From the Author's chapter in Cassell's "British Isles." (By permission.)

The Liddel rises in the Cheviot range, close to Jedhead, at an altitude of six hundred and fifty feet above sea level, and after a course of seven-and-twenty miles, with a fall of five hundred and forty-five feet, it joins the Esk at the Moat of Liddel, below Canonbie, near the famous Netherby Hall, twelve miles north of Carlisle and about eight from Langholm. It is fed by a score of affluents, of which the chief are the Hermitage and Kershope Waters, the latter constituting for nine miles or so the immediate boundary between the two countries. From its geographical position as cut off from the main division of the county, Liddesdale has little in common with the valleys of the Tweed and Teviot. A Liddesdaler, for instance, seldom crosses over to Tweedside, nor can a Tweedsider be said to have other than a comparatively slight acquaintanceship with his southern neighbour of the shire. Indeed, Liddesdale has been described as belonging in some respects more to England than to Scotland, and in a sense, it may be said to be the very centre of the Border Country itself.

PLATE 25

CAERLAVEROCK CASTLE

FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH

PAINTED BY

JAMES ORROCK, R.I.

If now-a-days one may roam through Liddesdale with some degree of comfort, it was a very different matter for Scott and Shortreed little more than a hundred years since. They knew scarcely anything of the district, which lay to them, as was said, "like some unkenned-of isle ayont New Holland." But Scott was bent on his Minstrelsy ballad-huntings. And it was the very inaccessibility of the Liddel glens which inspired him with the hope of treasure. For seven autumns in succession they "raided" Liddesdale, as Scott phrased it, and, as he anticipated, some of the finest specimens in the Minstrelsy were the outcome of these excursions. Evidence of the utter solitariness and roadlessness of the region is found in the fact that no wheeled vehicle had been seen in Liddesdale till the advent of Scott's gig about 1798. Nor was there a single inn or public-house to be met with in the whole valley. Lockhart describes how the travellers passed "from the shepherd's hut to the minister's manse, and again from the cheerful hospitality of the manse to the rough and jolly welcome of the homestead, gathering wherever they went songs and tunes and occasionally more tangible relics of antiquity." But a hundred years have wrought wondrous transformation on the wild wastes of the Liddel. The "impenetrable savage land" of Scott's day, trackless and bridgeless, is now singularly well opened up to civilisation and the modern tripper. The Waverley Route of the North British Railway passes down the valley within a few miles of its best-known landmarks. The Road Committees are careful as to their duty, and a well-developed series of coaching tours has proved exceedingly popular. From a miserable expanse of bleak moors and quaking moss-hags, the greater portion of lower Liddesdale, at least, has passed into a picturesque combination of moor and woodland with rich pastoral holms and fields in the highest state of cultivation.

But the main glory of Liddesdale is the romance that hangs over it. There is probably no parish in Scotland—for be it remembered that Liddesdale is virtually one parish—which could show such an extraordinary number of peel-houses to its credit. Their ruins, or where these have disappeared, the sites are pointed out with surprising frequency. A distinctively Border district, this was to be expected, and the like is true of the English side also. A Liddesdale Keep, still in excellent preservation—"four-square to all the winds that blow"—and far and away the strongest and the most massive pile on the Border frontier is Hermitage, in the pretty vale of that name, within easy reach from Steele Road or Riccarton stations, three and four miles respectively. Built by the Comyns in the thirteenth century, it passed to the Soulises, the Angus Douglases, to "Bell-the-Cat" himself, the Hepburn Bothwells, and the "bold Buccleuch," whose successor still holds it. Legend may almost be said to be indigenous to the soil of Hermitage, and one wonders not that Scott found his happy hunting-ground here. The youngest child will tell us about that "Ogre" Soulis, who was so hated by his vassals for his awful oppression of them, that at last they boiled him alive—horrible vengeance—on the Nine-Stane Rig, a Druidic circle near by. In part confirmation of the tragedy it is asserted that the actual cauldron may still be seen at Dalkeith Palace. Scott was constantly quoting the verses from Leyden's ballad:

The Nine-Stane Rig is the scene also of the fragmentary "Barthram's Dirge"—a clever Surtees forgery undetected by Scott. Leyden's second Hermitage ballad—two of the best in the "Minstrelsy"—deals with the Cout or Chief of Keeldar, in Northumberland, done to death by the "Ogre" in the Cout's Pool close to the Castle. In the little God's-acre at Hermitage the Cout's grave is pointed out (Keeldar also shows what purports to be the Cout's resting-place). Memories of Mary and Bothwell come to us, too, at Hermitage. Here the wounded Warden of the Marches was visited by the infatuated Queen, who rode over from Jedburgh to see him, returning the same day—a rough roundabout of fifty miles—which all but cost her life. Dalhousie's Dungeon, in the north-east tower, recalls the tragic end of one of the bravest and best men of his time—Sir Alexander Ramsay, of Dalhousie, who was starved to death at the instance of Liddesdale's Black Knight, here anything but the "Flower of Chivalry." One may wander all over the Hermitage and Liddel valleys without ever being free from the romance-feeling which haunts them. Relics of the Roman occupation are in abundance on every hillside—

This was the homeland of the Elliots, "lions of Liddesdale," and the sturdy Armstrongs, of the crafty Nixons and Croziers—"thieves all":

It is to be regretted that so few of the dozens of clan-strengths which at one time studded the district are any longer in evidence. Hartsgarth, Roan, (so named from the French Rouen), Redheugh, Mangerton—"Kinmont Willie's" Keep—Syde—"He is weel kenned Jock o' the Syde," Copshaw Park—the abode of "little Jock Elliot"—Westburnflat—an "Old Mortality" name—Whithaugh, Clintwood, Hillhouse, Peel, and Thorlieshope, have mostly all disappeared since Scott's day. A generation more utilitarian in its tastes has arisen, and the stones taken to set up dykes and fill drains. Near the junction of the Liddel and Hermitage stood the strongly posted Castle of the "Lords of Lydal," and the important township of Castleton—not unlike the Roxburghs between Tweed and Teviot; and, like them also, both have long since passed from the things that are. Only the worn pedestal of its "mercat-cross" and a lone kirkyard have been left to tell the tale. Two miles farther down is the village of Newcastleton, formerly Copshawholm, planned by the "good Duke Henry" in 1793, a rising summer resort with a population of about a thousand.

We cannot quit Liddesdale without recalling that this is "Dandie Dinmont's" Country. In writing "Guy Mannering" Scott drew largely from his earlier experiences amongst the honest-souled store-farmers and poetry-loving peasants of Liddelside. At Millburn, on the Hermitage, he enjoyed the hospitality of kindly Willie Elliot, who stood for the "great original" of "Dandie Dinmont."