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IF I were asked the best line
of procedure for a passing glimpse of the Merse by some inquiring soul with
an eye and a turn for rural economics and the things that make for the life
of a country, I should know what to do. But in these gregarious, industrial,
breathless days there are no such people—none, that is to say, wandering at
large about Great Britain, as Young and Pennant and Cobbett wandered. There
are plenty of them in the country. I know a good many who, if they found
themselves at Berwick with a couple of days to spare—a most remote
eventuality—would extract an immense amount of interest from a leisurely
day's journey through the heart of the Merse. They would not be so staggered
as upon a first encounter with East Lothian; but they would experience,
particularly if they came from south of the Trent, a remarkable eye-opener,
and I think would remember their little pilgrimage for the rest of their
lives. I am not referring here to mere lovers of or dwellers in the country,
rose-growers, artists, naturalists, antiquaries, sportsmen, or detached
country gentlemen, or amateurs generally, between whom and the man I have in
mind there is a great gulf in the appeal of a countryside outlook, but to
the farming squire, the large farmer, the land agent, and such like. These
folk are naturally disposed to make their annual holiday a violent contrast
to their normal existence, and will then be found in Scarborough, Paris, or
Switzerland. Such a man, if accidentally captured, I would send through the
Verse upon the almost straight road from Berwick to Kelso, not by the more
picturesque and twisting ways beside the Tweed which we have just followed,
nor yet again by the route nearer the foot of the Lammermoors, which I
propose to follow in this chapter. There is not a vast deal of difference,
but in the central road by Swinton the opulence of agriculture and great
country seats is more continually in evidence, while the upper roads, though
rich enough in both, have more of the scenic variety acceptable to the
general traveller.
So going out of Berwick
bounds through the parish of Mordington, in whose mansion Cromwell slept
when his troops were in Berwick, and thence heading for Chirnside, the
church and little village of Foulden makes the first appeal to notice of any
consequence. If these country churches along the Border have generally but
slim attraction in their modern disguise, they have quite often been the
scene of international ceremonies of high importance. Peace and war have
been decided, dynasties have been made or unmade within their walls, or at
least within the foundations of some of these plain, unpretentious-looking
kirks. At Foulden, for instance, the commissioners of Queen Elizabeth met
those of James VI. in 1587, to explain and vindicate on the part of the
English sovereign her wholly inexcusable butchery of Queen Mary. Foulden is
another of those exceptions which confront us from time to time as if to
mitigate the low aesthetic reputation of the Scottish village. For here a
single row of quite pleasing cottage fronts look out upon a well-kept, level
green. One might fancy this last a stage spread with a verdant carpet and
shaded by a big tree or two fronting a superb drop-scene through which the
vale of Tweed glimmers away to the blue outstanding masses of Cheviot.
Foulden parish, like the
others hereabouts, seems to have been a model Arcady eighty years ago. No
inhabitant had been tried for a serious crime within the memory of man.
There were practically no illegitimate births, though irregular marriages,
as elsewhere along the Border, from the facilities offered, is as usual a
cause of complaint by their excellent pastor. So too is emigration, with the
old, old wail of the young and the robust being the chief deserters,
attracted by the success of those who had already gone to Canada and
prosperity. The wages of the men, though paid mostly in kind, were then
equal to about twenty-one pounds a year; their food consisted of porridge
and milk morning and night, with pease-bannocks, broth, and potatoes,
seasoned with fat pork, for dinner, while every hind had a cow. If any one
is so ingenuous as to imagine this a poor diet for a hard-working class, it
would be useless to refer them to the physical qualities of the race it
bred; for this, too, would probably be outside their range of observation.
Nowadays the hinds' wages are very nearly thrice as much. He rarely keeps a
cow. Neither he nor his family, not even the young children, as a rule,
touch oatmeal porridge, or use any appreciable quantity of milk. Stewed tea,
anĉmic baker's bread, commercial jam, a little butcher's meat, and a good
deal of tinned stuff roughly represents in the matter of dietary the
trebling of a wage. In those halcyon days, when decorum, piety, and material
content, according to their ministers, were the distinguishing traits of the
Merse peasantry, one insidious and deplored vice was the "new and costly
habit of tea-drinking, particularly among the women." The entire
disappearance of games, on the other hand, is lamented by the worthy
incumbent of Foulden—an attitude which savours of the unexpected in an
official of John Knox's communion living so much nearer the day of that
truculent prophet. Particular regret is expressed by the good man at the
lapse of the old game of ball, in which the villagers had been formerly
accustomed to contend with the rest of the parish. Whether, as is probable,
it was a bladder, to be carried and kicked, otherwise football, or a-solid
ball to be carried and flung, as in the old South Welsh game of Knappan,
which also brought whole parishes into the field with like objects, is not
mentioned; nor is the difference material. But the object of the indwelling
side was to place the ball in the hopper of the mill on the Whiteadder, and
that of the outdwellers to deposit it in the church pulpit. What shades of
the old Covenanters buried under the windows would have thought of the final
melee in such a godless conflict going forward in their very kirk is ill
saying. In South Wales the respective churchyards of the two opposing
parishes were the goals. Our Foulden pastor would find comfort, on that
score at any rate, if he could return to earth and see the footballs flying
in every direction. "Creeling" was still in vogue at this time—one of those
ponderous practical jokes on newly-married couples that in various forms
delighted the rustic in most parts of the island. A few nights after
marriage the couple were visited by the gayer youth of the parish, the
husband hauled out and a basket full of stones tied on his shoulders. This
load, emblematical of the matrimonial responsibilities he had taken on
himself, he was condemned to carry till his wife could cut the cords and
release him, illustrating thereby how a good helpmeet could lighten her
husband's burden. This virtually degenerated into the extortion of a fine,
which was readily paid to escape the nuisance.
In former days every hind,
horsekeeper, or man employed by the year was required to find a "bondager,"
or, in other words, a woman to work whenever and for so long as his employer
required. This condition, though greatly modified, is not yet absolutely
dead, and the word "bondager," though still in general use in
Northumberland, has been toned down in the Merse to "worker." The bondager
was and is, either wife, daughter, sister, or some spinster relative, and
she is included in the written contract with the man. There are nothing like
the number of them employed as of yore. But the regular female field-hand is
still a common object of the countryside, earning wages of two shillings a
day with tolerable regularity. This, added to the man's wages, or "gains" as
the saying now goes, means a pretty substantial weekly income coming into
the same household. In turnip-singling, potato planting and lifting,
hay-making and harvest, the bondager is in daily evidence in the fields. And
again in autumn, handling the turnips or potatoes in the pits, or threshing
in the steading or forking manure in the yards, she is constantly at work.
They are mostly young women, but occasionally you see an old crone on whose
furrowed face the storms and sun-shines of forty or fifty seasons have left
their mark. A quaint and uniform dress has distinguished these rural Amazons
ever since I can remember, and doubtless for long before that. In the Merse
and Northumberland, however, though not in East Lothian, they have made a
notable change in head-gear.
In place of the poke-bonnet
and blue "ugly," they have adopted a brown straw hat with turned-down brim,
over which a pink scarf is bound and pulled down over their ears and neck,
and at the same time brought round to cover their chins up to the mouth in
semi-oriental fashion. Below this, giving a further touch of colour, conies
a blue blouse belted at the waist, short linsey-woolsey skirts to their
knees, thick woollen stockings, and hob-nailed boots. They look as ruddy and
stalwart as of old, but are said to have lost much of the prodigious stamina
of their predecessors in the less nourishing diet and the pernicious
influence of the baker's and grocer's carts, which have superseded the
porridge and milk and home-made bread. Comparative financial affluence and
nearly the whole wage being now paid in cash, has demoralised the dietary of
the labouring class as well as much of the simple culinary skill the women
once possessed. Porridge is now despised, nor is a cow any longer kept, its
keep value having been commuted for cash, very little of which, I am told,
is expended upon milk. It is genteel to buy white bread from the baker, and
saves no end of trouble. A married hind of perhaps forty, whose position
spoke for his worth, and who had himself apparently drawn a prize in the
matrimonial lottery, poured forth to me his contempt of the present-day
country girls as the wives and prospective wives of working men. That was in
East Lothian. Even in 1834 there seems to have been practically no one in
these parishes unable to read and write. There were also well-patronised
village libraries of standard authors ; and if theology was a leading
ingredient, it was, in matter and style at any rate, worthy the mental
exercise induced by it, which was considerable. The Scotch parish schools,
as •every one knows, were formerly very superior to those of England. The
old-fashioned dominie could not only teach Latin and the Higher Mathematics,
but very often Greek, and sent up promising boys from the village to the
universities. The English schools have been revolutionised, and the Scottish
have been stereotyped on much the same system, and there is now, I believe,
no difference in quality between them. In Scotland nowadays, as in England,
speaking with but slight metaphor, the roadsides are littered with the
garish covers of the cheap trash that has stood in the path of the modern
educationist and three parts thwarted his worthy endeavours.
The Whiteadder all this time,
away down upon our left hand and hidden from view, frets with strong current
in its deep, narrow, woody vale. It turns the wheels just here of Edington
Mill, which grinds the grain of the neighbourhood; while Edington Mains,
with its ample steading beside the highway, recalls a name familiar enough
in North British agriculture in bygone days.
Chirnside is the largest
village, and by far the most elevated in the Verse. Crowning an isolated
ridge 600 feet above the sea, its half-mile of bald roof and gable,
unrelieved by a touch of foliage, cuts the sky-line in cold and cheerless
fashion. One looks up at it notching the ridge of long, upsweeping fields,
immaculate in their cultivation, and shudders as one thinks of the east
winds of spring. It is, in truth, a long, unlovely substantial village,
lying drear and wind-swept above a lovely land. The church and tree-girt
manse, a Iittle way down the slope, make a redeeming feature. The former has
been well restored, and retains such small portions of old Norman work as
had been spared in the changes wrought since the Reformation. It now makes a
brave display, and is a landmark for miles.
Chirnside boasts of several
celebrities, worthy and unworthy. David Hume, the philosopher and historian,
was a son of the laird of Ninewalls, which is within easy view near the foot
of the hill. He lived and wrote here a good deal, and the present minister
told inc that his name was on record as up for " Kirk discipline," on
account of sonic amour with a local Phyllis. This fitted in nicely with the
fact that he wrote part of his Enquiry concerning the Principle of Morals at
Ninewalls. There is also a monument to David Erskine, once minister here, in
the churchyard, and notable as father of the two brothers who led the first
secession from the Church of Scotland. Wild things have happened here even
since the old Border days. About the year 1700, one David Spence was laird
of West Mains, now, I think, the farm known as Ninewalls Mains adjoining the
village. He was a pretty rake, and kept company with another spark of
similar propensities, Sir Robert Lauder, of Edington, recently mentioned.
Spence, however, married a wife who undertook to reform him. Her initial
step in this praiseworthy endeavour was to slam the door in Lauder's face at
his first visit and refuse him admittance in her husband's name! This was
not to be borne by the heady laird of Edington, who forced his way in and
shot his former friend through the heart. Remorse, however, was
instantaneous. For mounting his horse he galloped to Berwick, and, shouting
through the streets that he had killed the prettiest man in the Merse, he
flung himself over Berwick bridge into the Tweed, whose waters closed for
ever above his hapless head.
A more recent notability of
Chirnside, some forty years deceased, and of altogether another complexion,
was Dr. Henderson, country doctor, philosopher, antiquary, and poet, who
published some sixty years ago two little volumes, now extremely rare, out
of a mass of manuscripts that have never seen the Iight. Let us hope that
one day they will achieve some partial publication. For the county of
Berwick is extraordinarily deficient for so historically rich a region in
printed matter relating to its past from any point of view. There is nothing
even resembling a county history. Sir George Douglas of Springwood has done
this service for the three counties to the westward. But the seaboard shire
of the March lying upon the most trodden of all the old blood-stained
international highways vet awaits the labours of some zealous son of the
soil. Dr. Henderson's son, who lives at Chirnside, kindly allowed me such a
cursory glance at some of these manuscripts as the occasion allowed. How
rare are these admirable people, so fashioned that their native county or
district provides an inexhaustible mine of affectionate interest and study
of its people, its customs, antiquities, scenery, birds, beasts, and flowers
—not literally, perhaps, experts over so wide a range, though some few come
to the mind in various parts that are indeed all this and more. livery
countryside has happily a few who have eyes to see and ears to hear in this
sense of the word, and ask for nothing better. And what could be better than
to use and enjoy these too rare faculties and this happy temperament upon
the soil that bred them and for love of it.
There are not many sages of
this kind in the county of Berwick, though you might fancy it would be thick
with them. The prospect from Chirnside, for a site where nearly a thousand
souls cluster, is remarkable. You may brush aside the unromantic aspect of
the long, drear-looking street and fancy the women gathering from lines of
thatched cabins on this bleak height and straining their eyes over the
wide-stretching plain, now so radiant in woodland and tillage, but then
carrying scarce a stick of timber. It requires no effort to picture the
excitement and suspense of the whole noncombatant, stay-at-home portion of
the hilltop village, as its menfolk come straggling back across the open and
up the long slope—or do not come back—from one of those many sanguinary
battles fought almost within sight. The roar of artillery with which Flodden
opened must have been audible enough, and even its smoke-clouds plainly
visible, from here, while every fighting man in Chirnside beyond a doubt was
with this Earl of Home in that first victorious charge and its mysterious
sequel-
"What anxious mothers here
have stood
What new-made widows here have sighed."
And I think it will be
admitted that even Scott could not have recalled the frequent scene in a
simple couplet more felicitously than the local bard whose memory we have
just invoked. A mile away, in the valley below, the I3lackadder and the
Whiteadder unite their restless streams beneath Allanton bridge and glitter
away over a mile of open meadow before plunging into the deep and woody
channels of Edington and Hutton. I have been many times at Chirnside, or
round about it, in the past few years, and indeed quite recently spent a
fortnight hard by it for the mere pleasure of exploring a region always good
to look upon, and rich in old memories, even though their landmarks too
often are but heaps of stone or a crumbling wall. For the plough of the
Verse has been less tolerant of the past than the shepherds of Tyne and Rede,
of Jed or Ettrick. A husbandman of the Merse, too, is undoubtedly shorter
memoried, than the horseman and the shepherd of the Middle March.
The rents of this particular
district, I find, ran from 3s. to 5s. an acre in the middle of the
eighteenth century ; while quite early in the next one they are reported at
from £3 to £4, and sometimes more, and have hovered round those figures ever
since. This speaks con-elusively for the activity of the plough and the
improver, and is but a fair sample expressed in plain arithmetic of the
astounding leap of Scotland within the possible lifetime of a very old man,
from backward poverty to the very van of progress. One might illustrate
these two positions by the respective figures of a shilling and a pound
without fear of criticism. The material development of English life between
the accession of George III. and the death of George IV., great as it was,
becomes almost as nothing compared to the transformation of Scotland in the
same period. It is curious how little this quite sensational chapter in
British history is realised, which sets forth how completely within the span
of a single long life the northern kingdom turned the tables on her more
favoured southern neighbour;—how the once accepted, nay, the eagerly sought
after teachers in agriculture became the taught, and the once jeered-at,
microscopic rent-rolls of the north swelled to figures that became the envy
of Norfolk and Lincolnshire in their proudest days. how far Scotsmen outside
a small circle realise this quite dramatic performance and triumph of their
ancestors, I would not venture to say. I know a great many and of many
kinds, and feel compelled to remark, with all the risk so hardy a suggestion
entails, that a sense of these things does not seem very strong within most
of them. But after all the majority of folks, whether Scotch or English,
care nothing at all for the past, certainly not for a past of mere
unembellished fact, though they may owe their present condition to it. To
apply the term dramatic to a. revolution that had in great part its origin
in a. timely enthusiasm for lime and Swedish turnips and subsoil-draining
will sound like bathos beside the theological strife which prolonged poverty
and misery and the gorgeous pageants which accompanied the truculence of
Whig and Jacobite and made things extremely unpleasant for everybody.
Chirnside stands perched at
the very edge of the 1lerse of strict interpretation—the region, that is to
say, between Tweed and Whiteadder. Seaward the land soon springs aloft to
the long high ridge of Halidon and Lamberton, which shuts out the coast. And
as you descend the long hill on the Duns road, if it were not for the
stately avenue of trees that, as if in apology for the nakedness of the
village above it, spread a leafy screen upon either side, this rough
demarcation of the old topographers would explain itself. For away to the
right—to the east, speaking broadly—spreads a higher, bleaker, poorer
stretch of arable country, in touch and sympathy with Coldingham, rising to
the foothills of the Lammermoors, and sending its own little burn, the
Billiemere, sideways into the Eye, not into the White-adder. In this belt of
country, with the tree-sheltered homesteads sprinkled thinly over the great,
bare, clean-looking farms, there were terrible hard knocks going in old
days. For it rolls away to the mouth of the Pease Pass, so often referred to
as the gateway into the heart of Scotland. The remains of the castles of
Billie and Bunkle, mere grass-grown foundations in the one case and rude
fragments in the other, still speak to the infrequent pilgrim; while around
them in summer the oblivious bondager singles swedes in cheerful groups, or
the phlegmatic hind lays his shining furrow over the clean autumn ley
"Runkle, Billie,
and Blanerne,
Three castles strong as airn,
Built when Davy was a bairn:
They'll a' gang doon
In Scotland's croon,
And ilka one shall be a cairn."
Blanerne survives on the
banks of the Whiteadder, and its less mangled remains are still cherished in
the grounds of the family whose ancestors built it and descendants still own
it. In the woody gorge a mile or so from Chirnside, where the Duns road
crosses the broad, rocky channel of the Whiteadder, a paper-mill rears its
unsightly chimney, which pours forth into the rural calm with ceaseless
industry (for which, no doubt, one ought to give praise) an unsavoury cloud.
I remember coming on it unawares out of the bed of the river, in my youth,
with much resentment and vague foreboding. But nothing has happened. Nothing
more, I mean, outside its baleful presence ; for the White-adder, up or
down, is as fair and fresh to look upon as it was then, and what is yet more
remarkable contains, I really think, as many trout. Everybody told me so;
though the angler is notoriously a pessimist. For if the lawlactor temporis
acti prevails anywhere, it is upon the banks of fast-running trout streams,
whether preserved or otherwise. But the Whiteadder; like some other southern
Scottish rivers, is virtually open to the world for about five-sixths of its
forty-mile course, strips of private water in the actual policies of country
houses here and there comprising the lesser part. And the "world" in the
sense here used means absolutely the most trout-fishing people on the face
of the globe. I admit to misdoubting the local oracles, though they were not
hotel proprietors with an axe to grind, but humble sportsmen who had less
than none. But I was wrong. To those outside the fraternity this may seem a
trivial point. But to the angler familiar with trout and all that concerns
them, it will, I know, seem incredible that a river running through
civilisation, within call of first-class roads, in these days of swift
machines, to say nothing of propinquity to a railroad for much of its
course, can furnish reasonable sport to all and sundry, generation after
generation. The more they know, the more sceptical will they be. And unless
piscatorially familiar with the south of Scotland, they have probably never
seen a whole population armed with rods, or with a rod at home—a condition
due, no doubt, to the facilities traditionally- extended to them. I greatly
doubt if an owner would now venture to close more of his river than custom
seems to approve of. I am speaking for the moment only of Berwickshire,
which is watered by three notable tributaries of the Tweed and any number of
smaller streams and burns, every one stocked with trout. The outcry would
not be worth encountering, nor the trifling gain to the owners in any
proportion to the loss to a generally well-behaved public. If some novus
homo from Newcastle should peradventure come into possession here, and
bring with him the extravagant notions of the sanctity of even inaccessible
hill-burns nowadays prevalent in Northumberland, he might have a surprise in
store. How far this tradition of open waters extends to the middle and
western Border counties I do not know, but I think quite a little. But it
has answered admirably in Berwickshire. The lairds in some cases reserve a
home stretch for themselves, which waters are, I think, not only piously
respected by the fishing public, but regarded as a valuable sanctuary for
keeping up the stock. But even so, as an old fisherman with from peculiar
circumstances a wider general acquaintance than any mere fishing enterprises
could well give, among the rapid rivers of England and Wales, the sustained
fertility of the Whiteadder, the Leader, the Eye, and other delightful and
romantic Berwickshire streams, under their uniquely liberal traditions, I
admit, utterly confounds me. Little bits of open water sandwiched in between
preserves, such as you may occasionally find in similar streams elsewhere,
are conceivable as being reasonably stocked, though, as a matter of fact,
they are generally next to useless. A proposal to throw open the Dart, the
Exe, the Towy, the Dove, the Ribble, or any other of a score of prototypes
of the Whiteadder that occur to one, with an idea that they would continue
to provide quite reasonable sport, would be regarded as the suggestion of a
lunatic by the most liberal-minded and sanguine expert. Yet none of these
have such a number of potential anglers in touch with them as actually ply a
rod upon these Border streams. I myself should certainly have held such a
proposal nowadays as that of one demented. But these Berwickshire rivers
upset one's fundamental notions. I do not know what to think. For their
physical conditions are in all essentials identical with scores of streams
in England and Wales: the same water, the same banks and bottom, the same
multitude of feeders big and little, the same climatic conditions. As to
efficient drainage and rapid carrying away of flood water, which is a
generally recognised agency in reducing a stock of fish, the drainage of the
upland Scottish farms is infinitely more efficient than that obtaining in
the comparatively backward agriculture of the small farmers of Wales or
Devonshire.
Where lies the mystery? In
the early seventies I used myself to haunt the higher waters of the
Whiteadder a great deal, and in after years, with the wider experience they
bring of things in general, often wondered, on looking back, how the sport
came to be so good with so many rods even then busy at work, to say nothing
of the occasional competitions of fishing clubs from Edinburgh. I vaguely
put it down as one of those mysteries pertaining to "the good old days,"
like the rest of us. It has entertained me vastly to find to-day upon the
same waters men not then born harbouring strange fancies of that period as a
primitive epoch, when fishermen were scarce and the river stiff with fish
that would "rise at your hat," as the anglers' idiom has it. This is all
moonshine. There were heaps of fishermen—too many on occasions, as one even
then thought—from Edinburgh, Newcastle, and elsewhere, full of zeal and
skill, and as well equipped for all practical purposes as their successors
to-day. Then, too, the elder ones at least, as they began to warm with the
second tumbler, talked of the "good old days"; but I fancy their reminiscent
moods really did deal with a more elementary period. Stewart, the best
trout-fisher in Scotland, whose little classic was re-edited by the late Mr.
Earle Hodgson not long ago, was then still by the riverside, making, as it
proved, his last casts upon the Berwickshire streams. Twenty years before he
had written that the immense increase in the number of fishermen threatened
to alter all the conditions of which he was treating. Well, the Whiteadder
still flows on, fresh, beautiful, and sequestered as ever, unconscious of
the passing of generations and of their prophets of good and evil. And it
still offers to the angler simple or gentle who treads its banks or wades
its streams, as pleasant and nearly as profitable days, if he knows his
business, as Stewart sixty years ago was convinced that he saw the end of.
If the expert on a good day in the best months can kill with fly his twelve
or fourteen pounds weight, which he undoubtedly still does, any one
sufficiently knowledgeable to be interested at all in such matters, will
understand that such a river must be, as indeed it is, well stocked. The
secret of its fecundity, in face of such continuous and sustained attention,
is, as I have said, inscrutable. I make a present of the problem to the
angling reader. Most likely he will not believe me, and I shall fully
sympathise with his incredulity. But perhaps credo quia absurd urn est may
be his final and better judgment.
Though July is the second
worst fishing month, and I did not and should not go to Chirnside at any
month for that purpose, yet the temptation to throw a fly once more on a
river so intimately associated with faraway memories was irresistible. So
one afternoon, when a night's rain had put a little fresh water into the
Whiteadder's depleted streams, washed the dust from the roadside hedges,
freshened up the thirsting potato-fields, and put the last sown turnips out
of reach of the fly, I betook me to the waterside. Now, Broome House is
about four miles up the river, which running mostly out of sight of
highways, in its green secluded vale, is tapped anon by branching lanes that
pitch downward to some ford with stepping stones or swinging foot-bridge.
From the road which leads to Preston village and thence up into the wild
heart of the Lammermoors, one of these same byways branches off and dives
abruptly down a woody brae, beneath which the river flashes in broad and
wimpling shallows and deep rock-ribbed pools. Among the meadows on the
farther shore, embowered in wood, stands an ancient seat of the Homes,
though now represented by a modern mansion in which the original pele tower
is somewhere embedded. But it was not Broome House itself on this occasion,
nor altogether the fishable qualities of the stretch of river which washes
its woods and green haughs, that took me there. I had a fancy for hunting up
the reputed grave, if its memory still survived among the ancients, of that
French Warden of the March, De la Beaute, otherwise Anthony d'Arey, who fell
at the hands of the infuriated Homes in the days of the Regent Albany; for
this is a famous Border incident. I failed to find the mortuary cairn,
partly because the only wights I encountered were fishermen who had never
heard of it, and had obviously no soul for "anshent things" as the Welsh
peasant has it, and partly that I fell prematurely a-fishing myself, and
stuck to it. Though it was a bright and steamy July afternoon there was
quite a little rise on—enough at any rate to keep my feet from wandering
upon so vague an antiquarian quest. But this is the popular story.
Now in the days of James V.,
after the catastrophe of Flodden Field, the Regent Albany had been rash
enough to behead an Earl of Home and confiscate his estates, and foolish
enough to appoint a French favourite of his own Warden of the March in his
place. This was Anthony d'Arcy, commonly known, in accordance with the
Scottish love of to-names, as the Sieur de la Beautc from his handsome
person. A family row was going merrily forward at Langton Castle, now a
noble modern mansion near Duns, and the interference of the Warden becoming
necessary, "Bawtie," as the vulgar tongue had it, came down with a strong
force from Kelso. Failing to persuade David Home of Wedderburn and his
faction, who were besieging Langton, to go home in peace, he proceeded to
the use of threats, which coming from a usurping foreigner made the blood of
the already outraged Homes boil within them. So brooding on their wrongs,
Wedderburn and his friends after a little interval, and to the number of
only a score, made a furious onslaught on Bawtie's party, most of whom being
Scotsmen and half-hearted in his service, decamped. There was nothing then
left for the Warden to rely upon but the speed of his horse, a fine animal
that had once belonged to the slaughtered Earl of Home. And then began a
great race. Starting from the Carnie Ford, two miles beyond Duns, Bawtie led
his pursuers through the streets of the town and thence three more miles to
the "Stoney land" about Broome. The story has it that Bawtie would have
outpaced his pursuers if his horse had carried normal saddlery, and not been
weighed down by the pomp of French trappings. As it so fell out, the first
to come up with him was a young page of Wedderburn's, who had been left at
home, but, on getting news of the sport. had seized a sword and jumped on
his master's best horse. Riding for a long time a breast race with Bawtie,
the lad kept the Warden so busy parrying his thrusts that his horse fell
with him over some unseen stones. Springing to his feet, the Frenchman did
little more than hold the courageous youth at bay, till two of the Home
brothers came up and overpowered him, cut his head off and carried it back
through Duns, to be exposed over the gate of Wedderburn Castle. The body was
buried where it fell; and the pile of stones which is said to mark it was
the goal I had vaguely aimed at.
Instead of this I found
myself with the lengthening shadows seated upon a grassy bank beside the
stream, beneath one of those great spreading ash trees which flourish so
conspicuously on the Whiteadder's banks, and watching the clear amber water
sweeping over rocks and slabs of many colours into a wide heaving pool, of
whose "finny tribe," as Thomson would have said, I had just taken trifling
toll. The slanting sunbeams quivered on the open restless shallows, and shot
long stray shafts of gold beneath the low branching foliage upon the dark
shadowed depths of the pool. A heron with slow-moving wings passed lazily
overhead. Confiding conics popped in and out of the red burrows in the bank.
A white-breasted water-ouzel—water-crow as the rustics hereabouts inaptly
style him—nodded and bobbed at inc from a mossy stone after the humoursome
fashion of his tribe, and some milk cows, on the way, doubtless, to the
pail, crunched at the grass behind in sociable propinquity. The lush languor
of high summer reigned supreme. It was not a moment to muse on Bawtie and
his mangled corpse, or of swords and blood and fierce unbridled passions, or
on the Lady Chatelaine and her bairns, whom history relates the ferocious
Evers deliberately immolated when he burned this very pele tower of Broome.
I had seven or eight nice little fish upon the grass, one shapely prize
nearly a pound weight that had given me some heated minutes in troubled
waters. The trout had recovered from their fright in the pool below, and in
the curling water under the tips of the pendent willow boughs had begun to
dimple its surface as if it were a duke's preserve, and not the
threshing-floor of generations of happy, sport-loving rustics and decent
citizens of Arcadian tastes from far towns. They are tolerably well-educated
little fellows to be sure, and hatched, no doubt, with the hereditary germs
of wisdom within them, and at any rate all the more worthy of circumvention.
But they were there beyond doubt, which was all that matters; and as my rod
was now in its case, I sat and marvelled at the fact. I thought of all my
friends and acquaintances, who would regard a stream like this as "flogged
to death" if a couple of rods a day passed once over a mile of it, and of
all the carefully limited little fishing syndicates, the restriction of
baskets—not as foolishness, of course, but as food for reflection. I
recalled some waters, too, where the fish have run to seed, or, in other
words, to numbers and insignificance, from want of thinning. I thought of
Association waters familiar to me, miles of lusty fertile stream which,
except at holiday seasons, you may have almost to yourself, and the chronic
outcry of "over-fishing" that goes up from most of them. It was cheering,
therefore, to come back to these Berwickshire rivers, subjected as they are
to conditions almost unthinkable to Englishmen in physically similar
regions, and find them full of fish, whereas by rights they ought to have
been emptied long ago.
I was thinking of all these
things, so naturally suggested by the situation, and how strange it looked,
and at the same time how in a manner good it was to see these humble
disciples of old Isaac enjoying themselves, along the park edge of a country
house and in sight of its windows, and everybody looking on it as quite a
natural thing. For work hours were over on farm, mill, smithy, or school,
and three or four fishermen had dropped, as it were, from the clouds upon my
seclusion and were busy at work. The Border angler is essentially a
sportsman, though far too much addicted to the worm in good fly-fishing
weather. Otherwise he will not take trout by foul and nefarious means, such
as nets, or line, or dynamite, and, valuing his privileges, will, so far as
he can, prevent others from doing it. When occasional rascality of this kind
goes forward in this country—a crime against society in general—it is the
work of miners from the Mid-Lothian or Lanarkshire collieries. The Merse
peasant is as reserved an individual as is anywhere made. Like the
Northumbrian, he has no road manners at all. "Good morning" or "good
evening" do not exist in his vocabulary. These world-wide greetings sound in
his ears as the sound of gibberish. But this is not his fault. To a passing
remark that the day seems taking up, or if it is raining that it is a bit
soft, he may only grunt an accord if he doesn't know you, but he will at
least grasp what you are driving at. But meet him on the river bank within
the bond of angling freemasonry and he is generally another man, voluble and
eloquent upon the sport that he loves. " You seem to have plenty of fish
left here," I remarked to one of these newcomers who was putting his rod up
as I strolled along the bank, homeward bound. "Eh! there's plenty fish, and
some gran' yins tae," and then the flood-gates were let loose. I learned how
"yon stream abune the bridge," now in this July day a thin, shallow,
unfishable slide under a line of alders, had provided my friend one evening
in the merrier and fuller month of May with seven or eight fish in quick
succession, weighing, I am afraid to say how much—having regard, I mean, to
the average of the river. But I am sure he was speaking the approximate
truth. I learned, too, that he was a life-long enthusiast, and had won no
end of competitions—a form of entertainment that the Border trout-fisher of
all classes loves, and that southern anglers for trout generally abhor. I
was informed that his brother had won the gold medal (I think it was gold)
of a club in Edinburgh, the name of which I was evidently expected to know,
several times in succession. For the fishing clubs of the metropolis hold
their competitions on the various open waters of the Border counties, just
as the golf clubs of Edinburgh celebrate theirs on the many open links. I
was also told the precise weight of the baskets which had achieved these
various triumphs, and where they were made, and I am quite sure the figures
were approximately correct. His rod, like most of those still wielded by
these simple skilful souls, was a fearsome weapon—long, wobbly, and
top-heavy, of the kind which brings back the days of one's youth before the
economics of comfort and efficiency were duly studied. But the humbler
Scotsman is nothing if not conservative. Even his political Radicalism, any
one will tell you who can afford to say what he thinks, is due much more to
that inherent instinct than to the political acumen which is flourished by
his allies, and no doubt in quite good faith, on southern election
platforms.
"Ye're gangin awa' jest aboot
the time ye oucht to be start'n," said this fervent disciple of Stewart, and
Stoddart, and Henderson (not the Chirnside worthy)—the last two, charming
writers of riverside prose and verse—as I wished him good sport, and bid him
adieu. This was quite true. For that witching hour of sunset and gloaming
even into darkness, which in the summer months draws out the trout
fishermen, was at hand—a period which it may incidentally be remarked the
north country angler constantly prolongs to the hour of sunrise.
As a little later I crossed
the high-swung foot-bridge, the sun had sunk below the hill and the
after-glow was shimmering on the broad shallows; while away beyond them, in
the grey shadow of the woods, I could see the form of my late entertainer
already at work in midstream. Rooks in great flocks were swinging homeward
over the quiet vale to some abode, no doubt, of ancient fame in the Merse,
and restless cushats, lusty and fat from their depredations among young
turnips or grain-fields, were winging to some temporary roost their solitary
way, while downwards the river vanished under red screes into the darkling
woods of Edrom and Blanerne.
The Whiteadder has no place
in that garland of notable verse, ancient and modern, which has made Yarrow,
Teviot, Leader, and some other tributaries of Tweed household words, though
many of the seventy Berwickshire bards whose selected remains have been
collected into a single volume have naturally apostrophised it. Perhaps its
otherwise significant and euphonious name is a trifle unhandy for metrical
purposes. Again, it is far out of the old beat of the chief Scottish
singers, and was probably as unknown to the earlier as it certainly has been
to the later ones. This literary oblivion is assuredly due neither to lack
of charm nor of stimulating association, with both of which this final
tributary of Tweed is lavishly endowed. And the Whiteadder may assuredly
share with her sister streams in Stoddart's invocation to the great river
which gathers them all into her bosom:—
"Let ither
anglers choose their ain,
An' ither waters tak' the lead.
O' Hielan streams we covet nave,
But gi'e to us the bonnie Tweed,
And gi'e to us the cheerfu' burn
That steals into its valley fair,
The streamlets that at ilka turn
Sae safely meet and mingle there."
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