The Project Gutenberg eBook, In the Border Country, by W. S. (William Shillinglaw) Crockett, Illustrated by James Orrock
Title: In the Border Country
Author: W. S. (William Shillinglaw) Crockett
Release Date: March 17, 2010 [eBook #31678]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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IN THE BORDER COUNTRY
POPULAR BOOKS ON ART.
Edited by W. Shaw Sparrow
THE ART AND LIFE LIBRARY. 1. "The British Home of To-Day" (out of print). 2. "The Gospels in Art." 3. "Women Painters of the World." 4. "The Old Testament in Art," Vol. I. 5. "The Modern Home" (out of print). 6. "The Old Testament in Art," Vol. II. 7. "The Apostles in Art."
HISTORY, TRAVEL, RUSTIC LIFE. 1. "Mary Queen of Scots," with 26 Pictures in Colour by Sir James Linton, R.I., and James Orrock, R.I.; the text by Walter Wood. 2. "In The Border Country," with 25 Pictures in Colour by James Orrock, R.I., and Historical Notes by W. S. Crockett. 3. "In Rustic England," with 25 Pictures in Colour by Birket Foster; the text by A. B. Daryll.
THE ART AND LIFE MONOGRAPHS. 1. "Etchings by Van Dyck," in Rembrandt Photogravure the full size of the Original Proofs. Also an Édition de Luxe with Carbon Print Photographs of all the Etchings; the text by Prof. Dr. H. W. Singer. 2. "Ingres—Master of Pure Draughtsmanship." Twenty-four Rembrandt Photogravures of important Drawings and Pictures; the introductions by Arsène Alexandre and W. Shaw Sparrow.
ARTISTS OF THE PRESENT DAY. I. "Frank Brangwyn, A.R.A." the introductions by Léonce Bénédite and W. Shaw Sparrow. 2. "Lucy E. Kemp-Welch," the introductions by Professor Hubert von Herkomer and Edward F. Strange.
SERIES OF BIBLE PICTURES. "The Saviour in Modern Art."
London: Hodder & Stoughton
FRONTISPIECE
VIEW OF DUNSTANBOROUGH
FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
PAINTED BY
JAMES ORROCK, R.I.
DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
SIR WALTER SCOTT
PREFACE
Most of us prefer to spend our holiday tours away from our own country. There is a feeling of mild adventure when the land we behold is unknown to us, and when the language we hear filters into our questioning minds through an interpreter's suavity and chatter. And if we go to Switzerland we may earn even a reputation for intrepid pluck among the friends who listen to us on our return home, while the unlucky guides, who found for our trembling feet a pathway around each danger, will amuse their families during the winter with little tales at our expense, told with rough satire and with short, gruff peals of laughter resembling the noise of a crackling ice-sheet when it begins to slip downhill.
No doubt, heroism on the hillside has a vast attraction to brave, fearless hearts like our own; but we should find, here in our own country, quite as much adventure as is good for us, and quite as much novelty also, if only we could bring ourselves to believe that knowledge of native scenes and traditions does not come to us in baptism or by virtue of our birth as British folk. If you ask a friend whether he knows the Border Country, he will probably answer yes, and then go on to say that he when a lad at school was a great reader of Scott, and thank heaven! his memory is a good one. Push the matter further, ask whether he has verified the truth of Scott's descriptions by a visit to the places described, and you will probably hear that your friend would rather dream of the North Pole or be bitten fiercely by the swarms of lively insects treasured throughout Brittany in every cottage and hotel.
All this being somewhat commonplace, you may wish to get closer to this subject, and your friend at last, driven to bay, comes to the real point that pricks and distresses him. "You see," he will say, "a holiday tour at home is such a dickens of a gamble. You can't say how much it will cost. The only thing at all certain about it is that the cost will be more than you can afford. Wherever you go you become a goose to be plucked."
Let us rebel against this iniquity! It is not a question of cheating, it is a trait of the national character. In Great Britain, as among the Americans, the gift of long sight in business has become very common, and few persons think it worth their while to see the practical good things within easy reach of the blessed short sight of common sense. Our chief aim is not to keep a market open and steady, but to glut it with over-production or to block it with excessive prices. "Here is a holiday-tripper, so let us make him pay!" That seems to be the unconquerable maxim at all seaside resorts and in every place where tired workers seek rest and health. I have known a week's holiday in the New Forest to cost as much as a tour of three weeks in the beautiful and bracing Ardennes. The Belgian is content to draw his customers back to him, while the Englishman grasps all he can get and sends us away discontented.
It is true that the railway companies are doing all in their power to make holidays at home welcome and inexpensive. Their enterprise in this respect has no limits. But we cannot live on cheap railway tickets alone, whether single or return. Something should be done—and the newspapers could help—to establish in all attractive districts a reasonable tariff for board and lodging. It is only thus that Great Britain will be made popular during the holiday season, and that the great stream of gold—the holiday-making Pactolus—will be drawn from the Continent to nourish our own country sides and rural folk.
It seems to be certain that, during the reign of the old stage coach, life in rustic England was cheaper than it is to-day. At any rate we must account in some way or other for the immense number of county histories and illustrated topographical books which teemed from the press from the middle of the eighteenth century to the time of J. M. W. Turner. To study these works is to be sure that our forefathers took the greatest delight in their own country, and that huge sums of money were spent in procuring fine sketches and adequate engravings. Side by side with these books on British topography were volumes on foreign travel, like those by William Alexander, who in 1792 accompanied Lord Macartney's embassy to China, where he made many exquisite
But these books on foreign travel, admirable as they were, did not eclipse the many volumes on British scenery and landscape antiquities. All the ablest men among the earlier water-colour painters—Hearne, Malton, Dayes, Girtin, Turner, Francia, Havell, De Wint, David Cox, Cotman—made topographical sketches for illustrations, and lucky is he who "finds" their earliest efforts. To-day, happily, there are signs of renewed life in the old taste for picture books on the beauty and romance of our own country. It is a taste that invigorates, storing the mind with tonic memories and filling the eyes with beautiful scenes and colours; and we may be sure that it needs for its gratification books which are easy to carry and to read. The great folio of other days, as heavy almost as a country squire, is rightly treasured in the British Museum, like the remains of the Neolithic Man discovered in Egypt.
The subject of the present book—the Border Country—should set us thinking, not of one holiday, but of many; and he who has once tasted the Border's keen rich air will long to return both to it and to the traditions that dwell among the vast landscapes and in the ruined castles. The distinguished connoisseur and painter whose sketches are here reproduced, has gone back to the Border Country a dozen times and more, always to find there a renewal of his first pleasure and a host of fresh subjects, that form a delightful connecting-link between each to-day and the armoured epochs of the long ago.
And if the Border Country, with its enchanted places and memories, delights a landscape-painter, it is equally attractive to students of architecture, to lovers of folk-lore and literary history, to writers of romance in search of traditions and local colour, and to those of us also who indulge a passion for collecting either as botanists or as geologists. The rivers and streams have a rare fascination, and anglers, having made their choice, can come by all the sport which they desire. As to the hills, they have a certain modesty of height deceptive to the unwary, for although they have not won for themselves a reputation for fatalities to be described as Alpine, they are yet so dangerous when a mist gathers about them and thickens, that a climber may lose his life there quite comfortably, and without enjoying more than the customary amount of rashness or inexperience. Briefly, men may find in the Border Country nearly all their hobbies, and nearly all their professional studies.
In this book the historical notes are written by one who lives by the Tweed, and whose name is associated with Border subjects. Mr. Crockett's work is filled with the Past, while the outdoor sketches by Mr. Orrock are at once so faithful topographically, and so much in sympathy with the classic traditions of English Water-Colour, that they show us what the Border Country is to-day, when seen through the medium of a painter's observation and knowledge.
W. SHAW SPARROW.
CONTENTS.
Page Title Page. By David Veazey 3 Dedication Page 5 Preface. By Walter Shaw Sparrow 7 Contents 12IN THE BORDER COUNTRY
BY W. S. CROCKETT
I. Introduction 17 The Making of the Border 23 The Christianizing of the Border 26 Border Warfare 36 II. The English Border: Northumberland 44 "Merrie Carlisle" 60 III. The Tweed and Its Associations 75 IV. "Pleasant Teviotdale" 94 V. In the Ballad Country 105 VI. The Leader Valley 117 VII. Liddesdale 124 PLATES IN COLOUR
BY JAMES ORROCK, R.I.
I. INTRODUCTION
From Berwick to the Solway as the crow flies is little more than seventy miles. Between these two points lies the line that divides England from Scotland. But to follow this line literally along its every little in and out means a distance of no fewer than forty
There is, of course, a narrower sense in which the phrase, the Border Country, is used—the literary. That, however, applies almost entirely to the Scottish side, for neither of the English Border counties owns a tithe of the associations in literature and romance that belong to those beyond the Tweed. The extraordinary glamour which has been cast over the Tweed and its tributaries by the writings of Sir Walter Scott, the Ettrick Shepherd, John Leyden, and others, has given a prominence to the Scottish side which is nowhere shared by its southern neighbour. But to say so is no disparagement to the English side. For what it lacks in literature it makes up in other admirable characteristics. Both Borders are rich in historical memories. Their natural features are not dissimilar, and in commercial prosperity they are much akin. In union they have long been happily wedded.
The Border Country is a region of streams and hills which hardly rise to the dignity of rivers and mountains. Unlike the Clyde, the Tweed has no broad estuary laden with the commerce of the world. And the highest summits, Broad Law (2754 feet) in Scotland, and the great Cheviot (2676 feet) in England, have nothing in common with the rugged Highland peaks except their height. Both, it has been said, are monuments of denudation only, "lofty because they have suffered less wear than their neighbours."
It is difficult to imagine all this attractive Border Country as at one period a vast ocean-bed, over which waves lashed in furious foam, and sea-birds shrieked and flew amid the war of waters. Yet geology assures us such was its condition ages ago. By-and-by, it became a great rolling plain or table-land, and in age after age—how many and how long it were vain to speculate—there was carried on that stupendous process by which those fair green hills and glens have been so marvellously scooped out, and moulded and rounded into the objects of beauty that we see about us now. In the great glacier movements, in the working of the ice-sheets, and under the influences of frost, beating rain, and a constant water-flow operating through a countless series of years, we have the scientific explanation of their present benign and comfortable-looking appearance. The Border hills are of a purely pastoral type, grass-grown from base to summit, and usually easy of ascent. Here and there one meets with a distinctly Highland picture—in the deep dark glens down Moffatdale, for instance, but in the main they exhibit "the sonsie, good-humoured, buirdly look," for which Dr. "Rab" Brown expressed the liveliest predilection. Once at the curiously plateau-like summit of Broadlaw (out-topped in Southern Scotland by the Galloway Merrick only) or Hart Fell (2651 feet), or the Cheviot, the feeling amounts to a kind of awe even. Scott speaks of the silence of noonday on the top of Minchmoor, and the acute sense of human littleness one always feels amidst the "mountain infinities." "I assure you," he says, "I have felt really oppressed with a sort of fearful loneliness when looking around these naked towering ridges of desolate barrenness." The picture seen from such a height is both an inspiring and a humbling one. Beneath, it is a veritable earth-ocean that we are gazing upon. On all sides an innumerable series of what look like huge elephant-backed ranges are seen to be chasing each other like waves of the sea, as it were, ridge after ridge, rising, flowing, falling, and passing into the one beyond it, as far as the eye can reach. Enclosed between each we know are the rushing hill-burns and broader streams by which the Border country is everywhere so much blessed and beautified. At such a height we are entirely outside the human touches—altogether alone with Nature at her simplest and solemnest. The cry of a startled sheep and the summer hum of insects on the hill-top—
Voice of the desert, never dumb"—
are the only indications of life where all trace and feeling of man and his work have disappeared. Occasionally we shall meet by chance with the shepherd, maybe, who has his dwelling far down among the "hopes"—the cul-de-sacs of the uplands. Amongst those hills he lives and moves and has his being. All sorts of weather-conditions find him at his work. He never thinks of the loneliness, and the winter storms have not the terrors for him as for his predecessors. In some respects his life is an ideal one, and his class has a goodly record for intelligence and fine physique. The best specimens, indeed, of the country's manhood are drawn from the agricultural labouring classes—the "herds" and "hinds" who make up the bulk of the population in the purely rural districts. For agriculture, it need scarcely be said, is the staple business of both Borders. The Tweed industry, to be sure, affords employment to thousands, but on the Borders, as elsewhere, the land is the crucial problem. Within recent years many of the rural parishes have been woefully depleted, and until the land question is fairly tackled there seems small hope for a fresh and brighter chapter in the domestic history of the Border Country.
A hundred years have transformed the face of the Border Country in a marked manner. The development of agriculture, and the growth of the tree-planting spirit, which began to bestir itself about the beginning of
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.
THE CHRISTIANIZING OF THE BORDER
It would be interesting to know precisely when and how the light of the Christian faith first penetrated the Border Country, but neither the time nor the manner can be ascertained with certainty. Indeed, it is impossible to say who were the real pioneers of the Gospel within the realm itself. The probability is that in the first instance it was the beneficent work of the Romans in whose legions were to be found many sincere Christians, many faithful soldiers of the Cross. From the "saints of Cæsar's household"—not a mere picturesque dream—mayhap the Gospel found its way to the coasts of Britain, the greatest boon that could be conferred on a nation. An unvarying Peeblesshire tradition, for example, avers that among the first to witness for Christ and His truth by the banks of the Tweed and its tributaries were Roman soldiers from the great military station at Hall Lyne, and out of whose quiet fellowship-meetings in the recesses of the Manor, sprang the church of that valley, one of the oldest in the county, and dedicated to Saint Gordian, either the Emperor of that name, or what is more likely, "Gordian the well-beloved," Deputy of Gaul, who suffered martyrdom about the year 362. Be that as it may, it is at any rate certain that long before the departure of the Romans from Britain, Christianity had made considerable headway in the island. St. Ninian's is the earliest definite name which has come down to us, about the end of the 4th and beginning of the 5th century. His labours were confined chiefly to the Galloway side of the Border, where the remains of his Candida Casa, or White House, may still be seen at Whithorn on the shores of Wigtown Bay. It is more than possible that some of Ninian's missionaries, or a rumour of his work and teaching at all events, had passed beyond the Solway to the Clyde and Tweed watersheds. But, on the other hand, the difficulties following the departure of the Romans in the constant incursions from the Continent and the terrible internecine struggles of the time, would be sufficient to extinguish whatever light had faintly begun to shine. And it is not until well on in the 6th century that the darkness begins to grow less dense. Such names as Augustine, Paulinus, Columba, Kentigern or Mungo, Aidan and Cuthbert, come upon the scene, with each of whom seems to rest, as it were, the hope of the Church of Christ in Britain. In the year 597 Augustine arrived in Kent with forty monks in his train. The incident, apocryphal perhaps, which led to his mission, is at least interesting. The story has been told again and again, but it will bear repeating. Ælla, King of Deira, had defeated his northern neighbour, and with a portion of the spoil hastened to fill the Roman slave-market. Gregory the Great, in the days that preceded his pontificate, passed one day through the market-place when it was crowded with people, all attracted by the arrival of fresh cargoes of merchandise; and he saw three boys set for sale. They were white-complexioned, fair and light, and with noble heads of hair. Filled with compassion, he enquired of the dealer from what part of the world they had come, and was told "from Britain, where all the inhabitants have the same fair complexion." He next asked whether the people of this strange land were Christians or pagans, and hearing that they were pagans he heaved a deep sigh, and remarked it was sad to think that beings so bright and fair should be in the power of the Prince of Darkness. He next enquired the name of their nation. "Angles," was the reply. "'Tis well," he answered, playing on the word, "rightly are they called Angles, for their faces are the faces of angels, and they ought to be fellow-heirs with the angels of heaven." "And what is the name," he proceeded, "of the province from which they have been brought?" "From Deira," was the answer. Catching its name, he rejoined, "Rightly are they named Deirans. Plucked from ire, and called to the mercy of Christ." "And who," he asked once more, "is the King of this province?" "Ælla," was the reply. The word recalled the Hebrew expression of praise, and he answered, "Allelujah! the praise of God shall be chanted in that clime!" And as Green so beautifully puts it in his "Making of England," "he passed on, musing how the angel faces should be brought to sing it." And brought to sing it they were when the evangelist Paulinus found his way in the best sense, to the heart of heathen Northumbria. Paulinus, whom men long remembered,
Black hair, and vivid eye, and meagre cheek."
had come from Rome with Bishop Justus in 601, and laboured with Augustine in the evangelization of Kent. When Ethelburga, daughter of Ethelbert of Kent, Augustine's convert, became wedded to Edwin, the still idolatrous King of Northumbria, Paulinus accompanied her as chaplain, and at the same time as missionary among the rude Northumbrians. The field of his labours was a wide one. For a long time he made no progress until Edwin himself, moved by his escape from assassination at the hands of the King of Wessex, and by his victory over Wessex, and under the gentle constraint of Paulinus, resolved that both he and his nobles should be baptized, and this resolution was carried into effect at York, in a hastily-built chapel (the precursor of the Minster), on Easter Eve, 627.
The conversion of Edwin was followed by a great social revolution. Having convoked the National Assembly, he unfolded the reasons for his change of faith. Everywhere he was applauded. Crowds of the nobility, chiefs of petty states, and the great mass of the people followed the example of their King. The worship of the ancient gods was solemnly renounced, and even Coifi, the high priest, was the first to give the signal for destruction by hurling his lance at an idol in the pagan temple. Paulinus was now one of the most popular figures in Northumbria. Wherever he preached, crowds gathered to hear him and to be received, like their Overlord, into the Christian communion. Many spots in Northumberland are identified with the name of this early and ardent Apostle of the North. Pallinsburn, overlooking Flodden Field, is, of course, Paulinus's Burn, where large numbers were baptized. In one of his missionary journeys we are told (Bede) how he was occupied for six and thirty consecutive days from early morn until nightfall, in teaching the people and in "washing them with the water of absolution" in the river Glen, which flowed by the royal "vill" of Yeavering (anciently Ad-gebrin) in Glendale. At the Lady's Well near Holystone, in the vale of the Coquet, about three thousand converts were welcomed into the Church of Christ. A graceful Runic cross erected on the spot bears the following inscription:—
+In this Place
Pavlinvs the Bishop
Baptized
Three Thousand Northvmbrians.
Easter, DCXXVII.+
But after six years of incessant labours, the death of Edwin in battle with Penda, King of the Mercians, and Cadwallon of North Wales, put a sudden stop to his
PLATE 3
BAMBOROUGH FROM
STAG ROCK
FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
PAINTED BY
JAMES ORROCK, R.I.
(See pp. 25 , 58 , 59 )