The Scott Country. Geddie John

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СКАЧАТЬ of note in Scott’s career and fortunes. A biographer may well say that it was “here he began to gather up his intellectual gains and make his friendly conquests”. Kelso gave bent and direction to his genius.

      Like Smailholm, Kelso was “meet nurse for a poetic child”, for here join two “superb rivers” – Tweed and Teviot – each bringing down, from a hundred sources, its treasure of ancient story. As we have said, the beauty and romance of Tweedside do not begin in this neighbourhood. They are the endowment of the main stream from its tap-root to the sea. Berwick-upon-Tweed, for centuries a cause of contention between the Kingdoms, was at one time regarded as separate and apart from each – “England, Scotland, and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed”. Since the fifteenth century, however, it has territorially belonged to England, although situated on the north bank of the river. Its Edwardian and Elizabethan walls – the former recently placed, along with the venerable Bell Tower, the symbol of Berwick Liberties, under the protection of the Board of Works as a national relic and for preservation against the attacks of vandalism – enfold a sheaf of history. Few places have been the scenes of more furious sieges and merciless captures. Its bridge of fifteen arches, built before the Civil Wars and upheld for centuries from State funds, connects the town with Tweedmouth and Spittal to the south, although it is of small account, as a bond of union and means of traffic, compared with its upstream neighbour, the Royal Border Bridge, which carries the railway lines between England and Scotland.

      A mile or two higher up, but still into tide-water, flows in the Whitadder, which with its tributary, the Blackadder, comes out of the recesses of the Lammermoors to drain the fertile Merse, passing on its way many scenes that must have tempted Sir Walter to make its valley the stage of one of his romances. His fancy may have played with the idea. But beyond an occasional allusion, or the dispatch of one or two of his characters through it, in hot haste for some other arena of action, he never specifically annexed this heritage of the Humes and earlier Lords of Dunbar and Merse to the “Scott Country”, though some have attempted to identify Cranshaws Castle or Wedderlie with Ravenswood. Wedderburn recalls the “Seven Spears”. Polwarth and Marchmont, Ninewells and Nisbet, Kimmerghame and Langton, Edrington and Hutton, Chirnside and Bunkle, Duns and Greenlaw, are names steeped in the spirit of Border poetry as well as noted in local and national annals. The valleys in which lie Abbey St. Bathans, on the Whitadder, Priestlaw, on the Faseny, and Longformacus, on the Dye, seem to beckon for an interpreter of their almost forgotten stories; while that of the mysterious “Edinhall”, on Cockburn Law, the largest and most southerly of Scottish “brochs”, is wholly lost. At Ellemford, James IV was brought to a halt, in the futile “Raid of Ellem”; and his descendant Charles I came to a turning-point in his fortunes when he was faced by the Covenanting Host, encamped on Duns Law. From Haliburton, hard by the “Blackadder Rings”, Scott derived one line of his descent. Yet this region of the Merse serves at most only as a background in his Border Romance.

      Higher up the main stream, beyond Paxton, and Horncliffe, and Horndean, one comes to Ladykirk, whose fine old sixteenth-century church is said to have been founded and dedicated to the Virgin in gratitude for an escape from drowning in the Tweed. Behind it is Swinton, the home of an ancient and knightly family from which Sir Walter was descended, on his mother’s side. Over against it are the “castled steep” and “flanking walls” of Norham, the guardian of England and of the heritage of the Prince-Bishops of Durham, to the siege of which “Mons Meg” has travelled in her day – the scene, too, of quarrels and of conferences, at one of which Edward I decided between the rival claims of the “Competitors” for the Crown of Scotland.

      At Tillmouth and Twizell Castle, where the Till brings down waters – Glen and Bowmount, Breamish and College – drawn from both skirts of Cheviot, one is close to ground yet more closely bound to the tragedy of the Kingdoms and to the genius of Scott, for near here is Ford Castle, where the Scottish King is supposed to have dallied too long with Lady Heron; the bridge across which he allowed the English van to cross and attack him on flank; and the hill-slope of Flodden, down which, in 1513,

      “From his mountain home

      King James did rushing come” —

      to meet disaster half-way, and to fall in the midst of the flower of his nobles and of his kingdom.

      At Coldstream, Longshanks crossed the Tweed on the fatal enterprise of invading and subduing Scotland; Leslie, on his way to join Cromwell at Marston Moor, and Monk on the march to proclaim Charles II in London. Wark Castle, in which, according to tradition, the Order of the Garter was instituted – with Carham beside it, where, at a much more distant date, a generation before Macbeth, Malcolm II, King of Scots, won a victory that brought the boundary of his realm in permanence to the Tweed – stands within easy reach of Kelso. So also, on the opposite or Scottish bank, does Birgham, the soil on which William the Lion and the Scots prelates disowned the supremacy of the English Church, and where was signed the Treaty for that projected marriage of the heirs of the two Kingdoms – Prince Edward and the Maid of Norway – which, but for evil chance, might have united them without the intervention of three centuries of desolating war.

      But it is at Kelso Bridge, below the meeting of Tweed and Teviot, that we come fully within the circle of the Magician’s charm – where every stream and wood and glen seems to take light and colour from the imagination of Walter Scott. The scene has been admired and praised by a host of poets and travellers before and since his time. Burns looked down upon it from different points of view and owned himself “enchanted”. It has been extolled by, among others, James Thomson, of the Seasons, who was born at Ednam Manse on the Eden Water, only two or three miles away, and by Thomas Pringle, Scott’s fellow-pupil at Kelso and the first editor of Blackwood, who sang, from the South African veld, of “Bonnie Teviotdale and Teviot’s mountains blue”. The parent river makes a wide sweep, and, with its bold wooded banks, seems to embrace and protect the houses of the little market town, in the midst of which rise the ruined western towers and a fragment of the nave of the renowned Tyronesian Abbey. The place, standing so perilously near the English border, was guarded on the south and on the north by two great strongholds. Of Roxburgh or Marchmont Castle, on the narrow ridge between Tweed and Teviot, only a few walls, rising a few yards above the sod, remain. Its history would fill a volume. But one remembers chiefly that James II of Scots – he of the “Fiery Face” – was killed by the explosion of a cannon, while directing attack upon it from the farther bank of the Tweed, leaving the country, as was so often its fortune under the Stewart Dynasty, to the hazards of a long minority. On the town of Roxburgh – which once, as one of the “Four Burghs”, was a leader in the path of municipal and commercial progress – a more sweeping fate has descended; not a stone has been left above another on a site upon which for long was held “St. James’s Lammas Fair”.

      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, СКАЧАТЬ