Hume Castle, Kelso’s other bulwark – or, if it happened to be in the hands of an enemy, its thorn in the flesh – stands on high ground to the north, where its square-set form, now reduced to a shell, can be seen from all parts of the ground that lies between the Lammermoor and Cheviot. But the town had strength within itself in its great Norman Abbey Church, built for purposes of war as well as of prayer. It was founded by that zealous abbey- and cathedral-rearer, David I, the son of Canmore and of Saint Margaret; and its head, as a mitred abbot who acknowledged only the jurisdiction of the Holy See, held a position that gave him a precedence, much envied and much resented, over the superiors of the neighbouring religious houses of Jedburgh, Dryburgh, and Melrose. It was endowed with rich benefices and wide territories, but its wealth and glory all vanished in the storms of the Reformation, or, more ruthless still, of the English invasions and the Civil Wars.
A large part of the Abbey heritage has passed to the Kers, of the ducal house of Roxburghe, whose stately seat, Floors Castle, planned by Vanbrugh and completed by Playfair, commands from its terraces one of the widest and loveliest views upon Tweed. Of the Kers of Cessford, who had feuds with the rival branch of the Kerrs of Ferniehirst, as well as with the Scotts and other neighbours, it has been said that they had a genius for fighting on the winning side: “When the power of the Douglases on the Border began to crumble, they became Crown vassals, and their fortunes mounted rapidly. They won new lands, and held, and still hold, the old. They kept a hawk’s eye on the wild tracts of moor and pasture and peat bog, where even in the old days of foray there was, as Dandie Dinmont said, ‘mair stabling for horses than change-houses for men’, and where now all is utterly abandoned to the curlew and the sheep. But they moved their household gods, and extended their bounds, from the Bowmont to the Kale, from the Kale to the Teviot, and finally from the Teviot to the Tweed.” Their ruined castle of Cessford stands in a lonely place, on a slope overhanging a little side-glen of the Kale Water, some eight miles from Floors. The roof is gone, and all about is bare and deserted. A few sapling ashes grow in the crannies of the stone, but time has riven the thick walls which Surrey, in 1523, found so hard to breach, and has thrown down the grand old Crow Tree that stood so long beside Habbie Ker’s stronghold. Long before this the family had flitted to a warmer nest, and had feathered it with the spoils of Old Roxburgh Castle and of Kelso Abbey.
Scarcely less than Melrose and Abbotsford are Kelso and Floors the centre of a sanctuary of Border romance; and over the scene the forms of Hume Castle and Smailholm Tower seem to keep sentry-watch and to “shift places mysteriously, like the triple heads of the weird Eildons, as if they were pacing guard upon the hilltops”. In the setting of the picture revealed from these vantage-grounds are – along with places already noted – the hanging woods of Stichell and Newtondon; Nenthorn, Hendersyde, Mellerstain, Makerstoun; beyond Teviot, the rich woodlands of Springwood, Woodendean, and Sunlaws; the darker pine trees around the hunting seat of Bowmont Forest; the folds in which lie the “Gypsy capital” of Kirk Yetholm, the ancient Kirk of Linton, Eckford of the Douglases and Crailing of the Cranstons; the hills of Hounam and Morebattle; and, behind all, the soft blue line, rising high in Great Cheviot and sinking away towards the west, of the chain that divides the kingdoms, with peeps here and there of Haddon Rig, and Ruberslaw, and Dunion, and Minto Crags, and Penielheugh, crowned by its Waterloo monument, with other scarce less famous Border heights.
While, above the junction, the ascending valley of the Tweed holds its way westwards, so that the water-sheds of its northern tributaries are in common with those of streams flowing to the Forth and the Clyde, Teviotdale keeps throughout a line that is parallel with the Marches of the Kingdoms, from which its main channel is nowhere more than a dozen miles away as the crow flies. It follows that there is more of hazard, and with this more of romance, crowded into its annals than perhaps into those of any other area of like extent. It is sprinkled over with battlefields and with peel towers, most of them now in ruin; every dale has been the scene of a fray, and every burn has a song or ballad tacked to its name. These Middle and West Marches were a centre of power and action, first of the House of Douglas, and then of the “Bauld Buccleuch”. The “Good Sir James of Douglas” kept the peace of this troubled frontier for the Bruce; his son, the “Knight of Liddesdale”, expelled the English from Teviotdale, and was killed while hunting in Ettrick Forest; his grandson, the first of the Douglas Earls, also chased out the invaders and brought back spoils from the English side; his great-grandson, the second Earl, captured Percy’s pennon at Newcastle, and was slain at Otterburn, while riding home by the road of Redesdale and the Carter Bar with his prey; while it is of a later descendant, “Earl Tineman”, captured at Shrewsbury by a later Hotspur, that the canny saying is quoted in The Fortunes of Nigel: “Poortith (poverty) takes away pith, and the man sits full still who has a rent in his breeks”.
A Scott of Buccleuch accompanied James V when he hanged Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie and all his company at Carlenrig near Teviothead; and the “rank reiver’s” reproach, given in one version of the ballad, was not without edge:
“Now haud your tongue, Sir Walter Scott,
Nor speak o’ reif and felonie;
If ilka man had his ain coo,
A richt poor clan your name would be.”
It was from Branxholm, on the Teviot above Hawick, that another Scott of the name – generation after generation were Walters – rode forth to rescue “Kinmont Willie” from prison in Carlisle. The Minstrel’s tale, in the Lay, opens at and returns again and again to Branxholm Ha’; it was at the Tower Inn, at Hawick, where the Duchess Anne of Buccleuch and Monmouth held her receptions, and that the greatest of all the Sir Walters parted from his guests the Wordsworths.
It is a land dedicated to the achievements of Douglases and Scotts, but that resounds also with the deeds of Elliots and Armstrongs, and of minor and broken clans, Turnbulls and Rutherfords, Cranstouns and Olivers. It has its rich endowment of beauty as well as of history. Around the keep of Branxholm, which from the deep bank overhanging the stream has often defied its enemies, have gathered buildings of more recent date and a screen of ancient trees. Below it is the Tower of Goldilands, where a marauding Scott was hanged at his own gate, and here comes in from the left the Borthwick Water. As Leyden has it:
“Where Bortha hoarse, that loads the meads with sand,
Rolls her red tide to Teviot’s western strand,
Through slaty hills, whose sides are shagged with thorn,
And springs in scattered tufts the dark-green corn,
Towers wood-girt Harden, far above the vale” —
Harden, the cradle of the branch of the Scotts from which the author of the Lay was descended; the “mountain home”, hidden in its narrow glen, to which the “Flower of Yarrow” was brought by “Auld Wat” – “a wide domain, and rich, had purple heath been grain”.
At the town of Hawick, Teviot meets Slitrig, coming from the wild bounds of Liddisdale. All roads in Teviotdale seem to lead to Hawick, the capital of its trade as well as a centre of its history. Proud as its citizens are of the leading position of the burgh in the tweed and hosiery manufacture of the South of Scotland, and of the undiminished importance of its great lamb and sheep fairs, they are prouder still of the prowess of its sons in the dark days that followed Flodden, and in other scenes of Border strife. Scott was familiar with its story, as with the streets and with the steep hills that surround this stirring little metropolis of industrial and pastoral life; and allusion has already been made to the literary and legendary memories attached to the site of the Tower in which the Douglases of Drumlanrig entertained their guests and protected their rights. From the parish church of St. Mary, since often rebuilt, the heroic Ramsay of Dalhousie was carried away by the Knight of Liddisdale, to be immured and to suffer a lingering death in the Douglas hold of Hermitage —
“Did ever knight so foul a deed?”
An older memorial of the past of Hawick is the Motehill, on which justice was dispensed, and an outlook kept for enemies, in times beyond the range even of tradition. The great “Hawick Tradition” of the capture of the standard of the English marauders at Hornshole is kept green by the annual ceremony of the “Common Riding”, when Hawick is to be seen in its gayest and most jubilant mood. The words and tune of its slogan of “Teribus ye Teriodin” are supposed to have descended to it from heathen times, and to have originally been an invocation to the gods of the early Saxons and Norsemen – Thor and Odin. The defiant spirit of these warriors of old seems still to ring in the chaunt sung by the Cornet and his men as they ride round the marches in the beginning of June:
“Teribus ye Teriodin,
Sons of heroes slain at Flodden,
Imitating Border Bowmen,
Aye defend your rights and Common.”
A few miles up the Slitrig is Stobs Castle, an ancient seat of the Elliots, which became a military centre during the Great European War; and there are many other places of note and fame on the once hazardous way, now followed by the railway, that leads across the hills to the head-streams of the Liddel and thence to those of the North Tyne, or to the “Debatable Land”, the Solway, and Carlisle. Another crowd of warlike memories and of pastoral and woodland charms awaits those who, from Hawick, or from the old Douglas seat of Cavers, lower down Teviotdale, explore the Hobkirk valley, or pass over the skirts of Ruberslaw into Rule Water – to Bonchester and to Hobkirk, where Thomson planned his Seasons, and to Southdean, where the poet spent his early years, and to the Carter Bar and the Border.
A few miles below Hawick, past Hornshole and past Denholm, the birthplace of John Leyden – the poet, the Oriental scholar, the friend of Scott, whose “brief and bright career” closed too soon in the Malay East – below “dark Ruberslaw” and the Dunion, which interposes its round-backed form between the “mining Rule” and the “crystal Jed”, and more directly under the Minto Crags and the Chesters moors, lies one of the loveliest bits on Teviot. Haughs and dells, green hills and wide sweeps of river spread around the fragments of Fatlips Castle, whose owner, a Turnbull, dwelt
“Mid cliffs from whence his eagle eye
Full many a league his prey could spy”;
and around Minto House, the home, since the Union, of the Elliots, a race great in law and in war, in song and in statecraft, with whom, through their descent from “Gibbie with the Gowden Garters”, a daughter of Harden, Sir Walter could “count kin”. Jed Water and Ale Water come in from south and north, farther down, and here, too, every foot is famous. The “Minstrel” sings of scenes, on the track of William of Deloraine, “good at need”, among them
“Ancient Riddel’s fair domain,
Where Aill, from mountains freed,
Down from the lakes did raving come;
Each wave was crested with tawny foam,
Like the mane of a chestnut steed”.
The inflow of this turbulent stream is below the fine old tree-surrounded Ancrum House. It is overshadowed by Penielheugh and by the ridge of Lilliard’s Edge, across which the main road from Carlisle, that has followed the course of the Teviot almost from its source, toils painfully over to the valley of the Tweed. On a day in 1545, Ancrum Moor
“Ran red with English blood,
Where the Douglas true and the bold Buccleuch
’Gainst keen Lord Evers stood” —
a victory to which, according to traditions, “fair Maid Lilliard” contributed manfully, until, like a hero of “Chevy Chase”, she “fought upon her stumps”.
Jed Water is still more charged with the history and legends of the past. Much of it, including Jedburgh Abbey, is the patrimony of the branch of the Kerrs represented by the Marquis of Lothian, whose modern seat, Mount Teviot, lies opposite Jedfoot, while the ancient home of the family, Ferniehirst, begins to run to decay. It would take many pages to do justice – even “Jeddart justice” – to Jedburgh, whose townsfolk, armed with their “Jeddart staves” and to their slogan of “Jeddart’s Here!” were in the front of the Border Wars. Its Abbey, founded by David the Saint, who placed here Augustinian canons from Beauvais early in the twelfth century, is still, in spite of having been seven times burned, the stateliest and the best preserved of the mediæval religious houses of the Scott Country. The site of the Royal Castle, where in the “Golden Age” of the Borders Alexander III held court after his second marriage, has disappeared under public buildings; but the house in the Backgate is pointed out where Mary Queen of Scots lay sick to death after her perilous ride to Hermitage, as well as the lodging in the Castlegate occupied by Prince Charlie on his march into England.
His road lay over a shoulder of Carter Fell into Redesdale, where runs what is still the only way across the hills for wheeled traffic in the sixty miles between Wooler, on the Till, and Riccarton, on the Liddel, although the Romans built over the Cheviots paved roads, one of which descended into the head of Kale Water, and, from the site of the old Border Trysts at Pennymuir, ran straight as a ruled line to the camp of Newstead, under Eildon. From end to end these hills are deserted, except by the shepherd and the sportsman. Along the “wild and willowed shore” of Teviot and of Jed, the “glaring balefires blaze no more”. The race of the mosstroopers – of “John o’ the Side” and “Christie’s Will”, the “Laird’s Jock” and “Hobbie Noble” – is long extinct. But there are still to be found fine products of the soil, of the type of the stalwart tenant of Charlieshope. The Border spirit may have run into manufactures, and pastoral and arable farming, and Kirk and State contentions, but anyone who fancies it is dead should attend a “Common Riding”, or an otter or fox-hunt, or a game of curling or of hand- or foot-ball in these parts; or a meeting or parting of Hawick “Teeries” or of “Jedburgh callants”. He will doubt no more.
Dryburgh Abbey is less than ten miles distant from Jedburgh, in a straight line. But there are marked features distinguishing it from its Teviotdale neighbour as well as from the Abbeys standing below and above it on Tweedside – Kelso and Melrose. It was planted in its corner of Berwickshire by baronial and not by kingly beneficence, its founder being the great Hugh de Morville, in David’s time Constable of Scotland and Lord of Lauderdale, whose tomb is near the site of the high altar. It was smaller in size and less richly endowed than the other three, but is not less generously invested with historic and legendary interest. Its fate and condition are not dissimilar, for like the others it was many times burned and ravaged in the Border wars, and was afterwards abandoned for centuries to neglect and decay. These Tweedside monastic houses have now fallen upon happier times; for, apart from the reverence they have gathered from the past, and not least from their association with Sir Walter Scott, they have lately become national possessions, through the generosity of the Duke of Roxburghe at Kelso, of the Duke of Buccleuch at Melrose, and of Lord Glenconner at Dryburgh. The Præmonstratensian Abbey on the bend of the Tweed under Bemerside Hill differs from its rivals in respect that it has preserved more of the monastic buildings and less of the church. Of Dryburgh Abbey Church – apart from the north transept, of which more has to be said – little is left beyond the gables of the south transept and of the west front, the latter pierced by a five-light window, surmounting some ruined walls, and the foundations of piers. But the chapter house – St. Modan’s chapel – is extant, and its vaulted roof covers interesting architectural and archæological details, while of the cloisters, sacristy, fratery, and other domestic buildings of the “White Friars” of Dryburgh there are considerable remains, clad in ivy and overhung by immemorial yews and other trees. Enough survives to indicate a structure of much grace and beauty, showing a great range of styles from Romanesque to Later Pointed, and built of a local reddish sandstone which, as at Melrose, has weathered into a rich and harmonious variety of colour.