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EDROM is on the right bank of
the Whiteadder, not far below the pleasant spot where daylight fell on our
discursive saunterings in the last chapter. It is also about half-way
between Chirnside and Duns, and one might add without offence, is the only
point in the five-mile journey that would give pause to any wayfarer other
than that imaginary rural economist on the prowl, whom we have agreed would
in July, between hay and harvest, be at Scarborough or in the Engadine.
Edrom boasts of an old church of some importance, originally Norman, with
little left in it, however, of any pre-Reformation work. Two buttresses
containing image niches survive of an aisle erected by Robert Blackadder,
Bishop of Glasgow, a Berwickshire man, with the fact and the date, 1499,
inscribed thereon ; while a fine Norman arch guarding the entrance to a
family vault is all there is left of I the original church. To anyone
accustomed to the virtually intact mediaeval churches which confront one at
every two or three miles in some southern counties, the very notice of such
mere fragments as this may seem superfluous. But as English hands gutted all
these churches and left the Scotch Reformers but small opportunities to show
what they might or might not have done in that sphere of action, there is
cause rather for abasement than for complacency in an Englishman when he
notes the nakedness of the land.
The interest of Edrom lies
rather in the fact of its being the Valhalla of so many famous Border
families: not the building itself—save, I think, for a vault of the
BIackadders under the wall—for after the Scottish fashion these family
burial-places and vaults are distributed about the churchyard. One liberal
allotment is sacred to the Buchans of Killoe, another to the Campbell-Swyntons
of Kermigham. Near the church there is a
long, low building, one-half
of which is the mausoleum of the Loans of Broome, the other of the Logan-Humes
of Edrom. It is a wide-spreading kirkyard, fair and green to look upon, with
no adjacent village to speak of, and shut off by bordering groves from the
Whiteadder, which sings below. The grouping and fashion of these tombs of
the mighty of the parish are characteristic of the north side of Tweed;
while the long, open sheds near the kirk, for horses and traps, are
essentially of the soil. I should be a bold individual did I attempt any
serious excursion into the mystic labyrinth of Border family history. But
these Blackadders touch a slightly variant note in nomenclature, as taking
their name from the river on which their early lines were cast—that winsome
younger sister of the Whiteadder that we shall no doubt meet again later.
Blackadder Tower, near the junction of these two streams, still recalls in
name the ancient family whose dust lies here at Edrom. They have long ceased
to be lairds in the Merse, but not by any means to be worthily represented
here and elsewhere. An interesting name, and one that if you happen to have
started life with a fortuitous acquaintance of this most absolutely Mersian
of all the Berwickshire rivers, for it alone begins and ends in the county,
will catch the ear in any clime.
Edrom, as a considerable
burying-place, has had, like other churchyards in the Dlerse, some gruesome
experiences during that active period of body-snatching associated with the
infamous names of Burke and Hare. A local friend, who is a complete mine of
Berwickshire lore, related to me the particulars of a "resurrection"
exploit, and its termination, which, as it concerned Edrom, will be in order
here. Iic had it from his father, who was a student in Edinburgh when the
two above-mentioned villains and others less known to fame were in an active
way of business, and was a minister in this neighbourhood during the period
when churchyards had to be regularly watched for many nights after every
funeral. In the year 1828 a well-known farmer, who had been "keeping it up"
after Berwick market in the convivial fashion of the time, was riding home
in the moonlight upon the road between Edrom and Duns. Soon after passing
the first-named he espied ahead of him a gig or spring cart with three
people upon the front seat. Jogging along not far behind it his attention
became drawn to the rigidity of the central figure, as compared to the
flexible attitude of its neighbours, who were conversing across it.
Suspicion was naturally in the air in these days, and pressing closer up he
was able to make out that the man in the middle was dressed in a reefer
jacket, and wore a cloth cap pulled down over his eyes. His attitude,
however, gave rise to still stronger suspicions, which quickened yet more
when the driver whipped up his horse and went away at a smart pace.
The farmer now determined to
see the matter out, and stuck close to the trap, whose driver then
practically gave his case away by putting his horse into a gallop. The other
being well mounted gave chase, and a hot race ensued along the moonlit road
to Duns. The saddle, however, in time asserted its superiority over the
shafts, and at a point where the road skirted a deep wood the pursuer saw
the trap in front of him suddenly pull up, two of the men jump out of it,
and with a parting cut at the horse, which galloped on, disappear among the
trees. Continuing the pursuit, the farmer soon came up with the horse, and
succeeded in seizing it by the bridle and bringing it to a stop. The reins
all this time had been dragging on the ground, and on interviewing the
undemonstrative occupant of the gig, he found, as he expected, a corpse
fastened to the seat in an upright position. So taking charge of his prize
he led it on into Puns, and handed it over to the police. The body turned
out to be that of an old man buried at Edrom two or three days previously.
Feeling in Duns was greatly wrought up cover the incident, and the body was
reburied there, not in its desecrated grave at Edrom. The horse was put out
at livery till it had eaten up its value, and then became the possession of
the stable, for it may be well imagined no one claimed it. The gig was
publicly burned in the market-place. Descendants of the twice-buried corpse,
and those of the farmer who so opportunely rescued it from desecration, are
alive and hearty in the 1lerse to-day.
A local tradition of a less
authoritative nature than this one tells how a humorous and resourceful
person got possession of a horse and cart by inspired strategy from some
resurrectionists and neither burned the cart nor put the horse out at livery
to eat up its value. In this case two men in the front seat of a vehicle
were seen one night by the genius in question to leave it in the road, with
apparently a third party on the back seat, and repair to a lonely
public-house for some refreshment. Biding his time, our friend, having
satisfied his suspicions that the back passenger was no longer of this
world, and obviously not being himself troubled with nerves, unfastened him,
deposited him in the ditch, and, assuming the corpse's overgear, took its
place. In the meantime the fortified resurrectionists returned to their
charge and resumed their grim and risky journey towards Edinburgh—seated as
before, with their backs against that of the supposed corpse. In time
uncanny feelings vaguely crept over them. One swore the back passenger
pressed warm against him; the other, outwardly scouting his companion's
tremor, began to lose nerve under the horrible suggestion. The corpse's
substitute in the meantime contrived such subtle movements as to increase
the growing terrors of the guilty pair, and unstring their nerves without
giving any definite sign of life. When by their conversation he judged them
to be sufficiently under the influence of fear, night, and superstition, he
heaved a deep groan and gave a push with his back about which there could be
no possible mistake. Uttering, says the chronicler, a wild cry of "Man! it's
alive," the pair jumped out and fled into the darkness, while the corpse
drove the horse and trap home for better uses.
Duns is the present capital
of Berwickshire, having ousted Greenlaw from that honourable situation
within recent times. This was only a return, however, to its situation in
the seventeenth century. It has only quite lately, after six or seven
hundred years, come to a firm decision about the spelling and pronunciation
of its own name. In ancient times it was Duns, so far at least as spelling
counted for anything. In my youth it seemed to have settled down finally
into Dunse; and it was something of a shock to come back and find a historic
place wearing an almost unfamiliar name, for the final "e" makes all the
difference in pronunciation. But it is surely a good move to revert to a
form so closely associated with the nation's history. Sometimes, too, in the
wild phonetic days it was spelled Dunce, and it may probably have been the
peril of some loose return to this that brought about the present
settlement.
The town rises pleasantly
upon a low ridge, richly garnished with the fine timber of the NTcrse, and
banks ablaze with that peculiar radiancy of colouring that only clean and
lusty crops give to a tillage country. Above the town spring the woody and
pastoral slopes of its historic Law. Behind all, and now but two or three
miles away, are the long sweep of the Lammermoors. A clean, rather
hard-faced, but not uncheerful little town this, of some 3000 souls, with a
spacious market square presided over by an imposing town-hall of most
ecclesiastical complexion. At first sight of its Gothic front, its pointed
door and windows, its crocketted buttresses and lofty battlemented and
pinnacled clock tower, you would hail it without hesitation as the parish
church, particularly being in Scotland, where church architecture is apt to
be disconcerting. In this case, assuredly the most conspicuous building in
Duns is at the first approach much more eloquent of preacher than of
Provost. Duns Scotus, the eminent fourteenth-century schoolman, is accepted
as the first of the local worthies. A portrait of him, or rather an artistic
conception of what he might possibly have been, after the manner of the
well-known Holyrood galaxy of Scottish kings, hangs in the town-hall. The
parish of Embleton, in Northumberland, however, also claims him, and
cherishes the site of a farmhouse named Proctor Steads, formerly Dunstan
Tower, as his abode. It supports this claim by its association with Merton
College, of which ancient foundation the subject of this rivalry seems to
have been a member. The county buildings are modest compared to the
town-hall, and situated in a less conspicuous quarter. The corn exchange was
once a great commercial mart, but nowadays, so completely have the "Auld
Enemies" buried the hatchet both of war and its long-surviving prejudices,
that much of the trade and traffic of the Scottish county goes to English
Berwick, on the main artery of business. But Duns has obviously survived
such shocks as well as any little town, and being on the only railroad
traversing the county, with a huge sheep country behind it and a fat grain
country in front, and a county council to cheer it up, looks entirely happy
in spite of its resounding paved streets, on which three crawling farm carts
will make the town rattle as if in the throes of a big thunderstorm. Its
proud motto is "Duns dings a'."
Thomas Boston, author of the
Fourfold State of Man, and of memoirs freely used by modern writers on
Scottish history, was a native of Duns. He was minister in Ettrick in the
early part of the eighteenth century, and of the hard cheerless Calvinism of
his day was a fanatical and uncompromising exponent. His memoirs, as
exhibiting that point of view, and merely as a means of introduction to the
spirit of his time, have a certain grim fascination. Dr. McCrie, the
historian and the upholder in his many works, which include a life of Knox,
of the theocratic principles and dogmas of which his fellow-townsman a
century before had been such an extreme supporter, was born here. McCrie was
a seceding minister, but his works had a great vogue. He was a contemporary
of Sir Walter's, and among the many who felt and resented with his pen the
new light upon a fanatical past so genially shed by that master hand. I
admit without blushing that my own acquaintance with the Duns historian is
limited to observing the frequency with which he is pilloried in footnotes
by some present-day Scottish writers, as an awful example of how history
should not be written. The atmosphere of Duns should in truth have been
sufficiently favourable to the production of such champions of the Covenant:
for is not Duns Law the most consecrated spot in the whole struggle?
Whether theocracy was the
making of Scotland, or its curse, as some of its most brilliant sons have
now the hardihood to hint, Duns Law at any rate witnessed one of its
greatest demonstrations. It may or may not be remembered that Charles I.,
with the fatal indiscretion of his race, made persistent efforts to force
Episcopacy upon Scotland, where the Presbyterian development of the
Reformation had taken firm hold of the mass of the people. A bishop, to the
Scotsman of that period, had literally horns and a tail. The mere holding of
such an office was absolutely the quickest passport to that inferno which
the more truculent elect of the day positively revelled in realistically
visualising for the benefit of a foredoomed majority of their neighbours.
Charles, however, encouraged no doubt by an Episcopalian minority, could
not, or would not grasp the situation. He conceived himself, too, as
ordained of God head of the Church as he was of the realm of Scotland. He
was not more astray than the Scottish Presbyterian leaders in their
ignorance of the English nature and their almost pathetic hope that the
English people would bend to the inquisitorial yoke of a gloomy
quasi-democratic theocracy. We all know how a brief experiment of Puritan
rule, not approaching the Scottish form in vexatious restraint, was flung
off by the English like a nightmare with one shout of relief. Whatever the
lies, shifts, and double-dealings of Charles, both before and during his
troubles, he behaved like a man and a gentleman in refusing to save himself
and perhaps his fortunes by taking the Covenant. He was incapable of doing
this like his outrageous son, with his tongue in his cheek. His conscience
here, at least, when he had no other hope, stood firm. But this didn't
excuse his foolish attempts to coerce Scotsmen, who really liked their
homemade form of Calvinism with all its gloom and hell-fire, and honestly
believed themselves to he a chosen people, literal successors of those who
wandered out of Egypt. If most of this enthusiasm came from the middle and
lower ranks, and if the tail did in a measure wag the head upon Duns Law,
when Charles was waiting with his army to cross the Tweed, the nobility and
gentry of Scotland were out for the Kirk in greater force and with more
enthusiasm than on any occasion before or afterwards. Over 30,000 men were
camped on the Law, each regiment under its territorial lord, and all
commanded by the crooked little old soldier Leslie. Thousands were either
taking the oath of the Covenant for the first time or renewing it with much
fervour upon an old block of stone that still lies upon the summit of the
hill. The preachers were in high feather. It was a great triumph to see so
many of the noblest of the land, who in general, with their complex
interests, were anything but united and whole-hearted in this business, all
solid for the cause. The Rev. Robert Baillie was there, mounted and armed,
but more helpful with his tongue, which he wagged to some purpose, and yet
more with his pen so far as posterity is concerned. Charles was watching all
this from the high south bank of Tweed opposite Paxton, and had about 16,000
men with him. Forty cannon frowned from the slopes of Duns Law, and the
hardy souls who served them would have blown a bishop from each muzzle with
grim joy.
But even military enthusiasm
and pulpit eloquence cannot flourish without provisions, and it was just as
well that Charles proposed an adjournment of both parties, by
representatives, to Berwick and a more amicable settlement. But this army of
the Covenant clustering on Duns Law in successful defence as it proved of
the national form of faith is something of a bloodless Bannockburn to the
true Presbyterian heart.
Duns had been gutted so
ruthlessly in the English raids of the sixteenth century, that the town was
built anew on the present site, a little lower than the ancient one. The
last of the great Border raids to be led by a Percy was discomfited here not
long before Flodden by the cunning of the locals, as there seems to have
been no opposing force at hand. For when the camp was asleep and the horses
of the English cavalry tethered on the pasture, a large body of peasants
rushed down waving the rattles, composed of a bladder containing pebbles
tied to the end of a stick, which they used for scaring the deer and cattle
of the Lammermoors, from their grain crops. At the hideous noise a wild
stampede took place among the horses in the darkness, and all further
progress of Percy and his army put an end to. Duns Castle, a seat of one
branch of the Hay family, stands near the Law and above the town amid a
wealth of undulating wood and park-land, a comparatively modern house upon
an ancient site. In the grounds is a sheet of water known as the Hen poo',
the great gathering place of Berwickshire curlers. Duns Law is a place of
pious pilgrimage to many lowland Scotsmen, for the historic significance
attached to it; while the block of stone, now carefully protected, on which
the Covenant, as related, was taken or renewed by so many zealous patriots
in 1639, gives that tangible objective point to the trip which the more
slenderly equipped tourist likes to have. The view over the Merse is a fine
one and much spoken of. But it is nothing to the superb outlook which
rewards the more adventurous traveller who has sufficient energy to follow
the highroad over the Lammermoors for a steady upward drag of three miles.
Here, upon Hardens Hill,
after trailing between fine avenues of beech and ash, and mounting higher
into windswept pine woods, the road sweeps out at last into the glorious
heaths of Lammermoor. A half hour upon the brow of this high rampart comes
vividly back to me. It was a July noon, beneath a clear sunny sky with the
gentlest and balmiest of south-west breezes wafting on its wings the mingled
fragrancy of moorland and pine wood. A dry hank of sward was handy for the
greater enjoyment of a glorious scene. The drubbing wings and vocal plaints
of restless peewits close overhead, the song of rejoicing larks in the air
far above them, and the call of distant curlews mingled with the faint bleat
of sheep. And this was no mountain top," but only the apex of an excellent
though but lightly travelled highway that leads into the heart of the
wilds—otherwise to the little village of Longformacus, the "capital of the
Lammermoors." 'These edges of great moorlands, which open wide upon the one
hand into sweeps of solitude, and on the other over vast distances where
rural life is thickly humming, are seats for the gods. The heather was just
touching with its first faint flush the folding hills that heaved away
towards a far horizon which looked down upon Last Lothian. Below, the Verse
glimmered far and wide with its red fields, its yellowing cornfields, and
mantling woods, its glint of village church spire or country seat. Beyond
the line of Tweed spread the fainter but yet clear-cut hills and valleys of
Northumberland. I could follow up the windings of the Till from Flodden and
Ford Castle to Wooler, and from Wooler to the woody spur beneath which the
wild cattle of Chillingham have their immemorial range. The Cheviots rolled
their billowy crests from the "Buckle Cheevit," looming large and near upon
the Border line, to fade remotely into the more rugged heights that embosom
Rothbury and the upper waters of the Coquet.
But enough of Northumbrian
detail. It is in the westward outlook that Hardens Hill more particularly
excels, if Cockburn Law and some other points on the brink of the Eastern
Lammermoors open out the sea-coast to better purpose. For westward one can
follow the Lammermoors to their remote shadowy limits, where thirty miles
away they mingle with the misty hills of Selkirk, Peebles, and the country
of the Upper Tweed. The triple-crested Eildons, the heart of the Scott
country, and the long chain of sentinel heights guarding Lauderdale, seem by
comparison close at hand. From here, too, I got the first glance, and an
intimate one, of a strip of country that was new to me—for my early
wanderings among the Lammermoors had not extended quite so far west—and it
savoured also of the unexpected. Now the south-eastern part of the
Lammermoors drop more or less abruptly down into the Mersc. But from Hardens
Hill, which is something of a flanker, you can rake their skirts westward
with the eye away to the Westruther and Spottiswoode country near to
Lauderdale, a rather sad-looking, broad, level step as it were between Merse
and moor, neither one nor the other, sparsely planted and thinly peopled. It
appeared to stretch for miles and miles along the foot of the moors—one vast
moss, no doubt, in former days, and seeming to tell to-day a tale of but
partial conquest in its unfenced spaciousness, broken only by belts of fir
trees, and bearing but intermittent traces of that relentless lowland plough
which drives so high up into the wild, if there is anything to be made on
it. There was character obviously in this long stretch of smooth-lying,
sad-looking, but half1tamed country, for its very loneliness. Curiosity
impelled me to traverse it a little later, which I did from Westruther by a
road that began well, but running about as straight as an arrow, with
scarcely a rise, ultimately obscured itself beneath a thick coating of turf.
For a farming country it proved as lonely as it looked from this height of
Hardens that so finely flanks it. Three or four homesteads, each handling,
no doubt, great areas of the thin moorish land, made up its human element.
Breadths of flat, unconquered heathland here and there even yet told the
tale of its material, while an ancient pele tower told another of its
social, past. The ramparts of the Lammermoors, then in all their purple
glory, looked down upon the scene, and finally a terrific thunderstorm, with
no refuge from its fury, sent me drenched into the last farmhouse on the
waste, a proceeding that might, under the circumstances, seem belated to any
one who was indifferent to the amenities of fork-lightning at extremely
close quarters upon an open road. Looking down once more from Hardens Hill,
a tapering church spire springing high above a mass of foliage to the west
of Duns marks at once the seat of the former Earls of Marchmont and the
picturesque and historically notorious church and village of Polwarth. It is
on the road to Greenlaw, which I propose to glance at in this chapter. Here
is a village celebrated in the rustic lore of the Merse and immortalised by
two poets, if a ballad of Allan Ramsay's, recast by Leyden, may stand for
the double honour:—
"At Polwarth on
the Green,
If you'll meet me in the morn,
Where lasses do convene
To dance around the thorn
A kindly welcome you shall meet,
Frae ane that likes to view
A lover and a lad complete,
That lad and lover you."
The uninitiated in his
armchair may think I am trifling with him in quoting these artless lines.
But they are hallowed in the first place by their authorship, in the second
by the familiarity they enjoy in a country whose tale lives so much in song,
and above all they commemorate a bygone custom for which most of us have a
soft place. For what is left of an ancient thorn still stands on Polwarth
Green protected by a railing. And this is the identical tree around which
the less sophisticated forbears of the present lads and lasses of Polwarth
danced in their youth. If the thorn and its associations, which might easily
be so, were situated in a Surrey village, there would be a revival under the
distinguished patronage of a narrow acred, sumptuously housed squire, not
very long, perhaps, from Manchester or Glasgow, or with an interest in a
bigger city still nearer home. Gaily caparisoned children of a pseudo
village, accustomed to much more stimulating forms of entertainment and
sprung from every stock in the United Kingdom, but united in the common bond
of a cockney accent, would caper once a year before a mildly bored and
decorative audience a very pretty pastoral play. There would be the three
cheers for the squire and his lady, proposed by the schoolmaster, on whom
much of the burden had very likely fallen, and everybody would drive away in
motors declaring how delightful it was that the lower classes should be thus
encouraged to revive the simple, hearty, rural amusements of Merry Old
England. But country life in Berwickshire and the north is not the least
like that within the orbit of London, and, indeed, differs no little in many
ways, chiefly social, from that of a genuine English countryside. I may be
wrong, but I fancy it would take very strong inducements to make the yokels
of the Merse dance around the thorn on Polwarth Green to-day. A stranger
meeting a troop of "workers" in their quaint primitive attire coming from
the field might be excused for imagining that these were just the very
people to do so. But if he met these strapping lassies in their Sunday best
he would see at once how utterly he had misjudged them. The dancing on
Polwarth Green, however, was particularly associated with weddings, of which
it was in former days an indispensable corollary, every married couple being
expected to dance round it with their friends. So the time-honoured stanza
of invitation from a Iad to a lass to dance around the thorn on Polwarth
Green had a very direct significance.
But Polwarth has much more in
the way of romance than this graceful old tradition to its credit. For the
brave heroism of Lady Grizell Baillie, which saved her father's life, is an
event that no history of Scotland larger than a text-book would venture to
omit. Polwarth church, rebuilt 200 years ago upon a very ancient foundation,
stands in the grounds of Marchmont House, which was built in place of an
older castle rather later by the last Earl of that name, and is still in the
family, though the title has lapsed. Now the first Earl, then Sir Patrick
Home of Marchmont, during the troublous, persecuting times of Charles II.,
was so out of sympathy with the Government, that they sought his life.
Driven into concealment, he found it in his own family vault beneath
Polwarth church, no one living but his young daughter, Grizell, being in the
secret. Hither for a long period the courageous girl in the dark of the
night brought her father such food as she could save without observation
from the family table, and finally assisted his escape to Holland. From
thence at the Revolution of 1688 he returned to be raised to an Earldom. The
same young woman, while ministering to the wants of her entombed parent, had
also carried a letter from him to Robert Baillie (whose son she married a
dozen years later) then lying in prison at Edinburgh under sentence of
death. She rode alone to Edinburgh, forty miles, through the night, passing
in the early morning beneath the city gates on which the heads of many of
her family's friends were already festering. She contrived to get the letter
in and take home the reply to her father. This lady, however, was no mere
plucky girl. At the revival of the family fortunes she rejected a pressing
offer from William's Queen, Mary, to remain at court as a maid of honour,
choosing, as she thought, the better part of a country lady in Scotland. And
this she filled with such engaging charm, sweetness, and dignity for nearly
sixty years after the Revolution, as the wife of Sir George Baillie of
Jerviswood, that she was long remembered. Some songs she wrote as a girl
when taking refuge with her relatives in Holland still survive. One of them
in the vernacular contains an allusion to the matrimonial atmosphere of
Polwarth Green.
Polwarth is half-way between
Duns and Greenlaw, the now discarded county town, and the land rises a
little in elevation as it declines vastly in fertility. An atmosphere of
reclaimed moorland, or rather moss, begins to pervade the atmosphere, which
no high-farming can conceal, and, indeed, in large tracts here and there the
land has been left virgin, so far as the plough is concerned. Six or seven
hundred feet will be the normal elevation of all this western end of the
Merse, if Merse it can still be called, which is tilted up and rolls away in
breezy spaces till it pitches down into Lauderdale. It is easy to see what
this whole country was a hundred or more years ago; and it is interesting to
note in what wholesale fashion the big lowland farmers of the past
generation have bent this for the most part reluctant soil to their needs. I
have beguiled the way at times by trying to picture what this wide-sweeping,
poorer Berwickshire country with its great fields, had it fallen to the
reclaiming efforts of Welsh squires and their fifty-acre tenants, would look
Iike.
This is in no sense a
reflection upon the latter, for they are an industrious and land-loving
people; but as small farmers remotely situated they are inevitably
non-progressive. The comparison suggests itself, because just such tracts of
moorish country in the counties of Cardigan and Carmarthen, sloping away as
these do from the hills, are also more or less reclaimed. But how different
custom and tradition affect the landscape of a tract of country in the
making. Instead of these great fields geometrically traced by the stone
walls that about Greenlaw take the place of hedges, and the Iarge
substantial homesteads with their hinds' cottages, standing on ridges far
apart, we should have a patchwork of little white- or pink-washed homesteads
in clumps of trees, each surrounded by a network of small fields. There
would be irregular patches or straggling belts of moor-grass, heath, gorse,
or rough pasture that the small man's more diffident plough had flinched
from, straggling everywhere in and about. The little streams, too, would
claim their ample margins of copse and bracken. There is no question
whatever which makes for the picturesque in landscape. But there is
something fine after all, if deplorably unaesthetic, in the antitheses of
these little farms, and the way in which the lowland Scotsman has treated a
refractory country.
There are no half measures,
no little corners or odd patches of waste land, no inconsequent straggling
thickets of birch or alder, and broom or gorse, which once had a firm grip
everywhere. The symmetry is tremendous, even in this wavy, broken, poorish
country. The motives were, of course, purely economic ones, according to the
bold confident method which distinguished the very much reformed Scottish
farmer of days that are now getting far away. The country savours greatly of
a pious dread of slovenliness, and a pride of appearance at all costs; as if
an exaggerated horror of the notorious ways of these forbears had seized
upon a very much awakened generation. One feels here that ragged, hopeless
acres have been whirled under with the hopeful ones in the long stride of
the plough, with no paltry niceties of calculation, to take their chance,
and at any rate to have equal treatment and equal share of the good things
to come from the lime-kiln, the barnyard, and the manure merchant. If a
piece was rejected, it would seem to have been by the hundred acres, and
turned to such grazing uses as may be. This roughly indicates at any rate
the spirit of this country; and in remembering all this and looking at it in
the right way, you will almost admire the great shapely fields, waving in
grain or in rippling seas of rye grass, or in clean pasture, up towards the
Lammermoors. Beyond Greenlaw. it is almost as bare of trees as the Scotland
of the Union period, which so astonished travellers for its nakedness. Stiff
and angular plantations of fir, which are the aeasthetic blot on so much
northern scenery, are here of less consequence. Even the moderately old
songs of this Borderland were written in a ragged country. They breathe of a
rough surface, of flowery fields, of tortuous paths and the most primitive
agriculture, of "dowie denes" and "broomy knowes." One cannot avoid the fact
that the enterprising Scottish farmer has made a tolerably clean sweep of
the furniture which decks the stage on which the Robs and Maggies of the old
Border land lived and frisked. The Merse is a country good to look upon in
many ways, both material and romantic, but it is not easy to conceive a
bunch of skinny ewes being driven up to milk over its trim pastures. With
all the surface changes of Southern England, which perhaps we hardly
realise, there has not been any so complete as this in the last two or three
hundred years. A Jacobean milkmaid we might imagine to be not greatly out of
order in many an old-fashioned Devonshire or Wiltshire foreground. Greenlaw
is, in legal phrase, "a burgh or barony," the superior of which is the owner
of the estate of Marchmont. The original town was situated on a small hill a
mile away, hence the name. It was the property in mediaeval times of the
Earls of Dunbar, pre-eminent in Berwickshire, from whom are derived the
Homes, equally so—the continuity being thus nobly maintained from quite dark
ages. Greenlaw is a more than peaceful little place of a thousand or so
inhabitants, sitting pleasantly in a shallow vale, through which the
Blackadder, a purling moorland stream, pursues its way through glen or
meadow. When it is fining down after a flood you will see an angler every
fifty yards along its banks, taking more or less toll from its apparently
inexhaustible store of trout. Greenlaw is nothing; like such a well-built
little town as Duns. A single long street, of so unpretentious and negative
a character as to disarm criticism, expresses most of it. About midway,
however, there is a break, and the startled alien will find himself
confronted upon either hand by buildings in their different way of quite
noble proportions. Both, however, are calculated to strike a note of
melancholy rather than of joy in the heart of the native. The more imposing
of the two are the whilom county buildings, a standing reminder of the
ravished dignities of the town, and the grievance which the freemen of
Greenlaw, if they are merely human, must still cherish in their hearts.
Opposite to this is a great hotel of Georgian aspect, the despondent-looking
victim, not merely of diverted official patronage, but of a much older
story—to wit, the disappearance of the coaches. The larger of these two
buildings is described by a responsible writer soon after it was built at
the cost of the then laird of Marchmont, nearly a hundred years ago, as "a
noble edifice of Grecian architecture and chaste design." There is an
imposing classic portico extending along the front, surmounted by a dome
which appears to have been made fire-proof for the express purpose of
safeguarding the county records—and now they are all at Duns! The other
building is described with almost equal enthusiasm by the same hand, as then
in course of construction, with a fair promise of being one of the finest
hotels between London and Edinburgh. For Greenlaw was then on one of the
main international coach roads.
The occasion of the visit to
Greenlaw now particularly in mind was a lovely day of sunshine in the July
of the past year. My only previous one had been made two years before, when
a June pilgrimage through the heart of the Dierse from Hutton in a dense
mist had terminated at Greenlaw in drenching rain-i--a catastrophe which
virtually wiped out, so far as I was concerned, all details of the little
town with its startling architectural contrasts, its present and its
departed glories. So even still unacquainted with its resources, and
inquiring of a friendly tradesman for a suitable house of entertainment for
the modest noonday needs of a rather travel-stained wayfarer, he directed me
without a moment's hesitation to the palatial-looking hostelry, which I then
for the first time knowingly encountered. The first glance was enough;
perhaps it was not a very searching one. But it seemed the precise kind of
establishment I abhor upon an occasion of this sort, and altogether
suggestive of a melancholy, gilt-mirrored, antimacassared coffee-room,
haunted at intervals by a depressed waiter in a white tie. So I retired to
my friend and demanded something more snug and cordial-looking. If he didn't
quite grasp my needs he did my objections with great perspicacity, and
expressed them to a nicety: "Well, there's nae other I could just
recommend;" and with that touch of humour the occasion demanded, "ye won't
find the Arms quite sae intimidating as you might think." Intimidatin'! this
was splendid, and exactly expressed my feelings. So I returned, and mounting
many steps passed through the portals into great corridors and empty halls
which recalled Macaulay's rolling periods on the splendid hostelries of the
great north road in the coaching period. There was no sign of habitation,
however, till a cast or two round the end of a long corridor revealed a
secluded bar, presided over by a kindly but humble female, who expressed her
ability to provide me with bread and cheese. I was shown into a
comparatively small and bare apartment, of stately elevation and corniced
ceilings, and altogether eloquent of departed glories. Two or three
portraits of long-deceased county magnates hung upon the walls, and such
scant furniture as there was looked as if they themselves might once have
sat upon it. The bread and cheese appeared in due course—a slice of either
upon a plate, with a knife, brought in by a little girl of rustic and
unsophisticated habit.
The Ettrick Shepherd would, I
think, have been safe here, if one may recall his dread of what in his day
must have been a much more "untimeous" meal, as seen through the medium of
Christopher North. "I daurna trust myself wi' a luncheon: in my hands it
becomes an untimeous dinner. Whenever I'm betrayed into a luncheon I mak'
off wi' a jug or twa just as gin it had been a regular dinner wi' a
tablecloth. Beware of the tray.' "
There was certainly nothing
intimidatin' in the sense my friend the stationer had used the word, though
the prospect of sleeping a night alone in these echoing halls might well
have justified the epithet. Mine hostess showed me over this mute skeleton
of vanished coaching and county glories. It was at least cheering to note
that one vast saloon showed signs of occasional festivities.
Though "Duns dings a'," the
discomfited Greenlaw does not look in the least depressed, but only
tranquil, and, indeed, wears a cheerful mien. It has, no doubt, outlived
ambition, and long ago learned to cut its coat according to the measure of
its cloth. It has its fairs and markets, too, and lots of troi.it-fishing at
its doors. Mitch more than this, like a few other old boroughs in this
country, its freemen have the pasturage over a thousand or more acres. Every
morning the town herd collects the cows, and drives them up to this
immemorial expanse of ragged, moorish pasture a mile or so beyond the town,
and every evening drives them home again to scatter to their various
lodgings and byres. I traversed the town moor one day, in walking from
Greenlaw to Hume Castle, which lies some three or four miles to the
southward; a really primitive bit of the old wild country that might well
make a stage for any of those old ditties that tell of the loves and humours
of a peasantry who have ceased to exist, as everywhere else. Clean nibbled
sward was here, and tousely moor-grass, yellow with tansy and ragwort; wet
green rushy hollows, fragrant with meadow-sweet and patches of broom, or
gorse, or heather, and unmolested thistles. Companies of stunted thorns
straggled about the wide-spreading upland, whose choice bites were, no
doubt, an open book to the veterans of the town herd. I found their
guardian, a man of many years, sitting by the roadside, and only too ready
for a crack. He was reading a newspaper, and admitted that when this daily
performance was concluded he found time hang heavy on his hands. He had none
of the Scottish classics, theological or secular, either in his pocket, or
apparently at command, not even a Burns, and obviously was not a man of
culture. He "didna tak' much heed to Burns," he said. But he told me all
about the time-honoured rules and regulations affecting the grazing rights
of the moor. There was no shelter on this whole stretch of it but the
afore-mentioned stunted thorns and the like, and I asked him how he did in
heavy storms. He replied he didn't do at all well, but fared on such
occasions "jes' the same as ilka ane o' yon beasties." Then he waxed
eloquent on the thunderstorms he had braved, and the lightning flashes he
had narrowly escaped. There had, in fact, been a severe one the day before:
hence his eloquence.
The railway from Greenlaw to
Gordon, the next station, runs nearly all the way through moorland, ablaze
now with heather, or through wide, tawny moors, where little natural sykes
or straight-furrowed draining ditches trace black lines through the poor
grey-green grasses.
The sudden contrast from the
opulent Merse scenery —sudden, that is to say, in a railway train—is almost
more striking than if the quick change had been into mountains. With an
imperceptible rise you pass from a country far more productive, as
luxuriant, and as stately in parks and mansions as Warwickshire, into the
land of the curlew and the snipe. But this is the charm of a Border country,
whether of Scotland or of Wales. In Kent or Warwickshire it is a beautiful
garden always, if that satisfies. But you feel that it continues so to be,
from horizon to horizon; there is nothing beyond. The racy, the romantic,
the mysterious are not in that world. To enjoy it in perpetuity you must
pluck all such things from your mind and settle down to a standard of ornate
limitations. And a man must be bred to this, or at least not to the other
sort, to feel a perfect satisfaction. If this is the case, he will see
nothing lacking, however susceptible to the influence of nature, nor
understand the restiveness that comes of another temperament and standpoint.
Gordon is a small village
with fine old timber about it—a detail superfluous to mention in the Merse,
but significant here. Rolling away from it in great waving sweeps are the
neat farming lands with stone wall enclosures of a reclaimed country. Behind
them rises the wild upland of the Lammermoors. Hidden away beyond them to
the westward lies the romantic dale and tributary glens of the Leader, to
which, I hope, in due course to introduce the reader.
Gordon would hardly claim our
notice here but for the fact that the parish was the original seat of the
founders of the famous Aberdeenshire clan. Most people, I take it, who have
any sense at all of British ethnology, know that the Gordons are of
Anglo-Norman, not of Celtic origin—a fact less out of harmony with ordinary
tradition when one remembers that the great Aberdeenshire clan, to a far
greater extent, I believe, than any others, included a large low-country
element. The Gordons are said to have first settled here in the twelfth
century, and seemed to have removed to Aberdeenshire two centuries later.
Just to the north of the village a mound still known as the castle, which
was only destroyed about 1580, marks the site of their stronghold. Curiously
enough, the name of Huntly was borne till a century ago by a hamlet in the
parish, now vanished, and was, no doubt, carried with them to the north to
become eventually so famous as the distinguishing mark of the head of the
clan.
But there is here a more
tangible link with the past, if not of quite so distinguished a flavour as
that attaching to the mere soil where grew the seedling which, transplanted
to a northern clime, grew into so vast a tree. For near the railroad, a
short mile beyond the little station, and standing on a green knowe, with
obvious traces of an encircling moss, is a pole tower. It is fairly perfect,
and blinks picturesquely out of a scattered grove of ash and oaks. This
belonged to the Pringles, whose fame as a Border family even to this day is
so well known in the north as to require no reminder of the fact. But
experience has taught one how little one part of this small island knows
(genealogically, I mean) of another part. What does a Pringle know, for
instance, of a Basset or a Baskerville, who held the Welsh marches from the
time of Rufus, and are still seated there? And what does a Basset or a
Baskerville know of a Pringle or a Lauder? —nothing at all, in the way here
implied, except by accident. |
