last century, have given to the Border its modern picturesqueness and its look of prosperity. Sir Walter Scott himself may be said to be the father of arboriculture in the South of Scotland. In the creation of Abbotsford, forestry was his main out-of-doors hobby, and the example set by one who had studied the subject thoroughly, and who discoursed pleasantly upon it, was quickly followed by all the neighbouring lairds and many others besides. Not that the country was altogether treeless before Scott's day. Here and there "ancestral oaks" clumped themselves about the great castles and mansions, with perhaps some further attempt at embellishment. But that was rare enough. It needed a man like Scott to popularize the notion, and to take the lead in an undertaking fraught, as this age well sees, with results so beneficent. We do not forget, of course, that in earlier historic times practically the whole of the Border Country was covered with wood. Its inhabitants, whose very names—Gadeni and Ottadini—signified "dwellers in the wood," were found by the Romans in their dense forests, and the first settlements were only possible through clearances of growing timber. Across the country, from Cadzow, in Renfrewshire, to the Ettrick, there stretched the vast Wood of Caledon (whence Caledonia), known at a later period as the Forest of Ettrick, or simply as the Forest (e.g., the "Flowers of the Forest"). There is no doubt that it was largely a forest in the ordinary acceptation, and not a mere deer-forest use of the term. Over and over again we have the various charters, as to the Abbeys, for instance, authorising the monks to cut down for building purposes and fuel oaks "from the forest," both in Selkirk and in Melrose, in Kelso and the Ettrick. The original religious house of Melrose was entirely of oak. So were the first churches founded by Kentigern and Cuthbert, and those even of a later date. The Forest of Ettrick survived to the time of the Stuarts, who had here their favourite hunting expeditions, James V. and Queen Mary especially being frequent visitors to the Borderland. The Forest of Megget, or Rodono (a sub-division of that of Ettrick), yielded on one occasion no fewer than five hundred head of game, bird and beast of the chase, and at another time eighteen score of red deer. In the reign of Mary there was issued a proclamation limiting and prohibiting the slaughter of deer in the Forest on account of their growing scarcity. And by the time of James VI. the hunting possibilities of the Border were at an end.

More than anything else, the laying down of the great railway lines and the immense road improvements of last century have opened up practically every corner of the Border Country. There are now no places so utterly inaccessible as Liddesdale was during Scott's visits. It is possible to reach the most out-of-the-way parts with comparative comfort. And with the dawn of the motor age, still greater hopes and possibilities appear in store.

PLATE 2

CRAG LOCH AND THE
ROMAN WALL

FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH

PAINTED BY

JAMES ORROCK, R.I.

(See pp. 24 , 44 , 45 , 71 , 73 )

THE MAKING OF THE BORDER

It is from the Roman historian Tacitus that the light of history falls for the first time on the Border Country. It is a mere glimpse, however. But it is enough to show us the calibre of the men who held its forests and fastnesses at that remote period. They were the Brigantes, a branch probably of the Celts, who were the first to reach Britain, coming from the common home-land of the Ayrian race somewhere in Central Asia. Their kingdom, Brigantia, embraced all the country between the Mersey and Humber and the Links of Forth. They are spoken of as a strong, courageous and warlike people, able for many years to keep the Roman cohorts at bay and to check the northward progress of the invaders. The Roman Conquest of Britain, as is well known, was begun by Julius Caesar as far back as B.C. 55. It was not, however, till the time of Julius Agricola (A.D. 78-84) that the Romans obtained a firm footing on the island. Agricola's generalship was more than a match for the sturdy Brigantes. He carried the Roman eagles to the Forth and Clyde, fixing his main line of defence and his northmost frontier on the isthmus between these two firths. But about A.D. 120, when the Emperor Hadrian visited Britain, his chief work was the delimitation of the Roman territory by the great stone wall still bearing his name, stretching from the Tyne to the Solway, a distance of 73½ miles. Twenty years later, however, Lollius Urbicus, the Emperor's lieutenant in Britain, appears to have revived and restored Agricola's boundary, so that what we now know as the Border Country, for more than three hundred years (A.D. 78-410), formed a part of the mightiest empire of the ancient world. Hadrian's rampart, the great camps at Cappuck, near Jedburgh, at Lyne in Peeblesshire, and Newstead at the base of the Eildons—the undoubted Roman Trimontium—with the roads known as Watling Street and the Wheel Causeway are the chief memorials of a singularly historic Occupation. Following the withdrawal of the Roman legions the district became the arena of constant warfare between Picts and Scots and Britons, until the sixth century, when it appears again in history as a kingdom of the Saxon Heptarchy under the name of Bernicia, and occupied by a colony of Angles and Saxons from the Low Countries of the Continent, the progenitors of the English-speaking race. Ida the Good governed Bernicia, having for his capital the proud rock-fortress of Bibbanburgh (so named from his queen Bibba), the modern Bamborough. In the following century Bernicia was combined with Deira, its southern neighbour (corresponding to Yorkshire) to form the powerful kingdom of Northumbria, extending, as Brigantia had done, from the Humber to the Forth. For the next three or four hundred years the story of the Border was little more than a wild record of lawlessness and bloodshed. It had grown to be a kind of happy hunting-ground for every hostile tribe within fighting distance, and for some even who were drawn from long distances, like the Danes, the latest of the invading hordes. But there is nothing of importance to narrate at this period. From a monarchy, Northumbria fell to the level of an Earldom in 954, and in 1018, the Scots, consolidated to some extent under Malcolm II., crushed the Angles of Northumbria in a great victory at Carham-on-Tweed (near Coldstream), of which the result was the cession to Scotland of the district known as Lothian—the land lying between the Tweed and Forth.