The Project Gutenberg eBook ofBonnie ScotlandThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Bonnie ScotlandAuthor: A. R. Hope MoncrieffIllustrator: Sutton PalmerRelease date: December 6, 2014 [eBook #47549]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BONNIE SCOTLAND ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Bonnie ScotlandAuthor: A. R. Hope MoncrieffIllustrator: Sutton PalmerRelease date: December 6, 2014 [eBook #47549]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)
Title: Bonnie Scotland
Author: A. R. Hope MoncrieffIllustrator: Sutton Palmer
Author: A. R. Hope Moncrieff
Illustrator: Sutton Palmer
Release date: December 6, 2014 [eBook #47549]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BONNIE SCOTLAND ***
ContentsList of Illustrations
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(etext transcriber's note)
That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake,Some usefu’ plan, or beuk could make.Burns.
That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake,Some usefu’ plan, or beuk could make.Burns.
That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake,Some usefu’ plan, or beuk could make.Burns.
BENEATH THE CRAGS OF BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIREBENEATH THE CRAGS OF BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIRE
BONNIESCOTLANDPAINTED BY SUTTONPALMER · DESCRIBED BYA. R. HOPE MONCRIEFFPUBLISHED BY A. & C.BLACK·LONDON·MCMXII
BONNIESCOTLANDPAINTED BY SUTTONPALMER · DESCRIBED BYA. R. HOPE MONCRIEFFPUBLISHED BY A. & C.BLACK·LONDON·MCMXII
BONNIESCOTLANDPAINTED BY SUTTONPALMER · DESCRIBED BYA. R. HOPE MONCRIEFFPUBLISHED BY A. & C.BLACK·LONDON·MCMXII
BONNIESCOTLANDPAINTED BY SUTTONPALMER · DESCRIBED BYA. R. HOPE MONCRIEFFPUBLISHED BY A. & C.BLACK·LONDON·MCMXII
Published November 1904Reprinted 1905, 1912
THEauthor does not attempt elaborate word-pictures, that would seem pale beside the artist’s colouring. His design has been, as accompaniment to these beautiful landscapes, an outline of Scotland’s salient features, with glimpses at its history, national character, and customs, and at the literature that illustrates this country for the English-speaking world. While taking the reader on a fireside tour through the varying “airts” of his native land, he has tried to show how its life, silken or homespun, is a tartan of more intricate pattern than appears in certain crude impressions struck off by strangers. And into his own web have been woven reminiscences, anecdotes, and borrowed brocade such as may make entertaining stripes and checks upon a groundwork of information. The mainland only is dealt with in this volume, which it is intended to follow up with another on the Highlands and Islands.
THEdawn broadens, the mists roll away to show a northward-bound traveller how his train is speeding between slopes of moorland, green and grey, here patched by bracken or bog, there dotted by wind-blown trees, everywhere cut by water-courses gathering into gentle rivers that can be furious enough in spate, when they hurl a drowned sheep or a broken hurdle through those valleys opening a glimpse of mansions and villages among sheltered woods. Are we still in England, or in what at least as far back as Cromwell’s time called itself “Bonnie Scotland”? It is as hard to be sure as to make out whether that cloudy knoll on the horizon is crowned by a peat-stack or by the stump of a Border peel.
Either bank of Tweed and Liddel has much the same aspects. An expert might perhaps read the look or the size of the fields. Could one get speech with that brawny corduroyed lad tramping along the furrows to his early job, whistling maybe, as if it would never grow old, an air from the London music-halls, the Southron might be none the wiser as to his nationality, though a fine local earwould not fail to catch some difference of burr and broad vowels, marked off rather by separating ridges than by any legal frontier, as the lilting twang of Liddesdale from the Teviot drawl. Healthily barefooted children, more’s the pity, are not so often seen nowadays on this side of the Border, nor on the other, unless at Brightons and Margates. The Scotch “bonnet,” substantial headgear as it was, has vanished; the Scotch plaid, once as familiar on the Coquet as on the Tweed, is more displayed in shop windows than in moorland glens, now that over the United Kingdom reigns a dull monotony and uniformity of garb. Could we take the spectrum of those first wreaths of smoke curling from cottage chimneys, we might find traces of peat and porridge, yet also of coal and bacon. Yon red-locked lassie turning her open eyes up to the train from the roadside might settle the question, were we able to test her knowledge whether of the Shorter Catechism or of her “Duty towards her Neighbour.” It is only when the name of the first Scottish way-station whisks by, that we know ourselves fairly over the edge of “Caledonia stern and wild”; and our first thought may well be that this Borderland appears less stern than the grey crags of Yorkshire, and less wild than some bleak uplands of Northumberland.
What makes a nation? Not for long such walls as the Romans drew across this neck of our island, one day to point a moral of fallen might, and to adorn a tale of the northern romancer who by its ruins wooed his alien bride. Not such rivers as here could be easily forded by those mugwump moss-troopers that sat on the fence of Border law, and—
TANTALLON CASTLE, ON COAST OF HADDINGTONSHIRETANTALLON CASTLE, ON COAST OF HADDINGTONSHIRE
Sought the beeves to make them brothIn England and in Scotland both.
Sought the beeves to make them brothIn England and in Scotland both.
Sought the beeves to make them brothIn England and in Scotland both.
Is it race? Alas for the ethnologic historian, on its dim groundwork of Picts and Celts—or what?—Scotland shows a still more confusing pattern of mingled strains than does the sister kingdom! To both sides of the Border such names for natural features as Cheviot, Tweed, and Tyne, tell the same tale of one stock displaced by another that built and christened its Saxon Hawicks, Berwicks, Bamboroughs, and Longtowns upon the Pens and Esks of British tribes.—Is it a common speech? But from the Humber to the Moray Firth, along the east side of Britain, throughout the period of fiercest clash of arms, prevailed the same tongue, split by degrees into dialects, but differing on the Forth and the Tyne less than the Tyne folks’ tongue differed from that of the Thames, or the speech of the Forth from that of the Clyde mouth. So insists Dr. J. A. H. Murray, who of all British scholars was found worthy to edit the Oxford English Dictionary, that has now three editors, two of them born north of the Tweed, the third also in the northern half of England. Scottish “wut” chuckles to hear how, when the shade of Boswell pertly reported to the great doctor that his post as Lexicographer-General had been filled by one who was at once a Scotsman and a dissenter, all Hades shook with the rebuke, “Sir, in striving to be facetious, do not attempt obscenity and profanity!”—or ghostly vocables to such effect.
Is it loyalty to a line of princes that crystallises patriotism? That is a current easily induced, as witness how the sentiments once stirred by a Mary or a Prince Charliecould precipitate themselves round the stout person of George IV.—Is it religion? Kirk and Covenant have doubtless had their share in casting a mould of national character; but the Border feuds were hottest among generations who seldom cared to question “for gospel, what the Church believed.”—Is it name? Northerners and Southerners were at strife long before they knew themselves as English and Scots.
By a process of elimination one comes to see howesprit de corpsseems most surely generated by the wont of standing shoulder to shoulder against a common foe. Even the shifty baron, “Lucanus an Apulus anceps,” whose feudal allegiance dovetailed into both kingdoms, that professional warrior who “signed on,” now with the northern, now with the southern team, might well grow keen on a side for which he had won a goal, and bitter against the ex-comrades who by fair or foul play had come best out of a hot scrimmage. Heartier would be the animosity of bonnet-lairds and yeomen, between whom lifting of cattle and harrying of homes were points in the game. Then even grooms and gillies, with nothing to lose, dutifully fell into the way of fighting for their salt, when fighting with somebody came almost as natural to men and boys as to collie dogs. So the generations beat one another into neighbourly hatred and national pride; till the Border clans half forgot their feuds in a larger sentiment of patriotism; and what was once an adventurous exercise, rose to be a fierce struggle for independence. The Borderers were the “forwards” of this international sport, on whose fields and strongholds became most hotly forged the differences in which they played the part of
THE BASS ROCK, FIRTH OF FORTH, OFF THE COAST OF HADDINGTONSHIRETHE BASS ROCK, FIRTH OF FORTH, OFF THE COAST OF HADDINGTONSHIRE
hammer and of anvil by turns. Here, it is said, between neighbours of the same blood, survive least faintly the national resentments that may still flash up between drunken hinds at a fair. Hardly a nook here has not been blackened and bloodstained, hardly a stream but has often run red in centuries of waxing and waning strife whose fiery gleams are long faded into pensive memories, and its ballad chronicles, that once “stirred the heart like a trumpet,” can now be sung or said to general applause of the most refined audiences, whether in London or Edinburgh.
The most famous ground of those historic encounters lies about the East Coast Railway route, where England pushes an aggressive corner across the Cheviots, and the Tweed, that most Scottish of rivers, forms the frontier of the kingdoms now provoking each other to good works like its Royal Border Bridge. Beyond it, indeed, stands Berwick-upon-Tweed, long the football of either party, then put out of play as a neutral town, and at last recognised as a quasi-outpost of England, whose parsons wear the surplice, and whose chief magistrate is a mayor, while the townsfolk are said to pride themselves on a parish patriotism that has gone the length of calling Sandy and John Bull foreigners alike. This of course is not, as London journalists sometimes conceive, the truly North Berwick where a prime minister might be seen “driving” and “putting” away the cares of state. That seaside resort is a mushroom beside Berwick of the Merse, standing on its dignity of many sieges. The Northumberland Artillery Militia now man the batteries on its much-battered wall, turned to a picturesque walk; and theNorth British and North Eastern Railways meet peacefully on the site of its castle, where at one time Edward I. caged the Countess of Buchan like a wild beast, for having dared to set the crown upon Bruce’s head. At another, it was in the hands of Baliol to surrender to an Edward as pledge of his subservience; and again, its precincts made the scene of a friendly spearing match between English and Scottish knights, much courtesy and fair-play being shown on both sides, even if over their cups a perfervid Grahame bid his challenger “rise early in the morning, and make your peace with God, for you shall sup in Paradise!” who indeed supped no more on earth.
The North British Railway will carry us on near a stern coast-line to Dunbar, whose castle Black Agnes, Countess of March, defended so doughtily against Lord Salisbury, and here were delivered so signally into Cromwell’s hands a later generation of Scots “left to themselves” and to their fanatical chaplains; then over a land now swept by volleys of golf balls, to Pinkie, the last great battlefield between the kingdoms, where also, almost for the last time, the onrush of Highland valour routed redcoat soldiery at Prestonpans. But tourists should do what they do too seldom, tarry at Berwick to visit the tragic scenes close at hand. In sight of the town is the slope of Halidon Hill, on which the English took theirrevanchefor Bannockburn. Higher up the Tweed, by the first Suspension Bridge in the kingdom, by “Norham’s castled steep,” watch-tower of the passage, and by Ford Castle where the siren Lady Ford is said to have ensnared James IV., that unlucky “champion of the dames,” a half-day’s walk brings one to Flodden, English groundindeed, but the grave of many a Scot. Never was slaughter so much mourned and sung as that of the “Flowers of the Forest,” cut down on these heights above the Tweed. The land watered with “that red rain” is now ploughed and fenced; but still can be traced the outlines of the scene about the arch of Twizel Bridge on which the English crossed the Till, as every schoolboy knew in Macaulay’s day, if our schoolboys seem to be better up in cricket averages than in the great deeds of the past, unless prescribed for examinations.
Battles, like books, have their fates of fame. Flodden long made a sore point in Scottish memory; yet, after all, it was a stunning rather than a maiming defeat. A far more momentous battlefield on the Tweed, not far off, was Carham, whose name hardly appears in school histories, though it was the beginning of the Scotland of seven centuries to come. It dates just before Macbeth, when Malcolm, king of a confused Scotia or Pictia, sallied forth from behind the Forth, and with his ally, Prince of Cumbria on the Clyde, decisively defeated the Northumbrians in 1018, adding to his dominions the Saxon land between Forth and Tweed, a leaven that would leaven the whole lump, as Mr. Lang aptly puts it. Thus Malcolm’s kingdom came into touch with what was soon to become feudal England, along the frontier that set to a hard and fast line, so long and so doughtily defended after mediæval Scotland had welded on the western Cumbria, as its cousin Cambria fell into the destinies of a stronger realm. Had northern Northumberland gone to England, there would have been no Royal Scotland, only a Grampian Wales echoing bardic boasts of its Rob Roys and Roderick Dhus,whose claymores might have splintered against Norman mail long before they came to be beaten down by bayonets and police batons.
But we shall never get away from the Border if we stop to moralise on all its scenes of strife—most of them well forgotten. Border fighting was commonly on a small scale, with plunder rather than conquest or glory for its aim; like the Arabs of to-day, those fierce but canny neighbours were seldom in a spirit for needless slaughter, that would entail fresh blood-feuds on their own kin. The Border fortresses were many, but chiefly small, designed for sudden defence against an enemy who might be trusted not to keep the field long. On the northern side large castles were rare; and those that did rise, opposite the English donjon keeps, were let fall by the Scots themselves, after their early feudal kings had drawn back to Edinburgh. In the long struggle with a richer nation, they soon learned to take the “earth-born castles” of their hills as cheaper and not less serviceable strongholds.
The station for Flodden, a few miles off, is Coldstream, at that “dangerous ford and deep” over which Marmion led the way for his train, before and after his day passed by so many an army marching north or south. The Bridge of Coldstream has tenderer memories, pointed out by Mr. W. S. Crockett in hisScott Country. This carried one of the main roads from England, and the inn on the Scottish side made a temple of hasty Hymen, where for many a runaway couple were forged bonds like those more notoriously associated with the blacksmith of Gretna Green. Their marriage jaunts into the neighbour country were put a stop to only half a century ago, when the