The Scott Country

“A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,Nor of the setting sun’s pathetic lightEngendered, hung o’er Eildon’s triple height”.

It brought the last touch of tragedy and of heroism to the closing scene of that noble life – to the passing of the marvellous power, the warm and generous heart, the gallant spirit that was Walter Scott. He enjoyed, however, many happy days in Abbotsford; it is associated more with his triumphs than with his misfortunes. Here he trod his fields, delighted “to call this wooded patch of earth his own”, entertained literary celebrities like Washington Irving, Maria Edgeworth, and the Wordsworths, held almost feudal receptions of his retainers and neighbours, talked and walked with his familiars – Lockhart, Skene, Cranstoun, the “beloved Erskine” – and with his “ain folk”, and planned and wrote his novels. Tweed sings a blither as well as a fuller strain since he dwelt by it.

Into the house, he built material more substantial than his hopes. Scott had the antiquarian temper and taste; and like Burns’s Grose, and his own Oldbuck, he gathered about him “a routh o’ auld nicknackets”, many of them the free-will offering of admirers. In this way the door of the old Edinburgh Tolbooth – the “Heart of Midlothian” – came into his possession, along with the ponderous lock and key over which “Daddie Ratton” had held charge. Sculptured and inscribed stones from the High Street and Canongate houses have also found their way here; while within the house has been collected a museum of Border antiquities, along with portraits, and personal souvenirs and relics, gathered from all corners of the land. The house has been left “very much as in Sir Walter’s time”; and a constant stream of pilgrims visits it. In the library are relics of Napoleon, of Prince Charlie and Flora Macdonald, of Nelson and Wellington; in the drawing-room, among other famous pictures, is Raeburn’s portrait of Scott; in the armoury, memorials of Rob Roy, Montrose, Claverhouse, and Archbishop Sharpe, and the keys of Loch Leven Castle, while on the walls are blazoned the escutcheons of “ye Clannis and men of name quha keepit ye Scottish Marches in the days of auld”. But more impressive than any of these things are the chair in which Scott sat to write or dictate and the pen that in his hand was as a magician’s rod.

The way from Abbotsford to Selkirk, by the valleys of the Tweed and Ettrick, past Fawdonside and Lindean, was a familiar one to the “Shirra”. He had legal and other county business that carried him often during a third of a century to the head town of his Forest Sheriffdom; and inclination went hand in hand with duty, for the road led to Ettrick and Yarrow, to “Sweet Bowhill” and to

“The shattered front of Newark’s towersRenowned in Border story”.

Selkirk – the old “church of the shielings”, which, in the days when David I and his successors hunted in the forest of Ettrick, served the royal sportsmen for their orisons – narrowly missed being the seat of an Abbey. A colony of Tyronesian monks were settled in it more than eight centuries ago, but were removed, “for convenience”, to Kelso. The “Souters of Selkirk” have since given themselves to war, to shoemaking, and latterly to tweed manufacture. But the town has not neglected poetry, and bards of later date have been born and have sung in it, since Burns and Scott drew the “birse” across their lips. It is set well above the vale of the Ettrick, at the gate of the Haining policies; and its public buildings are gathered around the triangular market-place, in which stands a statue of Sir Walter in his sheriff’s robes. In the Free Library is hung the Flodden Standard brought home by the survivors of that day of disaster, when “the Flowers o’ the Forest were a’ wede awa’”.

In 1645 Montrose was resting, with his cavalry, in Selkirk, his infantry encamped at Philiphaugh, on the other side of Ettrick, when David Lesley crept up on him from Melrose, in the mist of a September morning. In two or three hours the fruits of nine brilliant victories were lost, and the great captain was a fugitive speeding across Minchmoor to Traquair, where, the door being shut on him, he passed on to Clydesdale and the Highlands. There have been many romantic crossings of Minchmoor, and meetings and partings at “Wallace’s Trench” – part of the old Catrail or Picts’ Dyke – and at the Cheese Well. Walter Scott accompanied his friend Mungo Park – whose statue stands near his own in the streets of Selkirk – when Park was starting on his African journey. They separated on the ridge above Williamhope, where, as has already been told, Sir William Douglas, the “Flower of Chivalry”, was slain by his cousin the Earl of Douglas, in revenge, it is said, for the most unchivalrous deed of the starving to death, in Hermitage Castle, of Sir Alexander de Ramsay. Across this high moor between Yarrow and Tweed came James V, with five belted earls, to the meeting with the “Outlaw Murray”, lord of Hangingshaws, and Newark, and Philiphaugh and other lands on Yarrow. The king’s message ran —

“Bid him meet me at Permanscore,1And bring four in his companie;Five earls sall come wi’ mysel,Good reason I suld honoured be”.

Permanscore is a hollow of the hill, “where wind and water shears”, and here, three hundred years after the “Outlaw’s” time, the “Shirra” assembled and conducted “a perambulation of the marches” in a case of disputed boundaries.

Carterhaugh – the meadow on which faithful Janet met “Young Tamlane”, and, by holding him through all his grisly transformations, rescued him from Fairy-land – lies in the fork between Ettrick and Yarrow. Behind it is Bowhill, at the time when the Lay was written the favourite seat of the Buccleuch family; and the “Duchess’s Walk”, along the right bank of the Yarrow, is named from the lady who suggested to Scott the “Goblin Page” as an episode of the Lay. It leads to where

“Newark’s stately towerLooks out from Yarrow’s birchen bower”,

and to the “embattled portal arch”

“Whose ponderous grate and massy barHad oft rolled back the tide of war”.

Within the deserted walls, the widowed Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth is pictured as listening to the tale of the Last Minstrel. Local tradition has it that in the courtyard the Irish prisoners who surrendered at Philiphaugh were massacred; another story asserts that they were slaughtered on “Slainmenslee”. Newark was a royal hunting-seat in the fifteenth century; and its possession carried with it the Hereditary Sheriffdom of the Forest, which with many things else in this country came to the House of Buccleuch.

Over against Newark is Foulshiels, the birthplace of Mungo Park. Broadmeadows and Lewinhope and Tinnis are higher up the stream, which here runs between steep wooded hills, cloven by narrow side glens and with spaces of rich haughland on its margin. Yarrow burrows under banks of birch and hazel, or overshadowed by fine forest trees. The vale is “strewn with the sites of the tragedies of far-off years, forgotten by history, but remembered in song and tradition”; it is “the very sanctuary of romantic ballad-love. Its clear current sings a mournful song of the ‘good heart’s bluid’ that once stained its wave; of the drowned youth caught in the ‘cleaving o’ the craig’. The winds that sweep the hillsides and bend ‘the birks a’ bowing’ whisper still of the wail of the ‘winsome marrow’, and have an undernote of sadness on the brightest day of summer; while with the fall of the red and yellow leaf the very spirit of ‘pastoral melancholy’ broods and sleeps in the enchanted valley. Always, by Yarrow, the comely youth goes forth only to fall by the sword, fighting against odds in the Dowie Dens, or to be caught and drowned in the treacherous pools of this fateful river; always the woman is left to weep over her lost and lealful lord.” No strict identification of ballad sites and origins is possible; but the story of the “Dowie Dens” has become associated with Tinnis bank and with Deucharswire, beside Yarrow Kirk; and is said to be founded on the slaughter in 1616 of Walter Scott of Oakwood by the kin of John Scott of Tushielaw, with whose daughter, Grizel, Oakwood had contracted an irregular marriage.

A group of authentic memories gather around Yarrow Kirk and Manse, and the bridge which carries a crossroad over the hills to Ettrick. A succession of cultured pastors have dwelt here, including Dr. Rutherford the grandfather of Scott, two generations of Russells, and the late Dr. Borland. By an unfortunate fire, in the spring of 1922, the restored church was destroyed, together with the memorials placed in it of Sir Walter, of Willie Laidlaw, his friend and amanuensis, of Wordsworth, and of the Ettrick Shepherd, all of them residents or visitors on Yarrow and worshippers in this secluded fane. In a field close by is a stone carved in rude Latin minuscules to the “Sons of Liberalis, of the Dumnogeni”, a relic of post-Roman times. Above Yarrow Kirk, the valley widens until it becomes spacious enough to hold the clear mirror of St. Mary’s Loch; the hills become bare and green and smooth, and over the ridge on the right comes the road from the Tweed by Paddyslack and Mountbenger to the Gordon Arms. It was from this road that Wordsworth, in good company, caught his first, and his last, glimpse of Yarrow —

“When first descending from the moorlandsI saw the stream of Yarrow glideAlong a bare and open valley,The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.When last along its banks I wandered,Through groves that had begun to shedTheir golden leaves upon the pathway,My steps the Border Minstrel led.”

Hogg farmed, unsuccessfully, Mountbenger, before he removed across Yarrow to Altrieve, where he spent the last year of his life and where he died. In his youth he had herded sheep on Blackhouse heights, where looking down on the ruined peel on the Douglas burn are the stones that mark the place where the “seven bauld brethren” fell, in their pursuit of “Lord William and Lady Margaret”. The escaping lovers lighted down at this “wan water”.

“‘Hold up, hold up, Lord William,’ she said,‘For I fear that ye are slain.’‘’Tis naething but the shadow of my scarlet cloakThat shines in the water so plain.’”

But it was his “heart’s bluid”, and the pair were buried together in St. Mary’s Church, whose deserted graveyard is set on a shelf of Hendersyde Hill, overlooking the loch, and fronting the dome of Bowerhope Hill.

On the banks of a burn which flows into Yarrow a little below where it issues from the loch is Dryhope Tower. “Auld Watt” of Harden came to it to bear away Mary Scott, the “Flower of Yarrow”, and part of the provision for their housekeeping was the spoils of the “first harvest-moon”. Half-way along the shore of St. Mary’s, at Cappercleuch, pours in the Meggat Water, a stream that drains some of the highest ground in the Southern Uplands. It was a favourite royal hunting-forest in 1529, when James V came this way intent on the extirpation of the Border thieves; and fate threw in his path Cockburn of Henderland, whose tower was near Meggatfoot. The hollow and waterfall of the “Dowglen” are shown where his lady sought shelter, while “they broke her bower and slew her knight”; the spot, with names inscribed, can be seen in a little clump of wood beside the ruined peel to which she bore him on her back and dug his grave: —

“And thinkna ye my heart was sairWhen I laid the mools on his yellow hair;And thinkna ye my heart was waeWhen I turned aside awa to gae”.

Unfortunately for tradition, the fact is on record that Cockburn of Henderland, like his neighbour Scott of Tushielaw, was tried and executed at Edinburgh. James Hogg would have made small ado about brushing such obstructions out of the way of romance. His statue stands at the head of St. Mary’s Loch – the presiding genius of the scene. The road up Yarrow, passing through the woods of Rodono, holds out beyond it, by the Loch of the Lowes and Chapelhope to Birkhill, and then, under the “Grey Mare’s Tail” and White Coombe, down Moffatdale. But the seated figure of the burly Shepherd, wrapped in his plaid, faces “Tibbie Shiels”, the rendezvous of generations of thirsty fishers and poets, on the narrow space between the lochs, and looks towards the hills up which the crossroad climbs steeply, making for Ettrick. It was at this famous hostelry that Hogg gave his classical order, after a hard night’s drinking with Christopher North and other congenial company, “Tibbie, bring in the Loch!” “He taught the wandering winds to sing”, reads the inscription on his monument; and the strong song of the winds that blow down Ettrick accompanies the traveller as he climbs over by the Packman’s Grave, descends to Tushielaw and, turning upstream at Crosslee, follows the valley to the Shepherd’s birthplace and grave, beside Ettrick Kirk. This out-of-the-world nook in the hills – for the road up Ettrickdale comes to an end a few miles higher, under Ettrick Pen – may be reckoned the heart of pastoral Scotland. The thoughts and the talk of the inhabitants are absorbed in sheep – except what may be reserved for sport, and “auld farrant tales”, and church affairs. Around the Shepherd rest many of his own kin and kind: farmers and herds, lairds and tenants, reivers, smugglers, and gypsies – and in this strange mixed company, “Boston of Ettrick”, of the “Fourfold State”, the great preacher and Covenanting divine.

The Castle of Thirlstane, on Ettrick, stands a little below the kirk, with a fragment of Gamescleuch Tower facing it on the opposite bank. Thirlstane belonged to the “Ready, aye Ready” Scotts, until it went by marriage to its present possessors the Napiers. Tushielaw was another hold of the clan, and here dwelt Adam Scott – “King of the Thieves”, and “King of the Borders” – the father of Mary, the “Forest Flower” of the “Queen’s Wake” – until his rival from Holyrood came and “justified” him, says legend, on the Doom Tree at his own door.

Across the water from Tushielaw “Rankleburn’s lonely side” leads far into the hills. Rankleburn is the traditional first home of the Scotts in the basin of the Tweed, although Kirkurd in the Lyne valley might put in an earlier claim. They are even said to have drawn their name and their chief title from this deserted glen, high up which lies Buccleuch, now marked only by the foundations of a chapel wall. Scott of Satchells, who wrote the family story in halting rhyme, in 1686, tells how a wandering Scott from Galloway, in the remote days of Kenneth II, seized a hunted buck by the horns, swung it on his shoulders and brought it to the king: —

“And for the buck thou stoutly broughtTo us up that steep heugh,Thy designation ever shallBe John Scott of Buck’s cleuch”.

Neither at Gilmanscleuch, nor on the Deloraine burn, nor at the Dodhead have the men of the type of Jamie Telfer, who, “steady of heart and stout of hand, once drove their prey from Cumberland”, left any trace of themselves in standing walls. A reminiscence of old forest times survives in such names as Hindhope and Hartwoodmyres; the shell of an ancient peel guards, at Kirkhope, the “Swire Road” across the “Witchie Knowe” from Yarrow to Ettrick Bridgend; and Oakwood has something more substantial to show in the shape of the red keep which local legend insists was built by the redoubtable Sir Michael Scott himself, although its foundations must have been laid centuries after his date. Enough for us that it was in the keeping of “Auld Watt” of Harden.

“Wide lay his lands round Oakwood TowerAnd wide round haunted Castle Ower.”

At Oakwood we are back again beside Selkirk, and at Selkirk we are near where, each skirting the grounds of Sunderland Hall, Tweed and Ettrick meet, and where we can resume our course up the larger stream. With the delightful section of the Tweed between The Rink and Elibank, Walter Scott had many close ties. The right bank, and part of the left, were within his jurisdiction as Sheriff, in which office he succeeded his friend, Andrew Plummer of Sunderland Hall, in 1799. But even earlier he made familiar acquaintance with the district, on angling and walking excursions, and had visited the Russells and “Laird Nippy”, at Ashestiel. The Rutherfords of Fairnilee – the old house in which was born Alison Rutherford, the author of the popular version of “The Flowers of the Forest”, stands roofless and deserted, but a new mansion has risen in its neighbourhood – were of his kin. He was a welcome guest also with the Pringles of Yair, whose home, bound about by the woods and hills, is across the river, with the “sister heights of Yair”, otherwise known as the “Three Brethren”, as background. It may be remembered that it was with a son of “the long-descended lord of Yair”, Alexander Pringle of Clovenfords, that in later days he went over the field of Waterloo. Clovenfords was the nearest point of his Sheriffdom to town, and it was convenient for him to take up occasional residence there. Leyden had been schoolmaster in the village, which stands high above the rocky den of the Caddon, on the Peebles and Galashiels road, a mile from the “bonny bit” of Caddonfoot. While raising grapes and other fruit it piously preserves the memory of the author of Marmion in the form of an effigy set up before the door of the inn, where, besides Scott, William and Dorothy Wordsworth and other famous travellers have sojourned.

In 1804, Scott found it convenient to take a lease of Ashestiel; and that leafy cover became his home for the next seven years. It is within a couple of miles of Clovenfords and Caddonfoot. Under Caddonlee, where William the Lion waited with his bands from the Highlands and the Lothians, until he was joined by the Forest men on his ill-fated invasion of England, Tweed is crossed by a single wide arch to where “Glenkinnen’s rill” and glen open a short cut, oft traversed with the “Yair boys”, to Yarrow. Near the Peel burn is a knoll shaded by oak and birch – the “Shirra’s Knowe” – where part of Marmion is said to have been written. The house, much changed since Scott’s day, turns its front and two extended wings away from the Tweed; but its most attractive aspect is perhaps that towards the river. The little stream, that with its hoarse roaring in spate used to keep the great author, then just blossoming into fame, from his sleep, still tumbles through the garden. His armchair, which came back from Abbotsford after his death, and the window through which his favourite dogs sprang in or out at his call, are still shown. In these Ashestiel years he saw the last volume of the Minstrelsy through the press, published the Lay, completed Marmion and The Lady of the Lake, edited Dryden, and began but laid aside Waverley. His legal work was not absorbing, and he had time, aside from literature, for following the hounds, “burning the water”, making raids into the Forest, and holding convivial meetings with his friends. They were perhaps the happiest, if not the most brilliant, years of his life.

At Elibank, a couple of miles above Ashestiel, we leave Selkirkshire and enter Peeblesshire. The bare grey walls of the old castle of Gideon Murray, of the Black Barony branch of the name, a lord of Session and trusted Councillor of James VI, stands well above the tree-line, against the background of the hills, and commands a wide view of Upper and Lower Tweeddale. History, in this region, arranges itself in strata, with the oldest at the top – by the river margin are road and rail, farms with their fertile haughs, and the houses and tweed-mills of Walkerburn and Innerleithen; fragments of peels and bastiles of the fighting times when Thornielee and Holylee were onsteads of the monks or of the king’s forest vassals, are perched on the ridges, or hide in the folds or “hopes” of the hills, on whose summits are found the forts and cairns of a still earlier day. The outposts of the Moorfoots come to the left bank of the river, and behind them are the broad shoulders of Windlestraelaw; while over against them are steep outliers of Minchmoor – Elibank, Bold and Plora Laws. “Juden” Murray’s tower is of feudal date and aspect. Scott tells the story of how Young Harden, son of Auld Watt and the “Flower of Yarrow”, and presumably a personable young man, was captured by the owner of the tower and was about to be hanged, when the more politic lady pointed out that she had three ill-favoured daughters to dispose of, and the prisoner was happily married to the youngest and plainest, “Mucklemou’d Meg”. An injudicial proceeding; but not more so than the transaction by which Murray’s neighbour, Lord Traquair, had the President of the Court of Session carried off from Leith Links, by a Border freebooter, Christie’s Will, and kept in a dungeon of Hermitage Castle, until a case was decided in Traquair’s favour. Doubt has been thrown on both stories, and in particular it has been objected that Gideon Murray, whose descendants, the Lords Elibank of to-day, are established at Darn Hall on Eddleston Water, had only one daughter, that her name was Agnes, and that, although she married Young Harden, the alliance was with full consent of all parties concerned.

Lee Pen and Kirnie Law stand sentinels at the entrance of Leithen Water, up which the houses of Innerleithen straggle for a mile or more, along a road which runs across into Lothian, by the Piper’s Grave, the Heriot Water, and Carcant. It is a way by which Walter Scott, walking or driving, has often reached Tweedside, and he would note in passing Leithen Hopes, where his friend Hogg was once a herd laddie, and on the lower slope of the Pen, south of Lee Tower and above the village, the beginnings of the new “Spa”. The topographical resemblances of “St. Ronan’s” to Innerleithen are not very close; and Sir Bingo Binks, Lady Penelope Penfeather, Dr. Quackleben, and other types in Scott’s solitary attempt at a satiric portrayal of the social manners and humours of his own day, are not of local growth. One looks in vain, also, for a “Cleikum Inn” nearer than Peebles. Yet the spirit of Meg Dods pervades the place, the inhabitants of which eagerly accepted the identification and “recognized some of the characters as genuine portraits”. They have even adopted the device, on the inn-sign, of “St. Ronan and the Devil” as the burgh arms.

Geologists – who, “knappin the chucky stanes to pieces wi’ hammers”, reminded Meg of “sae many stane masons run daft” – still frequent the locality, along with anglers and tourists; for at Thornilee, as well as across Tweed at Grieston and the Glen, are celebrated beds of fossiliferous rocks. The bridge is not far above the pool – the “Droon-pouch” – from which the body of the young son of King Malcolm the Maiden was drawn by the Innerleithen people, in gratitude for which its church was made a “Sanctuary” with privileges equal to those of Stow and of Tyninghame. On the farther side is the entrance to the valley of the Quair, and the woods surrounding the venerable form of Traquair House. Its claim to be “the oldest inhabited house in Scotland” applies specifically to its western wing, which is said to date back fully nine centuries. However this may be, the antique character of Traquair is written on its outward features as well as inscribed in its record. It passed through the hands of a succession of royal favourites, of whom the last was James III’s musician and “familiar shield-bearer”, Rogers, who was among those hung over Lauder Bridge by the jealous nobles, before it came into the possession of a branch of the Stewart Earls of Buchan. The Traquair Stewarts have been of mixed reputation; but the tradition of loyalty to the cause of their Royal kin now clings to the house and is symbolized in the great Bear Gateway – the prototype of that of the “Barons of Bradwardine” in Waverley– which is not to be opened until a Stewart King comes again this way.

Like the house itself, all its surroundings breathe of the poetry and romance of the past. For was it not behind Plora Craig that “Bonnie Kilmeny gaed up the glen”? Are there not some scrogs of birch left by the waterside of the much besung “Bush aboon Traquair”? Were not the dwelling of Willie Laidlaw, and the scene of “Lucy’s Flitting” in the upper valley, in which stands the lordly mansion of Lord Glenconner – “The Glen” par excellence? And above all, is it not by the road along the Quair that one “turns aside to Yarrow”?

In the nine miles between Innerleithen and Peebles the full current of Tweed winds through a country brimfull of beauty and story. Whether the road followed upstream be that on the right or that on the left bank, one passes the ruins of ancient strongholds and modern country-seats, set among trees and lawns – on the south side, after Traquair, Cardrona, Kailzie, Haystoun, and Kingsmeadows, and on the north Glenormiston, the two Horsburghs, and Kerfield – and, behind these, high hills of grass and heather, Lee Pen, Dunslair and the Makeness Kips, over against the Glenrath Heights and the Dun Rig, from which on a clear day can be seen, it is said, the Calton Hill in Edinburgh and the Isle of May. The little country-town of Peebles is in a level space where Eddleston Water, side by side with rail and highway, meets Tweed; and from time immemorial it has been a resort of royalty, a place for pastime and relaxation – “Peebles for pleesure!” – and, in a modest way, for trade. It had a reputation for sanctity, also, in witness whereof there are the remains of the two mediæval churches – those of St. Andrew and of the Haly Rude. The house of the Archdean of Glasgow is represented by the Lodging, in the High Street, of the Dukes of Queensberry, now become a public library, whose name, the Chambers Institute, recalls the fact that the founders of the publishing house of Chambers were born in a humble cottage in one of the cross streets. Peebles has outgrown the limits marked by the fragment of the town wall, and has spread northwards to the foot of the hills, where on Venlaw – part of its lost patrimony – it has public walks and a “Hydro”; while it has crossed, by the handsome stone bridge, to the southern bank of Tweed; whence a branch railway follows the course of the river to Broughton, on the way to Clydesdale.