The Scott Country. Geddie John

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СКАЧАТЬ 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”.

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