| |
Edinburgh
and The Lothians
Chapter XXV - On Lammer Law |
EARLY one morning of last spring I pushed my bicycle
along the Haugh at Haddington, planning to cross right over the top of
Lammer Law. No great effort, in sooth, for the Lammermuirs are gentle
hills, and Lammer Law, reputed the highest, is scarce 1800 feet, but the
freshness of the time, the prospect of a day in the woods and fields and
hills, gave that inspiring touch of romance which attaches to the
beginning of a journey, be it great or small. As I passed over the wooden
footbridge across the Tyne I looked at the channel filled with gravel and
the green islands in midstream; the familiar note of the water is
distinctly in my ears as I think of the easy, gliding river. "You hear her
streams repine," says Scott, exactly hitting off the voice of the water
nymph. I have long known the particular spot as the "Stanners Heids." The
term puzzled me for years. Was it rightly placed there, or did it belong
to another part of the river, and what did it mean? And then one day I
happened to look into Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, himself a county
man, and there, in one of the "Prologues"
with which he adorns and beautifies his translation
of the Æneid, was the word "Stanners." As the glossary explained,
it was gravel in the bed of a stream. I saw what it meant, and why it
fitted more than one place on the Tyne. This by the way.
I moved on, and was soon skirting the park wall of
Lethington, or Lennoxlove as it is now called. I could just see the old
grey keep of the Maitlands through the trees. There abode the two Lord
Chancellors Maitland and their more famous son and brother, Secretary
Maitland, who, when his own cause and Queen Mary’s cause went hopelessly
to ruin, was thought to have ended himself, "as the auld Romans were wont
to do," to avoid an ignominious death on the scaffold. But the Maitlands,
and even their successors, are gone; and if you stop to muse over those
old-world stories you progress not at all. So I swung round by Grant’s
Braes and Eaglescairnie—delightful name for a quaint little mansion and
estate. It was one of those bright spring days that
carry with them the presage of rain. "The distant hills are looking nigh,"
the whole Lammermuir range seemed close at hand. Lammer Law, Cairn and all
was right above my head. I felt as if I could throw a stone on to one of
the snow patches that dotted its shoulders and gave an Alpine touch to my
little adventure. A few minutes and I was in the small hamlet of Bolton.
If you are anything of a Burns enthusiast you will not pass without
turning aside to the churchyard. Not that Burns was, as far as one can
learn, ever in the parish at all, but his mother, his elder brother
Gilbert, one of his sisters, and many nephews and nieces lie there. The
stone that records their names and dates records no more. There is a touch
of the antique Scots reticence and simplicity about stone and words alike.
You will not wonder there is no reference to the world-famous poet. In
1820 and 1827, the dates of the deaths of the mother and the brother (who
was long factor at Lennoxlove), the fame of Burns was not what it is now;
the last dark days in Dumfries still cast their black shadow over his
name, and a number of things were said about him that seem to us now
curiously irrelevant. But whatever his reputation had been it would not
have occurred to those pious and simple souls to record it there.
A little beyond Bolton the way deserts the main road.
You climb to the uplands through a delightful succession of woods and
fields and pastures, and burns and dells and braes.
It is rustic but not savage. The woods and fields are equally trim and
exact, the strong, well-kept horses draw the plough under the skilful
guiding hand in miraculously straight furrows, the sheep look as if their
fleeces had been combed, the fences are
in trim repair, and far up the hillside man wrestles with
Nature to reclaim the soil, to wring a little oats or what not from the
barren slope before he abandons it as mere mountain pasture. Ever on the
rise, you pass farm after farm—" toun" in the old Scots phrase. The
summits became more and more imminent. A little rain fell now and again,
the hills loomed black and bare and desolate, the wind whistled keen and
shrill, and one thought of the dark days and nights of winter, and you saw
why the houses were built so strong, and everything had the mark of energy
and endurance upon it, for the sharp weather stings to activity all that
work and labour there. But the spring reasserted itself; the sky cleared,
the light and play of the shadows raced across the hills, the sun changed
the sombre hues to bright colours.
The road led me by Humbie House, and a little way from
Humbie church and Humbie village I descended into the lovely dell where
Humbie Mill uses the waters of the passing burn. Here was a pastoral
interlude. A boy sat in a cart, stationary before the mill door, and
discoursed on a flute with some skill a fantasia of Scotch airs, simple,
popular things, that went excellently well with the lambs skipping on the
hillside, and the light and play of shadows, and the plaintive note of the
burn, and the order of the woods and the fields. I suppose you must always
take the native song and tune of a country in the country itself. The
tarantella of Sicily had sounded thin and fantastic on this sober
countryside.
At Upper Keith I noted again a house far up the
hillside; it occurred here and there with a certain odd persistency, but
perhaps I read into it what I knew of its history. You would put it down
at first for a shepherd’s hut, or even powder magazine; it is all that
remains of the magnificent twelfth-century mediaeval foundation of the old
Scots King Malcolm, called the Maiden, for travellers and poor folk. Here
was in distant days dispensed that strange mediaeval charity which fell
like the rain and sunbeam of heaven on the just and unjust, and ministered
to the wayfarer and the beggar according to their needs and not according
to their deserts. When the old order changed for the new at the
Reformation the place was left to go to wreck and ruin, and yet you fancy
it as still a majestic ruin, for it was long a quarry for the
neighbourhood. Some fifty or sixty years ago the folk rose by one common
impulse and carried the remains away for use in every base and common
purpose. As yet there was no ancient monument preservation spirit in the
land. Pringle of Goodman’s Acre had built a sort of vault as burying-place
out of the ruins over two centuries ago. This is called Soutra Aisle, and
is to-day the sole sign of Malcolm’s foundation, except for the crop of
nettles that marks the site of the old burying-place. And then again there
is a legend about Goodman’s Acre, of how the wife of an old-time Pringle,
by the exercise of a little timely hospitality to a presumably unknown but
suspected stranger, obtained a grant of the ground from that Scots Haroun
Al-Raschid, James V.
You now pass Johnstonburn and Woodcote, and come on the
main road, which crosses the Lammermuirs at the lowest point right over
Soutra Hill. A beautifully-engineered road this is, made just before the
railways; but the posts at the roadside, placed to show the track in the
time of snows, hint that there are still lingering elements of
uncouthness. Till you are right across the hill there is but one dwelling,
called, oddly, Lowry’s Den. In the old time of the footpad and the
smuggler it had an evil repute, and even to-day in the sunlight it looks
sinister, but its looks are the worst of it. And now you are on the edge
of the Berwickshire slope and you have a swift rush down till you reach
Carfrae Mill, where you leave the high road and address yourself to the
serious effort of the day. You must now follow a mere bridle track through
the centre of the hills. It is ten miles to Gifford and only three or four
are rideable; the rest is mere sheep-walk through heather. You begin
fairly enough where the road is plain beside the mountain burn, but you
soon take to stiff hill climbing, and when you leave the solitary
shepherd’s house, half-way up your first hill, you do not meet another
human habitation for six miles or so. I had passed this way before on a
golden autumn afternoon when the very air seemed to sleep, and the heather
was fragrant, and the silence of the hills had something magic about it;
but now the sky was dark, and the rain gathered strength, and the wind
whistled, and the whaups screamed in sad unison. The whole scene was
inexpressibly dreary. The track was sometimes lost in snow (some land here
is held in blench tenure on paying a "snowball in June "—no impossibility
at any rate), and again it wound through the midst of bogs and morasses,
and I was fain to turn back, only it seemed easier to go on. Yet this was
after all the more ordinary aspect of the. place, and I thought how scenes
like this form the character of men who live among them. In such moors and
solitudes Border shepherds and Highland clansmen, and Moss-trooper and
Covenanter, and many other typical Scots folk, had passed their days, and
from them, perhaps, came the sharp touch of Calvinistic theology, and the
cruelty of savage deeds and the reticence of speech and hardy endurance of
hard conditions; for I was wandering through a dreary wilderness with no
outlook beyond the near heights. However, the Cairn on Lammer Law, which
had a little before appeared over the shoulder of a hill, my one star of
hope, was now growing larger in the desolation. The track passes close to
the summit, and I left my bicycle and climbed thereto through a piece of
vile, boggy ground. Alas! what could I see through the rain and the
driving mist? Not those pleasant, happy fields I had gazed on once before,
that delightful landscape, that in its gentle rise and fall has something
of the stately and alluring rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter. And the
ground was historic. You looked towards battlefields like Pinkie and
Preston-pans and Dunbar, and islets like the Bass, and there was the smoke
of Edinburgh, and the fields of Fife, and the shadow of the Highland
hills, for, in sooth, from there you survey the theatre of a good half of
Scots history; but the curtain was drawn over it that day, and I had
nought to do but to get me down the hillside through the ever-increasing
rain. I was tempted by a few yards of better road to try the bicycle. I
was promptly thrown for my pains, though possibly ultimately to my
advantage. The gloom increased, the mist shifted uneasily on the hilltops,
and I thought how fitly godly Mr Alexander Peden had prayed in cruel times
for a lap of the Lord’s cloak when the dragoons were at his heels, and the
mist in their faces seemed a sufficient and immediate response.
These places do not strike those who work in them quite
as they strike you. One man I met on the hillside, and, of course, I
stopped for a "crack." You stop to greet the traveller in such a solitude
as naturally as two caravans do that encounter one another in the desert.
He was not a traveller, but a shepherd, and at that lambing season he
spent his days, and often his night; on the hillside. He stared when I
asked him if it was not lonely or dreary. The idea had not occurred to
him; the scene of his daily labours had a touch of cheerful commonplace
about it. Perhaps his dog was sufficient company. I am sure his plaid
protected him well against the weather, and his staff, it may be, guided
him as ably as ever that of the old-time warlock, Major Weir, guided
him. But the hillside is not the place to discuss such curious
questions. The rain still pursued me as I hurried ever downwards, but now
on comfortable ordinary, macadamized roads, through Long Yester and by
pleasant green Chesters, and then through trim, neat Gifford. That day I
turned not aside to view Hobgoblin Hall, "wrought by words of charm" by
that mysterious old warlock, Hugo de Gifford. And though I skirted the
policies of Coalstoun I did not even think of the magic pear to which
tradition has tied the fate of the family. The primitive cravings for food
and rest and dryness and warmth were strong within me as I crept with a
sigh of relief under the shadow of the old church tower at Haddington, and
so to my night’s lodging. |
Return to
Edinburgh and The Lothians index page
|