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THE "Merse" is something of
an archaic term, and the Scottish pronunciation must be remembered together
with the fact that it signifies the Marsh or March, the fashion or the loose
spelling in times remote having disposed of the final h. The "Merse"
may or may not be applied in print to the whole of Berwickshire; but in
practice, so far as the term is in Iocal use, it generally stands for the
fat, undulating, well-farmed, richly wooded lowland that occupies about half
the county, and lies between the Lammermoors and the 'Tweed. A sheep farmer
in the Berwickshire Lammermoors, which are the larger part of that long
sweeping range, would assuredly speak of the "Merse" as another district,
and associated with the arts of husbandry. Lauderdale, again, runs from
north to south across the western end of the county, but I do not think that
its people ever think of themselves as living in the "Verse." Whether the
bare stone wall, poorish country reclaimed from moor and moss, that lies
between Lauderdale and the undoubted Mere and to the west of Greenlaw would
strictly be included under that informal but ancient and familiar term I do
not know, nor probably does anybody in it.
It does not matter in the
least. Probably the same uncertainties would confront a native if requested
to delimit the Weald of Kent, and such precision would be of little
consequence. What is the Merse, however, beyond dispute is that broad,
delectable, and diversified stretch of country that spreads westward for
twenty odd miles to near Kelso and Greenlaw, lying, as related, between the
Lammerrnoors and the Tweed. But no strangers ever go touring in the Merse.
At any rate in the course of considerable journeys over its highways and
byways, during two or three recent summers, I have never seen any outward or
visible sign of such a thing, nor ever encountered a person looking in the
least like one impelled there from some far country by mere curiosity. This
will perhaps be accounted a merit, and it is chiefly worth noting as the
Merse proper runs out into what guide-books call " the Scott country." For
Sinailholin Tower, though not of it apparently in the tourist sense, is most
assuredly in it, and also in Berwickshire, while Dryburgh, where you are
fairly engulfed in the pilgrim vortex, is just within the county; but of
this anon. The Merse is
assuredly the most luxuriant spot in Scotland. The Lothians are laid out by
man and nature upon rather a different scheme, nor have the far northern
counties of England anywhere a region so lavish at once of the soil's
abundance and the greenwood shade. The lairds of Berwickshire were second to
none in that ardour for tree-planting which so felicitously took hold of
Scottish fancy in the early eighteenth century, and by degrees converted a
country whose astounding nakedness was the burden of every traveller's tale,
into a normal condition wherever trees would grow, and in the deep rich
soils of the Merse they grew and waxed mightily. But for the comparative
scarcity of the English elm, of which, to be candid, a little goes a long
way, you might over miles of many roads be in the most umbrageous of the
English Midlands. But there the analogy in almost every respect ceases.
There is more tillage and Iess meadow, and the former, as it is the more
skilful and productive, so it strikes a more lustrous note in the chequered
landscape. The grain fields, whether in the ripening car or in the stook
upon the clean stubbles, glow a deeper gold. The healthy, well-fed,
flickering turnip breadths are more vivid in their green between the woods.
Even that homely article the potato, when clustering over a thirty-acre
field with a slanting sun upon it, contributes a characteristic note. But
the opulent slopes, the umbrageous ridges, the stately seats and timbered
parks, the tree-girt roads of the Merse in all their accessories, and above
all in their horizons, and consequently in their atmosphere, differ vastly
from the midland county into which a Southron of only moderate observation
and no eye for the soils might fancy he had drifted. For above the stately
woods or the long folds of the large clean fields, the pale peaks of the
Cheviots will as often as not rise upon one side: or upon the other the long
sweeps of the Lammermoors will cut the sky, both eloquent of primitive
solitudes and of everything, indeed, that the opulent foreground is not.
And then, too, there are the streams of the
Merse! every one of them bringing the spirit of the mountain and the wild
into the rich low ground, and retaining the buoyancy of their clear amber
waters till their complaining voices are ultimately silenced in the wide
swish of Tweed. The Whiteadder alone, whose deep valley threads with
tortuous course the fattest heart of the Merse, would give that county some
distinction. For the Whiteadder is as fair a mountain-bred river, being
indeed much more than a stream, from its source on the Lothian edge of the
Lammermoors to its confluence with the Tweed near Berwick, that the heart
could desire. With fine disregard for the well-ordered landscape, its pride
of timber, and its pride of crop, the impetuous river churns in the deep
twisting valley that its chafing waters have cut in the course of ages
through the sandstone. Narrow breadths of green meadow serve to set off the
glitter of its rapid currents and take no great injury from its floods. But
the plough, the harrow, and the drill of the practical Merse farmer are
thrust back out of sight behind the steep ridges that for the most part hem
in either side of its delightful trough. And within these limits, after
breaking from its moorland gorges, the Whiteadder urges its clear waters
through twenty miles of ever-changing and often exquisite river scenery.
Chafing always upon a rocky bed, the river
gathers round it all that fine tangle of foliage which you only see upon
impetuous streams. The orderly atmosphere of the Merse might be a hundred
miles away. Bosky steeps dip a curtain of wild and natural foliage till
their boughs trail in the troubled waters; or again great forest trees of
oak and ash, with roots exposed by the fretting of flood waters, rise on
some level margin of turf that has been abandoned to gorse and broom and
briar. Here and there, too, bare red sandstone cliffs or softer screes wage
continual war at some sharp turn with the rushing amber streams. Stone
bridges carry the highway across the river here and there, giving the
passing traveller with his eyes open a brief glance both up and down stream
into another sort of world, while byways dip into broad glistening fords
with one of those narrow foot-bridges characteristic of the country swung
high on wires above the stream. Many seats of ancient fame, too, are fringed
and beautified by the Whitcadder. Modernised often or rebuilt, but still
quite frequently in possession of families as old as the stones of the
earliest house, while here and there a ruined pele tower above the bank
bears witness, if such were needed, that it ran of old through bloody
ground. Its younger sister, the Blackadder, which joins forces with it in
the heart of the Merse, though not half the size, has already run a long
course through Berwickshire. Entering the lower country near Greenlaw, the
smaller river purls eastward with much of the impetuosity, though only here
and there with as full a measure of beauty, as its more distinguished
fellow. All roads in
the Merse tend to Berwick except the still more numerous ones that lead with
singular precision from one main artery to the other and give the county
some appearance on the map of a chessboard crossed obliquely by two or three
`raving lines heading for the lower right-hand corner. The Merse, using the
term as I am for the low country of Berwickshire, is in truth
extraordinarily well served by roads, and practically all alike are
admirable. Frankly, it is a region to be explored by its roads, just as its
adjoining hills, the Cheviots or the Lammermoors, are for the walker alone.
There is no point in long-distance walking in the Merse, just as there is
nothing to be urged against it for the few who carry the cult of walking to
the daily compassing of long sections of road, when on their holidays. But
as the difficulty nowadays is to find any one in an ordinary company of
young and old willing to face even a twenty-mile walk in the hills, we need
not be concerned for quite unlikely trampers along the roads of the Merse.
For these last, as for the region itself, there is nothing like the cycle
for the individual of reasonably active habit. What else, indeed, is there?
Automobiles of all kinds are invaluable for getting rapidly to points far or
near, but perfectly useless for a rational appreciation of a countryside,
even if they were not ridiculous for such purpose in the case of the young
and strong, and irksome to such as may be no longer young, but are of active
predilections. Trains
are scarce. Excluding the great main line along the coast, there are not
fifty miles of railroad in the whole county, though a portion of the
North-Eastern running south of the Tweed to Kelso is of some service for the
Merse. But the cyclist, with the occasional help, if required, of both
railroads, the one skirting the foot of the Lammermoors to Lauderdale, the
other following Tweed, and so leaving the whole Merse between them, can see
much that is famous and much that is beautiful and a great deal that is
interesting with ease and contentment. I am assuming that Berwick is a
temporary headquarters. For whether the pilgrim comes from the south of
England or the west of Scotland to spend his nights and other spare hours
within the breath of the North Sea at this point, it will assuredly prove a
stimulant to health and vigour that will surprise him if he has never before
sniffed it. Moreover, as has been, I trust, sufficiently manifested in a
former chapter, Berwick is a noble place in its way, and always good to
linger in. But let us
away on the more southerly road from Berwick, that one which eventually
skirts the Coldstream and Birgham reaches of the Tweed. Lifted high up over
the bleak prolific fields of the "Liberties of Berwick," with HaIidon Hill
to the north and beyond the noble river shining in the vale below, the Iine
of distant Cheviots, we descend the long slope, to the last of the
Whiteadder's many bridges. Here around its piles this lusty child of
Lammermoor is playing its final gambols and with plaintive voice singing its
swan-song between meadowy banks. For the meadows open here to the adjacent
Tweed, and through them Tweed's lowest tributary winds to a tide-invaded
confluence. A living Scottish writer of repute has described the
significance of these "Berwick Bounds," these few thousand acres of corn
land windswept from the North Sea, in an
epigrammatic sentence or two that from this
point of view at any rate catches the fancy. "Surely," writes Sir Herbert
Maxwell, "they were but scant counterpoise for sunny Aquitaine and Guienne,
opulent Bordeaux, and the Pas de Calais, all lost to the Crown of England in
the hundred years' war. Such was part of the price paid for the lesson that
Scotsmen may never be coerced." This might serve to chasten the pride of the
Berwick burgess, unless, peradventure, it further exalted it in the high
valuation thus set upon his little kingdom. But we are not yet out of it,
only lingering for a moment in this one leafy and sheltered corner of the
Palatinate. For the boundary is a little beyond the Whiteadder, and that
lively stream undergoes a change of nationality for the last three miles of
her course. Like Tweed, only much more so, a Scottish river, she expires in
English arms. There is an inn beside Canty Bridge, much patronised, no
doubt, by Berwick anglers, who are a numerous company ; and it may be said
at once that there is not a more naturally prolific trout stream in Great
Britain than the Whiteadder.
The old road into Scotland crossed the Bounds a
mile or so higher up, and in a picturesque bend of the river, where it
chafes the feet of woody cliffs, are the traces of Edrington Castle, where
many a bloody fight was fought, but now the haunt of trout-fishers and
sylvan peace. Here were quartered repeatedly companies of Scots with
unfriendly designs on Berwick, and here in times of danger the English
Wardens posted troops to stop the Scottish advance and guard the Liberties.
Close by, too, the Whiteadder runs through "Tibby
Fowler's" Glen, that lady being a heroine of sorts in Border poetry, and
celebrated by Allan Ramsay in a familiar ballad; Tibby was only interesting
for a remarkable combination of material wealth with a poverty of physical
attraction so deplorable as to make the inevitable wooing of the heiress by
the local swains meet subject for the satirist.
"Tibby Fowler
of the Glen,
There's ower mony \vooin' at her;
Tibby Fowler o' the Glen
There's ower mony wooin' at her,
Wooin' at her, pu'in' at her,
Courtin' her and canna get her.
Filthy elf, it's for her pelf
That a' the lads are wooin' at her.
Ten came east and ten came west,
Ten cane rowin' o'er the water,
Twa came down the lane dykeside
There's twa-and-thirty wooin' at her."
But the stronghold was
apparently as impregnable as the stone one on the hill above had been in
former days. And close beside these scenes of strife in love and war stands
Hutton Hall, the ancient keep of the Homes, now enlarged and modernised,
though retaining as a country seat much of its ancient character. It was
here that Edward I. encamped when in 1296 he captured the defiant town of
Berwick and converted it into a shambles. This, however, is drifting a bit
up the valley of the Whiteadder. But Paxton, another former seat of the
Homes, and now a large nineteenth-century house, stands beside our route,
and its profusely timbered park, sloping to the last shallows of the Tweed,
lends great beauty to this final reach of the river before it touches the
tidal mudbanks. Indeed it is worth while turning down the road just beyond
Paxton, that bound for Northumberland brings you in a few hundred yards to
the great Chain or Union Bridge over Tweed. Not because it is, I believe,
the first suspension bridge built in the island, and that, too, by a naval
officer nearly a century ago, but for the fine prospect both up and down the
river with which it will reward your slight effort. Upstream the woods of
Horneliff display a rich curtain of drapery above the English bank, while a
wood-fringed belt of meadow Iand with grazing cattle makes a harmonious
complement upon the opposite shore. Looking downwards, the woods shift to
the Scottish side and become the park lands of Paxton House. But the
luxuriance of the timber is such that only a patch of sward here and there
catches the eye and gives a finishing touch to a quite charming scene, all
sparkling as it is below with the last rapids of the Tweed.
Some angler will probably be casting his flies upon ripple and eddies he
doubtless knows by heart, and is sometimes just where he ought to be, in the
picture. In not many great rivers in this country could you stand but
knee-deep in gravelly shallows among summer woods and catch trout or
grayling within three miles of its conflict with the surf of the open sea.
The influence of the tide, as a matter of fact, is felt far above the Union
Bridge, even to Norham, and the little cobble of the net fisherman, whose
rights follow the tide, may be seen moored to the shore at any point.
But to pursue our road up the river, though
nowhere yet, unfortunately, in actual touch with it, the traveller must find
his interest in the rural economies of the Merse. He must forego for a space
even historical associations—unless he has sat closely at the feet of the
local antiquary, which he is not in the Ieast Iikely to have done—or those
glimpses of an inspiring distance common to most of this Borderland. He must
resign himself, in short, to his foregrounds, and one must admit there is
little in all this country of those ancient habitations for the housing of
men or animals that help to redeem the dullest landscape in the southern
half of the island. The wayfarer who comes north must put any expectations
of such things entirely from his mind, and find his compensation in the grim
relics of an even older day, the castle or the pele tower. There are no
Tudor farms or manor houses, whether of timber, brick, or stone, here, no
mellow homesteads or manors, hardly less engaging, of the days of Anne or
the early Georges; no thatched villages half buried in flowers or orchards;
no public-houses of such alluring sort as to tempt even a temperance orator
with an eye for the picturesque, if the combination is admissible. There are
no crazy barns with moss-covered roofs, and, unfortunately, even but few
churches or portions of them that survived the ravages of the English raider
and the anti-aesthetic vigilance of the reformed Scottish Church. There is
nobody alive, I suppose, who is more severe upon his ancestors than the
modern Scotsman with an artistic soul, while, so far as my own acquaintance
goes, the clergy of the Establishment seem to have scant sympathy with the
architectural predilections of their more immediate predecessors. Yet, once
upon a time Berwickshire was quite rich in Norman and Early English
churches. But much of this will be superfluous to the intelligent reader who
has anything more than a mere nodding acquaintance with his own country. It
is enough to say that a few old country houses on a large scale, the
shattered remnants of castles and pele towers, and here and there the
portion of a church that has miraculously escaped the ravage of the Southron
and the fanatical zeal of the old Calvinist, represent almost all of those
features which in the south so greatly enhance the charm of landscape. But
you must come to the Border in altogether another frame of mind, and if you
are reasonably qualified, great compensation will be found for the
decorative accessories of the southern landscape. As a pele tower would look
absurd at the foot of the South Downs, so would a half-timbered thatched
cottage on the slopes of the Lammermoors seem quite painfully incongruous.
There are ruined castles in the south in abundance, beautiful to look at and
interesting structurally, as well as for the men and women they have
harboured, and occasionally for strenuous doings. But compared with the
Border castle their story is thin and tame. With fierce mien they scowled
over a peaceful, unwarlike peasantry that had no power to resist them, and
had probably lost the wish. The only part of South Britain where you get all
these
things in a measure combined with a past in full
harmony with them is the Welsh Border. That the Border strife of Wales, as
that of two divergent races or their respective allies of the moment,
differed widely in essentials from that of the north, which was the conflict
of politically divided brethren of more equal strength, matters nothing
here. Nor does it that the Welsh Border, qua Border, was at peace and
civilised while the Northerners on both sides were still astir erecting
castles, peles, and bastle houses ; lifting one another's cattle and cutting
one another's throats. Indeed, speaking on broad lines, the same hand that
brought peace with a sword to the one actually stirred up the other to a
bitterer strife. For no apology is needed for again reminding the reader,
either English or Scotch, that till the first Edward appeared upon the scene
there was very little of that ferocious antipathy between the nations which
became henceforward a fierce and fixed tradition. The occasional wars of the
kings and their following, the mere exuberance of a semi-barbarous period,
meant nothing. Even Edward, a great statesman, whatever else he may have
been, at first, no doubt, meant well, when he travelled, on this very road
perhaps, between Berwick and Norham or Birgham, as the invited arbiter
between the chiefs of a distracted country that had not yet become a nation
as we hold the word. His views towards a union were peaceful and surely
statesman-like ones. However, things went agog, as we know. He was a soldier
and a man of wrath, and in the end died at the wrong moment from one point
of view, creating thereby a nation, and provoking three centuries of almost
ceaseless strife. And
in the meantime we have turned off the main road to Kelso, which runs with
precision from one end of the county to the other, while the line of Tweed
forges away to the southward, and after passing the little village of
Horndean and crossing its burn, which in the shallow vale beneath it hurries
to the Tweed, the shattered towers of Norham, high perched up on the English
bank, can be seen in fitful glimpses through the trees. But Norham belongs
to Northumberland—very much so—though, to be precise, the feudal appanage of
the Prince Bishops of Durham, and in its fighting days and indeed till quite
recent ones, an isolated fragment of that county. On this side, however, and
right on the road we have a building of another sort worth coming a long way
to see, and of a quite exceptionally interesting origin. On the battle-field
of Shrewsbury we have a memorial church erected at the time by a subject as
a thanksgiving for victory and for the saying of perpetual masses for the
souls of the. slain. Here at Ladykirk we have a thank-offering of the same
kind erected by a monarch, not for victory, but for preservation from a
watery grave in the Tweed below. This deliverance was in the year 1500, and
how Ladykirk, standing right in the gateway of southern Scotland, escaped
those frightful and successive ravages of Dacre, Surrey, Evers, or Hertford
in the sixteenth century, which left the Abbeys of Kelso, Dryburgh, and
Melrose the pathetic wrecks we see them now, is a marvel.
Not that Ladykirk aspires to such comparison. It
is merely a curious old parish church some hundred feet long and fashioned
of red sandstone, and that, too, in a style calculated to give pause to the
passing stranger with any sort of eye for such matters. Its date may account
for some measure of eccentricity in detail, or ,Tames IV. himself may have
had a hand in the design! But the real interest which attaches to it over
and above that which prompted its erection lies in the mere fact of there
being a pre-Reformation Scottish church actually looking across the Tweed
and still intact, save for some recent pewing, put in, however, for comfort,
not of necessity. There may be a reason for all this, since tradition runs
that the King vowed that this votive offering of his to Our Lady should be a
building that neither fire nor water could destroy. Certain it is that no
particle of wood was used in its erection, for it has a barrel vaulted stone
roof, on which are laid stone flags, and the very Beatings were of stone
till within living memory. The shape is cruciform, the ends of the short
transepts and the chancel being five-sided apsidal. The building is lavish
in strange massive crocketted pinnacles, and in view, I presume, of the
weight of the roof, is heavily buttressed. Around it spreads a green and
shady kirkyard crowded with the tombstones of departed Borderers, many of
which bear ancient dates. It is altogether a peaceful and alluring spot, and
the adjacent hamlet, with its one-storied red-roofed cottages, makes for
harmony; for I must say something of an extenuating nature before I have
done concerning Berwickshire cottages. The noble timber all about it, the
cawing of rooks, the faintly heard complainings of the historic river, the
near neighbourhood of a great castle renowned above all other Border castles
in history and romance; all these combine to make Ladykirk a winsome spot
for a half-hour's dalliance on a summer afternoon.
On my first visit, the church, as is usual in
Scotland, being locked, I was on the point of departing without a sight of
the interior, taking for granted its adaptation to the rather arid
exigencies of Presbyterian worship. But two village matrons of ripe years
and comfortable proportions were opportunely discussing the affairs of the
parish at the gate, and proved to be of the eloquent and accessible sample
of Border peasant as opposed to the other and perhaps more prevalent
uncommunicative type. What was still nicer, they were proud of their church,
and made me feel quite ashamed of being caught, as it were, in the very act
of leaving it but half explored, though, as a matter of fact, it was only a
brief postponement in this case. "It wad be an awfu' pity for ye to gang awa',
sir, wi'out seem' the inside of the kirk—sae mony hundred years old as it
is, tae." Whether she
suspected me of a lingering irresolution, which would have been most unjust,
I know not, but the speaker, or rather one of them, for both were eloquent,
stout as she was, hurried off herself to a neighbouring cottage and returned
with the sexton's, or rather beadle's, blooming daughter, who held the keys
of office, and we all went in together. I have inspected hundreds of
churches under many auspices, and not seldom that of unofficial villagers of
the other sex with the prospect of a glass of beer and notions that are
worth many pints of it, but this was refreshingly novel. I let my cicerones
tell the oft-told tale of the King's escape from the rage of Tweed and his
subsequent act of pious devotion, with some accessories I had never heard
before, in their own way and in their own unalloyed vernacular. The interior
is absolutely plain, but of interest, with its stone roof vaulting, its bare
walls, and lancet windows, as the original building in every essential as
completed by the King's architect.
The thought struck me that the amount of
gunpowder required for the destruction of so massive a building was possibly
a consideration in view of its material emptiness and ecclesiastical
unimportance in the eyes of King Henry's devastators, for which we may be
thankful. For it is a most unique personal memorial of the man who of all
the Stuart line one feels perhaps is the most worthy of remembrance—not,
perhaps, for any perfections of character, but as a king. He had a long
reign, during which Scotland was unprecedentedly progressive. He was very
much of a man, if not distinguished for special wisdom or for restraint He
seems certainly to have possessed no little magnetism, and is generally held
to be the first Scottish King who could lead something like a united nation,
Gaelic and Teutonic, to battle. It is unfortunate that he used this
influence in ill-judged fashion, though in full accord with that evil star
which accentuated the impracticable side of his royal race. But at any rate
he had the saving fortune to die in what at the last was a chivalrous
blunder, and at the head of his troops in the fiercest battle of the long
list fought between England and Scotland. Other Stuarts were brave enough in
action, but they had neither the good fortune to get killed nor assuredly
the exuberant virility, the Homeric dash, that made James's conduct and
death at Flodden go far to extenuate his responsibility for the humiliation
and ruin he brought on a country he certainly loved and had ruled well after
a fashion for thirty years. When at a critical moment in a great battle a
king gets off his horse, pulls off his boots, seizes a spear, and rushes
down on foot upon the foe at the head of, and indeed too much ahead of his
division, and falls fighting amid his nobles, it is at least a magnificent
atonement for one great error of judgment. But a glamour attaches to James
IV. above all other Scottish kings since Bruce. And here, in sight of Norham,
which he besieged and captured at the opening of that brief and fatal
campaign, and in sight of Flodden Hill, when he and it ended, it is
singularly appropriate that his handiwork should survive as his memorial;
still more that it should survive in so acceptable and rare a monument in
these parts as a perfect pre-Reformation church. The first freshness will
hardly have worn off its red stones when James passed down this way with
most of that enormous army of a hundred thousand men that had rallied to his
standard at Edinburgh, and, no doubt, mass was frequently celebrated here
for the Scottish troops during the Flodden campaign. I did not discuss the
complexities of King James's character with the two old ladies, but was
quite content to listen to their rendering of the chief tale, as it had the
flavour at least of oral tradition. One of them, moreover, remembered
sitting as a child upon the stone seats. "Aye, and I mind weel how cauld
they were."
A little beyond this a road runs down to the
stone bridge which crosses Tweed just above Norham. Of this famous place, so
big with memories, I shall say nothing here, as it is on English soil, and
for the further reason that in my recent volume on Northumberland I gave
some pages to it. That famous meeting of 1291. however, when King Edward
decided between the claims of the eight competitors to the throne of
Scotland, was actually held this side the river, in this same parish of
Ladykirk, formerly Upsettlington, and on the meadow lying opposite Norham.
But no one, of; course, visiting these parts fails to visit Norham, and from
Berwick it is but two stations distant on the North-Eastern, with a short
mile walk across the fields to the castle. This with its spacious,
picturesque old village and noble Norman church makes matter for the
spending of a leisurely and delightful day which the enterprising may extend
to Ladykirk. For the Iatter is but a fitting complement to the Norham group
of associations. It belongs essentially to the same atmosphere, and should
share in the day-dreams to which no doubt the properly constituted pilgrim
will he inspired. But whether equipped or not for all that Norham means,
there will surely be some that will remember how a new heaven and a new
earth opened to their youthful fancy upon its sunset-gilded towers, as its
trumpets sounded the approach of Marmion and his first introduction to the
reader. After Ieaving
the church, the road skirts for some distance the broad, well-timbered
policies of Ladykirk House, where nearly a century ago dwelt William
Robertson, one of the fathers of that advanced agriculture, the lessons of
which lie all over the face of the Merse to-day. If the old farming families
of the seventies are not often in situ, to borrow an antiquarian phrase, and
have been wiped out by misfortune, actual or prospective, in the parlous
times of the eighties and after and by the permanent slump in grain, their
successors under altered circumstances maintain their traditions. In the
days of my youth wheat held a great place in the Merse. To-day barley has
almost ousted it, and one might, I think, fairly say that it fills nearly
twice the amount of the space more generally allotted to it in a tillage
country with an equal capacity for growing the three standard grain crops. I
have never in my life seen so much barley, and so much of it on such a high
level anywhere in Great Britain as in Berwickshire. How it may now fare with
brewers and distillers struggling against heavy odds remains to be seen. An
encouraging note for the brewer, however, comes from the local publican, who
reports an increasing taste for what was once as much the national beverage
of Scotland as of England. Not many readers will probably remember that it
was England forced Scotland to drink whisky by ruining the Scottish
breweries, not intentionally, but automatically, when the northern country
at the Union fell under the excise laws of the predominant partner, which
destroyed their native brewing industry and promoted a taste for ardent
spirits. No one can possibly desire that working men should drink whisky,
above all the vile stuff that Scotland, once conspicuous for a good article
even in its humbler hostelries, now vies with England in retailing. But good
ale is a fine and wholesome beverage for men employed in manual labour. No
temperance zealots will persuade a man of sense that lashings of stewed tea
of an inferior quality is a better prescription for breeding sound men and
Christians than sound ale. Nor, again, is the public-house anything like the
frequent object of the wayside here that it is in rural England. You may
travel for miles without encountering one. The wayfarer who perchance, like
the present writer, prefers the homely fare and shelter of an inn and a
crack with mine host, to a packet of sandwiches under a fence, will find
many a blank before him. Nor has opportunity created the habit of
frequenting the public-house in the evening and discussing the affairs of
the nation, of the squire, and of their employers to anything like the
extent prevailing iri the south. Furthermore, there are not nearly so many
villages in a rural district of the same population: most of the labourers'
cottages being attached to the homestead, a condition which applies also to
Northumberland.
In no long time our road,
which is now only a superior byway, emerges from the beautifully wooded
policies of Milne Graden on to the banks of Tweed. It is a delectable and
even sequestered point in the river's course; yet one of some consequence
too, for just here the "sullen Till," after its long, tortuous windings
through broad haughs from Wooler to the foot of Flodden edge, comes breaking
with unwonted activity through Twizel woods into the Tweed. It is a scene
worthy of the confluence of all the waters of the English Cheviots with
those of the greater river still at this point the boundary of the nations.
The familiar apostrophe of Tweed to Till, which banters the Northumbrian
stream on its comparative sloth, and the grim rejoinder one might expect of
a river steeped in Border conflict speaking to another of like memories,
that it has "drowned twa men to Tweed's ane," needs no repeating. But the
jest must be taken as retrospective, for here the Till, bearing with it the
peaty waters of the Colledge, the Langdon, the Wooler, and half-a-dozen
other lusty burns from the deep heart of Cheviot, comes pouring in with
laudable impetuosity. Tweed herself, too, is here in one of her lively
moods, rioting merrily round grassy islets to the junction whence the
mingled waters go racing down against the red sandstone cliffs of Milne
Graden, to vanish in the bosky woods beyond. The single stone arch over the
Till, which the right wing of Surrey's army crossed to Flodden, is here
hidden from view, though but a short mile up the woody gorge. So following
up the course of Tweed along a little-travelled road, the ruinous church and
large graveyard of Lennel, perched high between the road and river, mark the
near approach of the town of Coldstream.
Lennel is the old kirk town of Coldstream, which
last, leaving the other derelict, sprang into life some two centuries ago,
half a mile away. There is nothing now at Lennel but the forsaken church and
its rambling, picturesque graveyard packed with the headstones and monuments
of Logans, Thomsons, Lumsdens, Halls, Robertsons, Scotts, and all the
generic names of the Eastern March. The small villages, which in former days
must have been thick in this country, have largely disappeared. The minister
of Coldstream, writing in
1832, makes note that four had been completely
wiped out in this very parish. According to that invaluable work, The
Statistical Account of Scotland, published some eighty years ago, and
replete with much better reading than its name suggests, agricultural
holdings had doubled in size, and though the labouring classes had decreased
in number, they had enormously improved in circumstances and education
within the previous forty years. Emigration to Canada is mentioned from many
sources in these south-eastern counties as a strong contributing cause to
this decline in population, which was further assisted by the merging of
small holdings in big ones and the growth of scientific farming.
But let there be no misdirected, ill-instructed
lamentations over this steady stream from southern Scotland, which so
materially helped to build up the great province of Ontario as we see it
to-day. These were no Highland "clearances," nor anything at all resembling
the mad expulsion of Scotch-Ulster yeomen by idiotic landlords and fatuous
Anglican bishops to America in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, it
was the golden age of the hard-fisted, industrious emigrant to Canada. This
period extended roughly from 1820 to 1850, and no class in Britain profited
more by it than the labourer from the Scottish Low- lands. The splendid
wheat lands of Ontario were then being cleared, and still to be had on
conditions which a thrifty Scotsman, even when virtually penniless on
landing, sooner or later found means, for labour was highly paid, to take
advantage of. I may claim to speak with some knowledge from the Canadian
point of view of this movement. Thousands of Canadians, not merely yeomen
farmers, but as many who have risen to the more lucrative and conspicuous
spheres of life, are the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of Scottish
hinds. This is, of course, a matter of ordinary common knowledge to any one
in touch with such things. Nor were the fortunate Scotsmen who profited by
the opening of Canada as a field for the British immigrant, after the
Napoleonic and Anglo-American wars, by any means all hinds and the like.
But these were the people who by comparison rose
most in the world and so profited most. Their friends who remained behind
were then and have always been, within the limitations of farm service, as
well-to-do probably as any in the country. The reports from almost every
parish in south-eastern Scotland in the thirties describe the social,
religious, and industrial condition of its people as excellent. But even
thus, if there is any of that mawkish compassion which the sentimentalist of
the Little-England type likes to lavish indiscriminately on the humbler
exile, to be expended here, it would be on account of those who remained,
not because they were miserable, but that they missed their chance of rising
in the world. It may be said that they have had another since the north-west
of Canada was opened, and with no forests to clear as a preliminary. That is
true, though there are other things in favour of the early movement—which
the reader may be surprised to hear landed forty or fifty thousand people
annually in sailing-ships at Quebec—of no interest here. Moreover, the rural
population, from its greater numbers and other causes, was more ripe for
emigration in those days. Incidentally, the British emigrants that took so
large a share in the making of Canada after the Napoleonic wars were a more
capable and more successful lot than those who have played proportionately a
much smaller part in the recent making of the North-West ; partly for the
sufficient reason that the old-timers came mainly from the land, while among
the moderns the townsmen naturally enough, in a country rapidly degenerating
into an industrial hive, predominate. It is pleasant to remember that on an
early and protracted visit to Canada I came across several of the original
emigrants from this part of the world, by that time old men with grown-up
families around or near them, all living comfortably on well-ordered,
productive farms of their own, amid a practically completed civilisation.
The forest of suggestive tombstones in Lennel
churchyard must be my apology for this digression, which probably would not
have occurred but for an exhaustive survey of them in the performance of a
friendly office—to wit, the reporting on the condition of certain tombs of
which I had forgotten the situation. Here indeed is an instance of another
kind of change, the wiping out in a local sense of a typical Border family
of small lairds, large tenant farmers, soldiers, ministers, and such like,
gradually loosening from the soil with each generation, till now, though
represented in most other countries, there is actually, I believe, not one
on the Border; two fresh graves in a kirkyard not far away representing the
last survivors here. Coldstream, a long mile beyond, is what old Leland
would have called "a pratey toune." We are too far north for the
architecturally picturesque, and its buildings have no claim to antiquity,
but it wears a cheerful mien, which cannot, in truth, be said of all
Scottish towns. And it standswell up on a ridge, beneath which Tweed comes
curving round from Wark in a fine sweep, and racing briskly under the five
arches of the stone bridge now well advanced in its second century, which
unites the kingdoms. Coldstream Bridge, though less known to later fame,
seems to have played much the same matrimonial role in the past as Lamberton
Toll Bar and Gretna Green. One can fancy how desirable a second string to
the enamoured fugitives' bow it must have been in the event of a close
pursuit. A turn off the road, for instance, between Alnwick and Berwick,
with a cut across to Coldstream, might effectually baffle the parental
greyhounds, and cause them to overrun the scent for some distance if no
informing wayfarers were handy. At any rate, that communicative minister at
Coldstream to whom I am already indebted declares that these runaway English
marriages performed by any chance scoundrel were becoming a cause of
stumbling among7)his own and other flocks. For many of his people now
discarded the Church's assistance at their unions, and under the literal
construction of the then Scottish law resorted to Coldstream Bridge and the
services of the loafer for the price of a gill of whisky. Another blemish on
the otherwise Arcadian content and simplicity of the Lowland folk in those
days was caused by the difference between the Scottish and English spirit
duties and the irresistible temptation to smuggling such an anomaly held out
upon the Border. Perhaps the conscience of England was still pricking with
the memory of the ruined Scotch breweries and its lamentable consequence.
But, on the other hand, would Burns have sparkled on small ale? And how
would the Ettrick Shepherd, who, by his own account, took his whisky in a
jug, have liked it? The
house upon the street or its successor is proudly pointed out by the native
of Coldstream where General Monk's recruiting sergeants raised the Border
regiment which, after a few years' service in Scotland, went south at the
Restoration and became the Coldstream Guards. Beyond the town at the foot of
the slope the little river Leet crosses the road and runs down into the
Tweed, which by a sudden loop encloses the woods and park-lands of Lees
House, the seat of the Marjoribanks, to one of whom a lofty memorial statue
rises above the town. The Leet is a notable exception among the Merse
tributaries of the Tweed, being of sluggish habit and undistinguished
low-country birth, and would be spoken of in even more slighting terms than
it is by local chroniclers if it were not that larger trout haunt its narrow
waters than those of any other feeder of the Tweed.
From the road a mile or so beyond Coldstream the
long, flat reach of the Tweed, carrying a swift but even current between the
meadows, breaks into view. So on the southern shore does the knoll which
carries the trifling remains of the once mighty castle of Wark, equal,
indeed, to Norham in importance, with the rather forlorn-looking village
scattered around its flanks. Wark, like Norham, would fill a chapter with
stormy deeds that have been done there and the men of might that have held
or attacked it. As at Norham, there were fords about `dark and Coldstream
which have felt the tramp of many an English and Scottish army and have
swallowed up many a bloodstained and failing fugitive from the surrounding
battlefields. Here we look across a bare broken foreground of moorish hill
and dale rising gradually to the great mass of the Cheviots, eight or ten
miles away, where at their highest point, some 2700 feet, the international
border line cleaves the waste. For about this point the Tweed makes her bow
to the Cheviots, and at the same time, taking a more westerly turn, soon
after ceases to be the Border line, and becomes henceforth a purely Scottish
stream. Indeed I have failed to emphasise how greatly the Cheviots at points
innumerable contribute to this road journey up Tweed along the southern
fringe of Berwickshire. But everywhere in this country, whether in the
Lammermoors, in the Merse, or in the wide sweeps of north Northumberland,
they are always with us, a noble and majestic background shedding lustre,
even when far away, on many a homely foreground scene. And when pressing to
closer quarters, as at this bend of Tweed, where they become more dominant
in the atmosphere and display the colouring and the contour of their shapely
slopes, the grey screes and fern-clad folds of their bold rampart of
cone-shaped foot-hills, the wayfaring stranger will assuredly feel their
call to greater intimacy. This, happily, is no difficult matter, whether
from Berwick, Coldstream, or Kelso, for a morning train to Wooler will
deposit him within a seven-mile walk of the summit of the big Cheviot, the
monarch of the range, a walk as easy of performance as it is beautiful for
its scenery and its solitude. But in the Coldstream neighbourhood the eye
turns instinctively and repeatedly to the fir-crowned ridge of Flodden, but
four miles away, and its adjoining shoulder of Branxton, on whose long slope
the battle was actually fought. What a sight the fords of Wark and
Coldstream must have witnessed upon the night and following morn of that
fatal day! But happily there were no cutting and slashing horsemen at their
heels, as there seem to have been in the great stampede from Iiomildon Hill,
whose clear-cut, bare steep rises beyond Flodden, for after the greater
battle there was no pursuit. Night fell upon victors as exhausted as the
vanquished
"The skilful Surrey's
sage commands
Led back from strife his shattered bands,
And from the charge they drew
As mountain waves from wasted lands
Sweep back to ocean blue."
And even more to the point is
Sir Walter's brief but striking picture of the action of the Scots
"They melted from the
field as snow,
When streams are swollen and south winds blow,
Dissolves in silent dew.
Tweed's echoes heard the ceaseless splash,
While many a broken band,
Disordered, through her currents dash,
To gain the Scottish land.
To town and tower, to down and dale,
To tell red Flodden's fatal tale.
Still from the sire the son shall hear
Of the stern strife and carnage drear
Of Flodden's fatal field,
Where shivered was fair Scotland's spear
And broken was her shield."
There was a nunnery in those
days at Coldstream, now disappeared to the last stone, but tradition has it
that the Abbess exerted herself to gather for burial there such few bodies
of the Scottish nobility as could be rescued from the thousands of naked
corpses that whitened the slopes of Branxton Ridge when the despoilers had
done their nightly work. As that of the King himself could not be
identified, since there were no Scottish prisoners, till Dacre, who had
known him, came on the scene, the beneficent efforts of the Abbess must have
encountered no little difficulty. The men of the Merse, under their feudal
chieftain, the Earl of Home, with the other Borderers from Selkirk and
Ettrick Forest in that division, played at once the greatest and the least
part in all that Scottish host. For it will be remembered how upon that left
wing they overthrew at first the English right and gained the only success
of the day, and, though checked by Dacre and his English Borderers, were
never beaten. After this, though the fight was still young, the less said
about them the better, and indeed there is nothing to say. Specialists, of
which there are naturally many on such an epoch-making and dramatic
campaign, still vainly speculate on the motives which kept 10,000 hardy
Borderers idle at so tremendous a moment. General opinion, however, seems
inclined to the only apparent explanation, which may be expressed in the
single word "booty." The Borderer, like the Highlander, was more of a
particularist even thus late than a Nationalist, and like the other,
"portable property" was with him the natural sequence of success. When the
main battle in the centre was probably assuming its most critical and
tempestuous aspect, when the English left had driven the raw Highland right
off the field and joined in the great central struggle, the then of the
Merse and the Border were undoubtedly leaving things undone they ought to
have done, which was to assist their King. Whether they were actively
engaged in doing what they ought not to have done, and rifling the
undefended baggage and the dead bodies of friend and foe, nobody will ever
know. A fit of the spleen on the Earl of Home's part, the only alternative
solution to the problem, was bruited about at the time, but seems to find
little favour now. But what is most disconcerting under the searchlight of
the ruthless inquirer, the "Flowers of the Forest," the Borderers of
Jedburgh and Selkirk, who were under Home, could assuredly not have been "wede
away," being in fact the only division of the Scottish army who left the
field tolerably intact.
For four hundred years the field of Flodden, or,
to be precise, the broad breast of Branxton Hill, which rises gently from
the little church and village of that name, has borne no trace nor memorial
of the immortal fight; nor even in this later century of travel and aroused
interest in such things has it achieved the faintest self-consciousness of
being anything more than a secluded north-easterly slope of arable land
given over to the four-course system. A few stray people now and again, or
an occasional local historical society, have doubtless kept the memory of
this field green among half-wondering villagers who ploughed and reaped it.
Yet there is not a battlefield in Great Britain more compact, more
suggestive, and more illuminating, and there has never been a more dramatic
fight. From the belt of timber that now crosses the ridge and marks the
centre of the Scottish array and the King's position, you can follow down
the line of Surrey's advanced division, which, carrying out his daring
tactics, marched down the Till valley to Twizell Bridge, and, doubling back
on the nearer bank, joined the main body in locked array at the foot of
Branxton slope. From this same ridge the Tweed shimmers in the middle
distance, and the Merse beyond spreads to the Lammermoors, and the
Lammermoors fade away to the horizon, behind which lies Edinburgh. The slope
on the right is close at hand up which Stanley and his Lancashire and
Cheshire archers drove the unaccustomed highlanders of Lennox and Huntly out
of the fight. The half-seen, steeper declivity on the left, down which and
over the flat below the mysterious Horne and his Borderers drove their
victorious charge, is within a few hundred yards. Lastly, and in mid-view,
trends gently downwards that fatal slope where by far the greatest shock of
battle, with its long, desperate finish, churned to mud the rain-soaked,
sticky soil. A small enough arena the whole of it for a melee of seventy or
eighty thousand men! But the mute, unconscious look of the field has at last
been justifiably broken. Though Flodden, unlike Hastings or Bannockburn or
Naseby, or even Tewkesbury or Bosworth, was fought for no object worth
mentioning, and was in truth little more than a gigantic Border raid of a
whole nation met and defeated, it has run down the ages with a grim
fascination entirely its own, and the men on both sides of the Border have
felt that it was full time some token should be set up on a spot of such
world-renown and imperishable fame. So an obelisk now rises upon the knoll
where King James is thought to have fallen in the very thick of the
hurly-burly. It was unveiled in the September of 1910, before a large
company of Englishmen and Scotchmen; and since it commemorates an event
obviously too famous, and even too pathetic, for conventional inscriptive
lettering, it bears on its face the simple words:
TO THE BRAVE OF BOTH NATIONS |
