, and alit, in the matter of going and
returning, to provoke ill-humour with the Powers.
The great North road,
however, which from near Grant's House and long before it, follows the
main-line westward, pursues a singularly picturesque course through the
Pease Pass. The Pease Burn, which comes down hereabouts from the Lammermoors
and waters the narrow glen, is the best of company, though often invisible,
as it urges its clear streams through mazes of wild undergrowth, birch and
willow, spruce, hazel, and larch, and through tangled masses of heather,
broom, gorse, and wild flowers. Plunging in cascades from pool to pool, it
eventually disappears into that tremendous gorge where, deep buried between
two almost precipitous walls of unbroken foliage, it escapes through an open
and grassy vale to the sea near Cockburnspath. Standing upon the bridge
swung across Pease Dean, some 130 feet above the bed of the burn, the mass
of opulent and varied foliage that clothes the steeps upon either side, both
above and below, forms one of the most striking displays of hanging woodland
I know of anywhere.
This "Pass of Peaths," as
previously noted, has been for all time and by time's changing methods of
progress the principal route from the south into Scotland, or, to be
literal, to Edinburgh, the Lothians, and Fife, and all that country which
till modern times stood for so much of what the name of Scotland indicated.
To speculate on the mighty men of old who have traversed this narrow glen
would be much like charging one's imagination with all the illuminati who
have gone to Edinburgh in the last seventy years by the Great Northern
railroad. The men of old, however, really knew it, and with an intimacy, no
doubt, in which regard for the scenery had small part. Not one in a thousand
of the moderns have the faintest idea what they are passing through, and the
great gorge itself is invisible from the railway.
Somerset, whose ravaging
progress has from a literary point of view its lighter side in the
entertaining gossip of his special correspondent, Dr. Patten, had some
anxious hours in forcing the pass, which was held by Sir George Douglas, who
made its natural defences more formidable by digging lateral trenches at the
East Lothian end.
Alluding to the Pease Dean
itself, we are told "so steepe be these banks on eyther syde, and so depe to
the bottom, that who goeth straight downe shall be in daunger of tumbling
and the coznmer-up so sure of puffyng and Payne; for remedy whereof the
travellers that way have used to pass it by paths and footways leading
slopwise; of the number of which paths they call it somewhat nicely ye
Peaths." The Scottish trenches were found "rather hindering than utterly
letting." The limitations of modern prose, it must be confessed, seem at
times inadequate, compared to the delightful freedom of these quaint Tudor
chroniclers. "The puffying and Payne of the eommer-up " is admirable, so is
"the rather hindering than utterly letting" of an obstacle. When "his Lord's
Grace," however, "vowed that he would put it in prose, for he wolde not step
one foote out of his course appointed," the idiom takes on an obscurer form.
The Pease Pass bothered
Cromwell no little. "It is easier for ten men to defend this pass," he
wrote, "than for forty to make way." It was naturally infested by banditti,
and all kinds of stories are told of mediaeval raids made on these people,
and the huge bags of brigands' heads that were sometimes the result. Much of
it is even still mossy and boggy. No doubt in old days it was something of a
jungle. The name broadly signifies the "Pass of paths," which suggests
tortuous tracks leading through thickety swamps. For the Lammermoors rise
precipitously on one side, and on the other are the Coldingham moors. The
sites of fragments of castles are scattered all along it as far as the Merse.
As you approach Cockburnspath, once Coldbranspath, and now colloquially "Co'path,"
the considerable remains of a fortified tower stand by the roadside. The
enterprising picture post-card vendor, as previously noted, has labelled
this with indiscriminating audacity " Ravenswood." But enough of this
subject, unless to remark that the social ambitions of the Lord Keeper and
his haughty dame in the expansive period of William and Mary scarcely
harmonise with a lodging in a cramped Border tower. It assuredly remains,
however, to be set down that the MS. of the Bride of Lammermoor is at
Dunglass House, close by, the seat for some generations of the Hall family.
It is reported of a practical, but unhistorical lady tourist from Glasgow
that she misdoubted the identity of the aforesaid "Ravenswood House," as she
was convinced a family of such distinction would never have built their
house "so close to the road," alluding to the modern highway. Dunglass is a
later residence, built on the site of a really important castle. It belonged
to the Homes, when Sir George Douglas held it in 1547 against Somerset, or
rather surrendered it, for according to Patten the garrison only consisted
of "Twenty-one sober soldiers, all so apparelled and appointed that I never
saw such a bunch of beggars come out of one house in my life. Yet sure it
would have rued any good housewife's heart to have beholden the great
unmerciful murder that our men made of the brood of geese, and good laying
hens that were slain there that day, which the wives of the town had penned
up in holes in the stables and cellars of the castle ere we came." Somerset
razed the castle, but the Homes erected a larger one, and twice entertained
James I. on his journeyings south with all his retinue. In the Covenanters'
resistance to Charles I. in 1640, Lord Haddington occupied Dunglass, but was
blown up with most of his friends by the explosion of the powder magazine,
ignited, it is said, by an English page boy, in revenge for some slighting
remarks made by the earl on his countrymen.
One striking feature,
however, of this famous pass is the manner in which it opens out into the
rich and fertile fields of East Lothian. And further, how just at the
entrance, the way out is obstructed by two parallel and deep-wooded deans,
threaded by the streams which, running down from the Lammermoors, have in
the course of ages cut through the red sandstone. Modern traffic makes
nothing of such obstacles. But in old times one seems to see them as two
great trenches cut by nature as a last defence behind the Pease Pass of the
fairest bit of Scotland and the open road to Edinburgh.
Even peaceful transportation
appears to have been a formidable business through this pass. It sounds like
a huge practical joke that when a large sum of money had to be forwarded to
Edinburgh in the fifteenth century, it was despatched in penny and twopenny
pieces. "For God's sake," wrote the embarrassed English envoy to Scotland,
in despairing accents, "send silver and gold on the next occasion."
CartIoads of pennies toiling through the Pease Pass and the miry tracks of
Lothian to the Scottish capital has its humorous side.
The whole parish of
Cockburnspath, with its deep ravines and its varied surface, from the rich,
red tillage lands upon the cliff plateaus to the wild upland pastures of the
Lammermoors, is both picturesque and interesting. The oak seems to thrive
prodigiously in some of the deans, while in that of Dunglass the beech trees
have grown to a great size. The wild cliff scenery of the St.. Abb's
promontory, as earlier noted, is only modified as it descends to the mouth
of the Pease Dean. Beneath the red sandstone cliffs beyond this is a small
colony of fishermen, while in the village itself, half a mile inland, the
parish church, part of which is very old, possesses a most amazing circular
tower. There is a good inn here, too, a thing worthy of note in this
country, and the limited resources of the little village are taxed, I
believe, to the uttermost in the holiday season by visitors from Edinburgh.
But before going actually down into East Lothian, I must not forget the
quite pathetic-looking ruin of the little chapel of St. Helens set in a
lonely spot near the cliff edge. It was once the church of the long extinct
parish of Oldcambus, and is supposed to be of Saxon origin, though so rude
and rough it might be anything. It was dedicated to St. Helena, mother of
Constantine the Great, and its erection is associated with a time-honoured
local legend, which relates how three daughters of a Northumbrian king,
terrified at the sanguinary conflicts then waging in that ancient Saxon
kingdom, decided to seek refuge in some quieter region to the northward. So
setting sail with their attendants, and heading their barques for the Firth
of Forth, they were constrained by stress of weather to put in behind the
headland of St. Abb's, where they found safety and hospitality in the Priory
of Coldingham. In gratitude for both these good things they each determined
to found a chapel, dedicating them to the respective saints through whose
good offices they believed their deliverance was owing. So
"They They all
built kirks to be nearest the sea,
St. Abb's, St. Helen, and St. Bee.
St. Abb's upon the nabbs, St. Helen upon the lea,
But St. Ann's upon Dunbar sands
Stands nearest to the sea."
But what is most impressive
about St. Helens, the only one of which any stone is standing, is, perhaps,
the old graveyard. Utterly
neglected and unkempt, out of the tangled grass a number of inscribed
tombstones rise amid the wreck of others which lie around shattered or
tilted at all angles. The earliest inscription I could read was 1646.
Another was to John Laune, weaver of Pepperton, born in 1698 and deceased in
1783, with his wife, who died in 1740. From this forlorn and long-abandoned
burial-ground above the sea there is a fine prospect of the low red cliffs
of Fast Lothian, with their green caps curving away towards Dunbar, the Bass
Rock, and North Berwick Law, in vivid contrast to the blue of the sea and
the white lines of the insurging tides that even in fair weather find their
breaking point far from shore upon the reefs that line this inhospitable
coast. |
