Highways and Byways in the Border

Then broke out a din truly infernal. Picketed horses, mad with terror, strained back on their head-ropes, and breaking loose, stampeded through the camp, trampling over the recumbent forms of men wearied and even yet but halt-awake, many of the younger among them more than ready to share the panic of their horses. If the tale be not exaggerated, daylight showed an army deprived of its transport animals, its horsemen compelled to foot it, their steeds the prey of the wily Scots; a baggageless force compelled to fall back in disorder across Tweed.

In this part of Berwickshire you may still faintly trace here and there the outline of a ditch and earthen rampart called Herrits Dyke, which, local tradition says, once ran from Berwick inland to near Legerwood on Leader Water, – a work not dis-similar to the Catrail, (which cuts across something like fifty miles of the Border, from Peel Fell in the Cheviots to Torwoodlee on Gala), but without the double wall of Catrail. There are various sections of defensive works of this nature in the Border – if they were defensive, for instance, on the hill less than half a mile from the old castle of Holydean, near St. Boswells, in Roxburghshire, there is a particularly well-marked ditch and double rampart running for some distance across the moor. It can scarcely be a continuation of Herrits Dyke, for its construction is different, and its course must run almost at a right angle to Herrits, which is, indeed, many miles away from Holydean. This ditch points almost directly towards Torwoodlee, but it is out of the accepted Catrail track, unless the latter, instead of stopping at Torwoodlee, (as one has been taught), turned sharply and swept down the vale-of Gala, and once more crossed Tweed. It is curious, if these works are defensive, that no ancient weapons have ever been found in or near them.

Down the water a few miles from Blackcastle Rings stands the little town of Greenlaw, a settlement which dates from very early times, but not on its present site. Originally the village stood about a mile and a half to the south east, on the isolated green "law" or hill from which it takes its name. The history of the present town goes no farther back than the end of the seventeenth century, a date about contemporaneous with that of its Market Cross, which stands now on the west side of the place. This cross is said to have been erected by Sir Patrick Home of Polwarth (afterwards created Earl of March-mont) in the year 1696. In 1829 it was pulled down, to make room for something else – in the maddening fashion that possessed our ancestors of the period – and, in the usual manner, it was chucked aside as "auld world trash." In 1881, however, the cross, or at least the greater part of it, minus the top, which originally bore a lion rampant, was discovered in the basement of the old church tower, and was then re-erected where it now stands.

Still farther down the river is the Roman camp at Chesters. But even as long ago as 1798, the writer of the Statistical Account of the Parish of Fogo complained that the old camp was "very much defaced," and that the stones had mostly been "removed to make room for the plough." The rage for agricultural improvement was in 1798 but in extreme infancy; and as no Society for the preservation of ancient monuments came into existence for many a long year afterwards, and interest in such things was confined to the very few, it is safe to infer that not a great deal of this camp now exists.

From Chesters to Marchmont is but a step. Marchmont House dates from about 1754, and was built by the third Earl of Marchmont, near the site of Redbraes, the residence of his grandfather, that Sir Patrick Home of Polwarth who erected the cross in Greenlaw. The village and church of Polwarth are at no great distance. The original church was consecrated in the tenth century, and was restored in 1378, from which date it stood till 1703, when Sir Patrick Home (then Earl of Marchmont) rebuilt it. In the family vault of this church, Sir Patrick lay in hiding for several weeks in 1684, when the search for him was hot and discovery would have cost him his head. The secret of his whereabouts was known to three persons – to his wife, his daughter Grisell (whose name as Lady Grisell Baillie, lives still in the affectionate remembrance of the Scottish Border), and to Jamie Winter, a faithful retainer. Grisell Home, then a girl of eighteen, during all the time of his concealment contrived, with very great risk and difficulty, to convey food to her father in his gruesome lodging. Each night, she slipped stealthily from the house, and – sorest trial of all to the nerves of an imaginative Scot, – made her cautious way in the darkness across the "bogle" – haunted churchyard to her father's lair. Many a shift were she and her mother put to in order to get food sufficient for their prisoner without rousing suspicion among the servants, and more than once the situation was all but given away by the innocent hut embarrassing comments of young and irresponsible members of the family. Sometimes the servants cannot have been present at meals, one would think; or else they smelt a rat, and were discreetly blind. One day at dinner, Grisell had with careful cunning succeeded in smuggling an entire sheep's head off the dish on to her own lap, thence presently to be borne surreptitiously from the room, when her young brother, with the maddening candour and persistency of childhood, called the company's attention to his sister's prodigious appetite, which not only enabled her to gobble up in next to no time so much good meat, but even rendered her able to make the very bones vanish.

But the scent at length began to grow hot; they had nearly run the fox to his earth. Suspicion hovered over the neighbourhood of the church, and no longer could the vault be deemed even a moderately safe hiding place. A new den was necessary; and a new den was found, one perhaps even more cramped than the old quarters, if a trifle less insanitary. A large deal box was made by the faithful Jamie Winter, and was secretly conveyed into a cellar at Redbraes, of which Lady Home kept the key. But to get the "muckle kist" snugly into its resting place, it was necessary to scrape away the earthen floor of the cellar under the flooring hoards, so that the box might be entirely hidden when the boards were re-laid. This work could not be done with pick and shovel, lest the noise should betray what was going on. Grisell, therefore, and Jamie Winter literally with their own hands carried out the arduous job; the earth was scraped away, and poor Grisell Home's nails had almost entirely disappeared ere the work wyas finished and the hiding place made ready for her father. It was scarcely an ideal place of concealment; water oozed in so quickly that one night when Sir Patrick was about to descend into his narrow lodging, it was found that the bedding on which he was used to lie was afloat. And, with its other drawbacks, it had not even the advantage, as a hiding place, of being above suspicion. Had it not been, indeed, for the presence of mind of a kinsman and namesake, Home of Halyburton, a party of dragoons had certainly captured Sir Patrick one day. But Halyburton's liquor was good, and after their thirty mile march from Edinburgh, the temptation to wet their whistle could not be resisted. It did not take long, but it was long enough; a groom on a fast, powerful horse slipped away over the moor to Redbraes, bearing with him no word of writing, but a letter addressed to Lady Home, of which the contents were nothing but a feather, – a hint sufficiently well understood. Ere the dragoons arrived at Redbraes, Sir Patrick was clear away and well on the road to the coast and Holland, and safety.

As we travel down Blackadder towards its junction with the Whitadder, about equidistant between the two rivers we come to the only town of any importance in the district – Duns, or Dunse as it used, not very appropriately, to be spelled from 1740 to 1882, in which latter year the ancient spelling was revived. The original hamlet or settlement stood on the Dun or Law which adjoins the present town. But Hertford wiped that pretty well out of existence in 1545, as he wiped out many another stronghold and township in the south of Scotland. What was left of the place soon fell into utter decay and ruin, and a new settlement on the present site, then guarded On three sides by a more or less impassable swamp, sprung up in 1588. Duns is one of several places which claim the honour of having been the birthplace of the learned Duns Scotus (1265-1338), but even though she be unable quite to substantiate this claim, her record of worthy sons is no short one. And was not that woman, famed in the seventeenth century, she who was possessed of an evil spirit which caused her, an illiterate person, to talk fluently in the Latin tongue, a native of Duns! The Privy Council Record, under date 13th July, 1630, contains an order for bringing before it Margaret Lumsden, "the possessed woman in Duns," along with her father-in-law and her brother, that order might be taken in the case, "as the importance and nature of such a great cause requires." A fast for her benefit was even proposed by sundry clergymen; interest in her case was acute and widespread. Twenty-nine years later, an account of the circumstances was written by the Earl of Lauderdale, and was published in Baxter's "Certainty of the World of Spirits." Lord Lauderdale was a schoolboy in 1630, but he was accustomed to hear the case very fully discussed by his father and the minister of Duns, the latter of whom, at least, firmly believed that the woman was possessed by an evil spirit. The Earl wrote as follows to Baxter: "I will not trouble you with many circumstances; one only I shall tell you, which I think will evince a real possession. The report being spread in the country, a knight of the name of Forbes, who lived in the north of Scotland, being come to Edinburgh, meeting there with a minister of the north, and both of them desirous to see the woman, the northern minister invited the knight to my father's house (which was within ten or twelve miles of the woman), whither they came, and next morning went to see the woman. They found her a poor ignorant creature, and seeing nothing extraordinary, the minister says in Latin to the knight: 'Nondum audivimus spiritum loquentem.' Presently a voice comes out of the woman's mouth: 'Andis loquentem, audis loquentem.' This put the minister into some amazement (which I think made him not mind his own Latin); he took off his hat, and said: 'Misereatur Deus peccatoris!' The voice presently out of the woman's mouth said: 'Dic peccatricis, dic peccatricis'; whereupon both of them came out of the house fully satisfied, took horse immediately, and returned to my father's house at Thirlestane Castle, in Lauderdale, where they related this passage. This I do exactly remember. Many more particulars might be got in that part of the country; but this Latin criticism, in a most illiterate ignorant woman, where there was no pretence to dispossessing, is enough, I think." It was, of course, an infallible sign of demoniac possession that the victim, mostly an illiterate person, should break out into Latin or Greek, Hebrew or what not. That was how the devil usually betrayed himself; he could by no means control his weakness for talking – generally very badly – in foreign tongues.

The wonders of Duns in the seventeenth century by no means ceased, however, with this demon-possessed Margaret Lumsden. In 1639, when Leslie camped on Duns Law with the Covenanting army and its superfluity of ministers, there occurred a remarkable land-slide which the excited imaginations of those witnessing its effects could not fail to interpret as an assured sign that Providence meant to fight on their side. A bank on the slope of the hill near to the camp slid down, – it had probably become water-logged as the result of heavy rain. – disclosing "innumerable stones, round, for the most part, in shape, and perfectly spherical… like ball of all sizes, from a pistol to fixed pieces, such as sakers or robenets, or battering pieces upwards." Men looked on them with awe, and bore about with them specimens in their pockets, gravely showing them to excited throngs. "Nor wanted there a few who interpreted this stone magazine at Duns Hill as a miracle, as if God had sent this by ane hid providence for the use of the Covenanters."

We return now to Tweed, where on a steep slope stand the mighty ruins of Norham Castle, guarding the ford; we all know the scene, castle and ford in the gloaming, from Turner's beautiful plate in Liber Studiorum. Bishop Flambard of Durham built the castle to bridle the wild Scots, in 1121; some twenty years later it was taken, under David; but the eastern side shows the remains of the warlike prelate's work. "The Norman Keep still frowns across the Merse," and few of the castles of the age of chivalry display more of their ancient strength than Norham. Yet it yielded promptly to James IV. in the first week of the campaign which closed in the terrible defeat of Flodden Edge. In this castle, in the Lent of 1200, William the Lion kept his fast on fourteen kinds of fish, including salmon; he certainly "spelled his fasts with an e." While Berwick yielded to the Scots in the dark days of Edward II., good Sir Thomas de Grey, of that ancient Northumbrian house, held Norham stoutly, with pretty circumstances of chivalry, as his son tells in Scalacronica.

Over against Norham is Ladykirk, with its ancient church, dedicated, tradition says, by James IV. to the Virgin Mary, in gratitude for his narrow escape from death here when fording the swollen Tweed. A field to the east of the village shows some, remains of military works, ramparts for guns probably, from which to fire on Norham. In a line between this spot and the castle there was found in the river a stone cannon-ball, fifty-seven inches in girth, probably one fired from "Mons Meg" when she was here in 1497.

Following the light bank of Tweed we reach Carham burn, where Malcolm II. won Lothian in battle; from Carham to the sea the right bank is English. The next important tributary on the English side, as we ascend the stream is Till, formed by Bowmont and Breamish Waters, which rise in the "Cheeviots," as the Scots pronounce the name.

"T weed says to Til''What gars ye rin sae still?'Says Till to Tweed,'Though ye run wi' speed,And I rin slaw,Whaur ye droon ae man,I droon tw'a.'"

The ominous rhyme sounds with the slow lap of the green-grey waters of Till among her alders, and appears to hint at the burden of the ruinous fight of Flodden.

On August 22nd, James IV., "a fey man," kept his plighted word to France, which Henry VIII. was invading, and led the whole force of Highlands and Lowlands across the Border. He made his quarters at Ford Castle, where he did not, as legend says, dally with Lady Heron, still less did his young son, the Archbishop of St. Andrews, fleet the time carelessly with her daughter. James cleared his position by capturing Wark (now scarcely visible in ruin), Chillingham, and Eital castles.

Surrey with the English levies, including the Stanleys, sent a challenge from Alnwick. On September 3rd, the Scots are said to have wrecked Ford Castle, now a substantial and comfortable home, still containing the king's rooms. James crossed the Till by a bridge at Ford, as the tourist also does, if he wishes to see the field of the famous battle. We climb to the crest of Flodden Edge; look south to the wooded hills beyond the Till, and northwards note three declivities like steps in a gigantic staircase.

The Scots were well provisioned, and should easily have held the hill-crest against Surrey's way-worn and half-starved mutinous men.

They pitched their camp on the wide level of Wooler haugh, six miles to the right of Flodden; and on this plain Surrey challenged James to meet him, "a fair field and no favour." For once chivalry gave place to common sense in James's mind: "he would take and keep his ground at his own pleasure." But he neglected his scouting, though he had hundreds of Border riders under Home, who should never have lost touch of Surrey. That wily "auld decrepit carl in a chariot" as Pitscottie calls him, disappeared; James probably thought that he was retiring to Berwick. Really, he was throwing himself, unseen, on James's line of communication with the north: he camped at Barmoor wood, and then recrossed Till by Twizel bridge. Scott, in Marmion and elsewhere, blames the king for failing to see this manouvre and discuss Surrey before his men could deploy after crossing by Twizel bridge and at Millford. But Twizel bridge you cannot see from Flodden Edge; Sir Walter had forgotten the lie of the ground. Unseen, the English crossed and formed, advancing from the north towards the second of the three great steps in the declivity, called Branxton hill. In the early evening, Angli se ostentant, the English come into view. In place of holding his ground, which he is said to have entrenched, James yielded to his impetuous temper, fired his camp, and his men throwing off their boots, for the ground was wet and slippery, rushed down to the Branxton plateau.

"The haggis, Cott pless her, could charge down a hill," like Dundee's men at Killiecrankie, but the expected impetus must have been lost before James's Highlanders under Lennox and Argyll, his right wing, could come to sword-strokes. James's right, in addition to the clans, had a force led by d'Aussi and Both well, with whom may have been the ancestors of John Knox, as the Reformer told the wild Earl, Queen Mary's lover. The main body, the centre, under the flower of Scottish noblesse, were with the king; who "always fought before he had given his orders," says Ayala, the ambassador of Spain. His left was led by Crawford and Errol; his extreme left by Huntly with the gay Gordons; and Home with his Border spears, mounted men. The English front appears to have been "refused" so that Edward Howard was nearest to Home, and, slanting back wards to the right of James, were the forces of Edmund Howard, the Admiral, the Constable, Dacre, Surrey with the rear, and the large body of Cheshire and Lancashire, led by Stanley.

The Admiral sent a galloper to bring Surrey forward; and Home and Huntly charged Edward Howard, while Dacre's Tyneside men ran, as he advanced to support Howard. The Borderers, fond of raiding each other, could never be trusted to fight each other in serious war; they were much intermarried. Brian Tunstal fell, Dacre stopped Huntly; Home's men vanished like ghosts, no man knew whither; for they appeared on the field next morning. Probably they were plundering, but "Down wi' the Earl o' Home," says the old song of the Souters of Selkirk. In the centre of the vanguard the Admiral and the Percys clashed with Crawford and Errol. Both leaders fell, and James threw the weight of his centre against Surrey. To slay that general with his own hand was the king's idea of the duty of a leader. But the English guns mowed down his ranks, and the Scots could not work their French artillery. The king pressed in with Herries and Maxwell at his side; the ranks of England reeled, but the Admiral and Dacre charged James's men in flank. "Stanley broke Lennox and Argyll" on the king's right; the noble leaders fell, and the nimble Highlanders rapidly made a strategic movement in the direction of safety. Stanley did not pursue them, but fell on James's right, which now had the enemy on each flank and in front.

"The stubborn spearmen still made goodTheir dark impenetrable wood"

under a rain of arrows, against the charging knights, and the terrible bill strokes of the English infantry.

The king was not content to remain within the hedge of spears. Running out in advance, he fought his way to "within a lance's length" of Surrey, so Surrey wrote; his body was pierced with arrows, his left arm was half severed by a bill-stroke, his neck was gashed, and he fell. James was not a king to let his followers turn his bridle-rein; he fought on foot, like a Paladin, and died with honour. His nobles advanced; the spears defended the dead, and the bodies of thirteen of his peers and of two Bishops who, like Archbishop Turpin at Roncesvaux, died in harness, lay round him. An episcopal ring with a great sapphire, found at Flodden, is in the Gold Room at the British Museum.

Such was the great sorrow of Scotland; there is perhaps not a family of gentle blood in the Lowlands which did not leave a corpse on Branxton slope, where

"Groom fought like noble, Squire like Knight,As fearlessly and well."

As matter of plain history, this honourable defeat was to my country what, as matter of legend, the rear-guard action of Roncesvaux has been to France. It was too late in literary times for an epic like the Chanson de Roland; the burden of the song was left for the author of Marmiott. But Flodden, till my own boyhood, left its mark on Scottish memories. When any national trouble befell us, people said, "There has been nothing like it since Flodden."

My friend the late Lord Napier and Ettrick told me that when his father took him to Flodden in his boyhood, tears stood n the eyes of the senior.

This is the difference between us of the north, and you of the south. Along the Border line, my heart, so to speak, bleeds at Halidon and Homildon hills, where our men made a frontal attack, out-flanked on either hand by lines of English archers, and left heaps as high as a lance's length, of corpses on corpses, (as at Dupplin); but an Englishman passes Bannock burn "more than usual calm," and no more rejoices on the scene of the victories ol his ancestors, than he is conscious of their defeats. Pinkie is nothing to him, and a bitter regret to us! Dunbar to him means nothing; to us it means the lost chance which should have been a certainty, of annihilating Cromwell's force. Our preachers ruined our opportunity, bidding Leslie go down, in accordance with some Biblical text, from his safe and commanding position, after they had purged our army of the Royalist swords.

Surrey "had his bellyful" at Flodden. In Edinburgh which was hastily erected. But the English general had enough, and withdrew southwards. I visited Flodden Edge on my return from the west of Ireland, where I found the living belief in Fairies. I picked up a trifle of the faith at Flodden. The guide, a most intelligent elderly man, named Reidpath, told me this yarn: "A woman came to my brother," (I knew that he meant a woman of the Faery), "and told him to dig in such a place. He would find a stone, below it a stone pillar; and another stone, and beneath it a treasure. My brother and my father dug, found the stone, and the pillar, and the stone below – but no treasure!" Probably you will not find even this last trace of the fairy belief on the Border, but, from notes of my grandfather, it was not quite dead in his day.

"The old men girt on their old swords,And went to man the wall,"

Here we leave Till to those who choose to fish it up towards the Cheviots, and move up the right bank of Tweed towards its junction with Teviot.

Before reaching that point, however, there are one or two places to notice on both sides of the river – Coldstream, for example, where Leet water enters Tweed; Eden water, a few miles higher up; and, on the English side, Wark Castle.

Regarding the Leet, in order to find oneself filled with envy and with longing unutterable, it is only necessary to read Stoddart's account of the fishing to be had in his day in that curious little stream. "Of all streams that I am acquainted with," says Stoddart, "the Leet, which discharges itself into the Tweed above Coldstream, was wont, considering its size, to contain the largest trout. During the summer season it is a mere ditch, in many places not above four or five span in width, and, where broadest, still capable of being leapt across. The run of water is, comparatively speaking, insignificant, not exceeding on the average a cubic foot. This, however, as it proceeds, is every now and then expanded over a considerable surface, and forms a pool of some depth; in fact, the whole stream, from head to foot, pursuing, as it does, a winding course for upwards of twelve miles, is a continued chain of pools, fringed, during the summer, on both sides, with rushes and water-flags, and choked up in many parts with pickerel weed and other aquatic plants. The channel of Leet contains shell marl, and its banks, being hollowed out beneath, afford, independent of occasional vines and tree roots, excellent shelter for trout. Not many years ago the whole course of it was infested with pike, but the visit of some otters, irrespective of the angler's art, has completely cleared them out, and thus allowed the trout, which were formerly scarce, to become more numerous. On the first occasion of my fishing Leet, which happened to be early in April 1841, before the sedge and rushes had assumed the ascendency, I captured, with the fly, twenty-six trout, weighing in all upwards of twenty-nine pounds. Of these, five at least were two-pounders, and there were few, if any, small-sized fish." On another occasion, in June 1846, Stoddart caught in the same water, in four hours, three dozen and five fish, the biggest of which weighed 3 lbs., and a dozen of the others 1 lb. apiece. This stream, in its characteristics so unlike the usual Scottish burn, is not open to the public, but it may be assumed that no such fishing is now obtainable there, any more than it is to be got elsewhere in Scotland. Once they establish themselves and make unchecked headway, pike are very hard to extirpate; it is not in every stream that one finds otters so accommodating, and so careful of the interests of anglers, as they appear to have been in Leet in Stoddart's day.