NATURE has given you an admirable
coign of vantage from which to view North Berwick, for just behind it is
the Law, "with cone of green," in Delta’s hackneyed phrase. It is only 612
feet up, but then it rises straight from the sea. The strip of level
ground on which the old town stands is scanty indeed. There it is as in
Edinburgh and Heidelberg and Salzburg. If you saw them as left by Nature
you would think each site exquisitely inappropriate, but stick down your
houses and how admirable the effect! A road rises steeply from the High
Street to the still steeper Law, and the climb though brief is fatiguing.
It is just sufficiently off the perpendicular to remove the idea of
danger. At the top are some ruins. Be not deceived by their weather-beaten
aspect, they only date from the great French wars. Here dwelt the men who
kept watch and ward night and day, so that if Napoleon had in fact landed
at Aberlady Bay—he had marked it as a possible spot—the Beacon Fire had on
the instant flared through the Lothians and thence over all Britain. Here
too lie the jaws of a whale, making a gateway where there is no road, and
not letting you in or out of anywhere! You ask the why and the wherefore
of those superfluous bones. In earlier days whales were not rare on that
coast. They still strand thereon at irregular intervals, and it was the
fashion to use their jaws for gate-posts. You look right down on North
Berwick. There is the old kernel of the town. In it the High Street
running east and west, and at right angles on the east Quality Street,
with plane trees which give a pleasant shade in the few torrid days of the
northern summer, and the old harbour. Then all about along the main road
east and west, down by the shore, and up the hillside, are piles of
villas, all built after the fashion of suburban Edinburgh, so that the
place is fitly named Edinburgh-super-Mare. Every now and again is a
huge hotel. Not often can you so clearly distinguish the old from the new
and grasp so clearly how the old was featured. Till 1848 North Berwick had
no railway. A stage-coach ran to Edinburgh once a day. The parish-minister
in the well-known New Statistical Account lauds it as conducted
with great propriety. He goes on to lament the thirteen public-houses, one
to every fifty of the population. The average consumption of whisky he
computes at five gallons per head. Possibly tippling was the only
recreation of the populace, hard put to it to fleet the time through the
unrelieved dreadness of the winter months. To-day it is an exclusive
watering-place. Let the cheap tripper take note; it is no place for him.
There are no bands, no promenade jetty, no trains on Sundays, nay, the
very butcher and the baker, if they do not "repulse him from their door,"
will receive him without enthusiasm and without popular prices.
The extant antiquities of North Berwick are scanty.
They are, in fact, little more than two heaps of stone, one on a field by
the station, the other by the harbour. The first was a Cistercian nunnery.
The inmates had at any rate a fair view of the world they had renounced,
and they took an annual outing, or pious picnic, to the near island of
Fidra, for devotional purposes, doubtless, but looked forward to as the
one excitement in their humdrum year. The stones by the harbour represent
the former church, where were enacted the unholy pranks of the North
Berwick witches, temp. 1590. Duly captured and duly tortured they
made the usual astounding confessions. "On All Hallow even, to the number
of two hundred, they went to sea, each one on a riddle or cive, and went
into the same, very substantially, with flagons of wine, making merrie and
drinking by the way in the same riddles or cives." They disembarked
opposite "the kirk of North Berwick in Lowthian." Their leader was a
servant lass, one Gellie Duncan, who under the pilliewinks (screw for
fingers) developed strange narrative powers. She told how she led the
band, playing on a Jews’ harp with infernal skill, and chanting a mad
rigmarole. The ceremonies in the desecrated kirk were grotesque beyond
description. All Scotland shuddered in delicious horror. None more than
sapient James VI., for who so expert a witch-finder? He applied himself
diligently to the matter, and his profound observations thereon were much
admired in Court circles. As for Gellie Duncan and her companions, they
were hustled out of the world with all possible speed. But where were the
rest of the two hundred? Every old woman in the ‘Lothians was half dead
with fright lest she also should be worrit at the stake and burnt like
other innocents. Yes. Satan was at work in the land but all on the side of
the accusers. Those old Scots were perfect fiends upon occasion.
The one word that is the key of North Berwick’s present
day prosperity is golf. The links here are as famous as those at St
Andrews. The holes and bunkers therein are classic, and each has its
individual name, known throughout the universal world of sport. Every
other man or woman you meet carries a club. Listen to scraps of talk at
hotel or restaurant, or on the beach, and you catch endless chatter about
astounding strokes made or marred, and the merits of this or that bit of
green, and this or that man’s play, and so forth. Golf is not a poor man’s
game; it is the sport of statesmen and was that of Kings. The old Stuarts
dearly loved a turn on the green. It is the Royal game, the votary whereof
is clad in purple or some such raiment that shines quite as gorgeous. Also
it lets fall crumbs for the needy. All the poor boys, or what would
elsewhere be poor boys, are caddies. It is the game first and last,
everywhere and always, so that unless you are interested therein, what do
you in North Berwick? That is the question the player would like to ask,
especially if you rashly take to strolling on the links. Here you are
between the golfer and the deep sea. You may have a legal right but not
(it is held) a moral one. The balls fly about as in a battle, and no
genuine sportsman will divert his stroke because your shins or head
happen to be in the way. Stick to your perch on the Law, there only is
safety, and the prospect is superb. The islands solicit your particular
attention. First and foremost is the Bass, the most noted, yet but one of
many. A fair way out in the North Sea is the May, but quite at hand are
mighty rocks, quaint in shape, quaint in name: Craigleith, the Lamb, or "Lambie’s
isle," as Scott has it, Fidra and Eyebroughty, and some of these have
antiquities and traditions of note and interest.
You descend the hill, pick your way westward through
the maze of villas, and are on the highroad once more. Presently you come
plump into Dirleton, built round a large green. Quite a model village, an
English place lifted bodily into Scotland, as it were. It has been spoken
of in this fashion. It was offered as a bribe to Logan of Restalrig by the
Gowrie conspirators, anxious for his support. The classic phrase about the
place is his laud of it as the pleasantest dwelling in Scotland. There are
the crumbling ruins of a castle which has its own record of sieges by the
"Auld Enemy," and again in the Cromwellian period, and round about the
ruin is an exquisitely fair garden. Yet I should not put it before Gifford
or Tyninghame, to name but these. It is set on a frequented highway and
thus draws attention. A famous Scots lawyer of the Restoration, Sir John
Nisbet to wit, was possibly of Logan’s opinions. He got it at any rate.
His descendants still hold it, and have embellished their property, now an
old possession. As yet it is evident they are not "feuing" their estate.
It is worth noting that when proprietors of land in Scotland deliver it to
the builder, speculative or otherwise, they do not follow English methods.
The land is chopped up into small parcels in both cases, and an annual
payment is exacted, but in England the landowner is still the landlord,
and when the lease of ninety-nine years or what not runs out he, or rather
his representatives, have house and land entirely as their own. In
Scotland the landowner becomes the superior and the tenant his vassal, but
the yearly payment is perpetual, and as long as the actual holder pays he
cannot be disturbed. The words superior and the like are curious terms of
the old Scots system of conveyancing; it was a relic on paper of the Scots
feudal system, and was practically intact within the memory of living
lawyers. It was cumbersome, but historically very interesting. The
legislation of the last fifty years has made sad havoc of its
ponderosities. I may be excused this disquisition since we are passing
over ground the practice of the law gave to two lawyers, Dalrymple of
North Berwick and Nisbet of Dirleton. The latter took his title as Lord of
Session from the place. You remember his town house yet standing in the
Canongate. His Magnum opus, Dirleton’s Doubts ("better than other
men’s certainties," said Lord Mansfield) lies dusty and neglected on the
upper shelf of many an old law library. According to a saying of Lord
Bacon’s, the River of Time lets weighty matters sink and brings down
trifles. Near seventy years ago this couplet was current in Dirleton
parish:
"For a’ that fell at Flodden Field
Rowny Hood o’ the Hul cam hame."
Who Rowny was no tradition tells, nor whether this was
said of him in praise or blame. The parish minister preserves it in the
New Statistical Account published in 1845. When a thing of this sort
gets into print—and what now does not get into print?—it has a new and
changed life. In tradition there comes a time when the oldest inhabitant
fails to repeat and the legend vanishes. Once printed it is known at least
to the reader, though the common folk of the countryside never heard the
words for which they are the authority.
You presently come on the old toll-house. Such places
are scattered over the country, and like the "ducat" we saw at Tantallon
are emblems of an extinct state of things, for of course all the ways are
free. The road to the left leads up to the county town. I should have
noted that the road up to North Berwick Law also takes you in the same
direction; and again at Aberlady, at which we shall presently arrive,
there is another. The ground rises from the sea up to the range of the
Garleton hills and then sinks into the valley of the Tyne, wherein
Haddington itself is situate. All those roads lead through the quiet,
rural part of the county. The best is the way from North Berwick. It is
the least encumbered with traffic; it passes through delicious woods and
fields with a continual rise and fall, and it is dignified, at a little
place called Kingston, by the picturesque ruin of Fenton Tower, as to
which history and tradition are silent, and not even romance has whispered
a legend!
At Gullane we are still in Dirleton. Gullane gave its
name to the parish till near three hundred years ago, when the kirk was
transferred to Dirleton and the name followed. The last incumbent is said
to have been expelled by James VI. because he was an inveterate smoker. We
all know the British Solomon hated tobacco. We can all hope that the pipe
remained a sufficient consolation to the banished parson. The church was
restored the other day. If there is a saint who takes golf in hand he
ought to be patron here. Golf has made Gullane even more than it has made
North Berwick. Many years ago I played my last game on beautiful Luffness
Links. Then there was a famous training-stable for race-horses, and the
place was most known from that. It was scarce a village at all, merely a
few houses scattered on the hillside. There was one little inn called the
Golf Tavern. The host was something of an antiquarian and, what is called
in the north, "a character," and amused us by his talk. The Gullane of
those days had charms that have not survived. The place has grown like an
American city, so that villas, hotels, shops stretch over the fields in
boundless profusion. The highway leads right through the links. They are
perfection. They are of wide extent, by the sea and yet not too close,
provided by Nature with bunkers and so forth in reasonable plenty, right
in front of the houses and in view of the fields. Then comes Luffness
proper, the village of Aberlady, and Gosford. At Ferney Point, the western
limit of Gosford Bay, there is again a fine extent of turf, springy under
foot and fragrant with aromatic herbs. Beyond is quaintly named Bogle
Hill, with its ruined cottages, the abode, as I remember, not of bogies
but cows! Some tradition, you fancy, ought to linger round a place called
Bogle Hill, but the very ghosts are extinct. Legends of the spirit world
do not flourish in modem Lothian. The folk are educated, intelligent and
commonplace. They regard tales of bogies and such like with cynical
disfavour.
A good mile inland a few houses on the roadside make up
the uninteresting village of Longniddry, yet it has memories of Wishart
and Knox. Some stones in a field near are called Knox’s pulpit. Here it is
averred the reformer preached his first sermon. A little way to the east
is a ruined tower like unto Fenton Tower, known locally as the Red House,
once the residence of some old-time laird. It is a conspicuous object from
the railway, and touched with a sunlit effect it glows a burning crimson
and is singularly impressive. Westward you come into the Seton country.
There is Seton Mains, and Seton Mill, and Port Seton, and Seton Castle,
and Seton Chapel, but the famous Earls of Winton that flourished there for
centuries are all gone, and Seton Castle is a puny heir to the glories of
splendid Seton Palace. Seton chapel has been restored by the Earl of
Wemyss as a burial-place for his own family, and the glittering marble of
its modern tombs glares into nothingness those faded tablets on the wall,
with their quaint Latin phrases setting forth the virtues and achievements
of forgotten members of the old family. One of the Queen’s Maries was a
Seton, and the family were her devoted adherents and friends, as they were
in after days of her son. It was proper, nay inevitable, they should take
the Jacobite side in the rising of 1715, but for that they were driven
forth, and they never returned. In 1745 Prince Charles, when on a visit at
Grange, was presented with a rose by a lady of this ancient house. He gave
in return the thistle from his cap, with a very pretty speech about the
old kindness of the Stuarts and the Setons. The fated thistle is still
preserved. Port Seton to-day is but a suburb of Cockenzie, or even of
Edinburgh. The road rings under the tramway, coal-pits and factories smoke
and screech on either side. The Setons come not again. You leave these
shores of old romance behind and enter on the most commonplace and ugly
league in all Lothian! But it takes you towards Edinburgh!