“Cessford’s heart-blood dear
Reeked on dark Elliot’s Border spear”,
as if it had taken place beside the ruined Kerr stronghold of Holydean, on the southern side of the hills beyond Huntly-burn and the “Rhymer’s Glen”, and thus near to the pretty village of Bowden, which sits under the lowest of the three Eildons, and looks down into the valley of the Ale and towards Cavers Carre and Lilliesleaf.
The fields and woods sloping down from Bowden Moor and Cauldshields Loch, on the left of the way from Melrose to Abbotsford, are part of the possessions which Sir Walter gathered together between 1811, when he had to give up Ashestiel, and 1824; and they still belong to his descendants. The nucleus of the property was the little farm of Cartley, or Clarty, Hole, on the Tweed a little above the inflow of the Gala. It lay almost opposite to the site of the plum trees that, according to a story of Border foray much cherished in Galashiels, gave to that town the burghal arms and the slogan tune of “Soor Plooms”, the favourite bagpipe air of Scott’s Kelso uncle. On the strength of a tradition that there was here a crossing-place of the monks, Abbotsford got its new and ever memorable name. A modest cottage, which forms part of the west wing, gradually grew with the growth of the owner’s fame and fortunes, until, at the end of fourteen years, by addition and reconstruction, mainly all of Sir Walter’s own devising, it had become the stately baronial mansion, adorned with turrets, corbels, and crowsteps, that challenges the eye by its form and size as well as by its history. Into it the author of the Waverley Novels may be said to have built his fancies, his aspirations, and his ambitions; and here he counted on spending the evening of his days in well-earned rest, surrounded by his children and his friends, and by the love and admiration of his fellow countrymen. Hardly had this “poem in stone and lime” been brought to completion when an untimely frost blasted his hopes, and with unimpaired courage, but with gradually failing strength, he turned to a task, greater than any that ever fell to his namesake the “michty Michael”, and worked unremittingly, with hand and brain, for another seven years’ term until he came back for the last time to Abbotsford, a spent and broken man, to die. Sadder far his return than his departure a year before in quest of health, when
“A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,
Nor of the setting sun’s pathetic light
Engendered, 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 towers
Renowned 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,1
And 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 tower
Looks out from Yarrow’s birchen bower”,
and to the “embattled portal arch”
“Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
Had 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 moorlands
I saw the stream of Yarrow glide
Along a bare and open valley,
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.
When last along its banks I wandered,
Through groves that had begun to shed
Their 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 cloak
That 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 sair
When I laid the mools on his yellow hair;
And thinkna ye my heart was wae
When 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.