BeyondHaggerston, and up along the rising road that leads for six of the seven miles to Berwick, the journey is unexpectedly commonplace. The road has by this time turned away from the sea, and when it has led us through an entirely charming tunnel-like avenue of dwarf oaks, ceases to be interesting. Always upwards, it passes collieries, the “Cat” inn, and the hamlet of Richardson’s Stead or Scremerston,whence, arrived at the summit of Scremerston Hill, the way down into Tweedmouth and across the Tweed into Berwick is clear.
Tweedmouth sits upon the hither shore of Tweed, clad in grime and clinkers. Like a mudlark dabbling in the water but not cleansing himself in it, Tweedmouth seems to acquire no inconsiderable portion of its dirt from its foreshore. Engineering works and coal-shoots are responsible for the rest. Little or nothing of antiquity enlivens its mean street that leads down to the old bridge and so across the Tweed into Scotland. The roofs of Berwick, clustered close together and sealing one over the other as the town ascends the opposite shore of the river, are seen, with the spired Town Hall dominating all at the further end of the long, narrow, hump-backed old structure, and away to the left that fine viaduct of the North Eastern Railway, the Royal Border Bridge. But the finest view, and the most educational in local topography, is that gained by exploring the southern shore of the Tweed for half a mile in an easterly direction. An unlovely waterside road, it is true, a maze of railway arches spanning it, and shabby houses hiding all but the merest glimpses of Tweedmouth church and its gilded salmon vane, referring to the salmon-fishery of the Tweed, but leading to a point of view whence the outlook to the north-west is really grand. There, across the broad estuary of the Tweed, lies Berwick, behind its quays and its enclosing defences. Across the river, in the middle distance, goes Berwick Bridge, its massive piers and arches looking as though carved out of the rock, rather than built up of single stones. Beyond it, in majestic array, go the tall arches of the Royal Border Bridge, and, in the background, are the Scottish hills. Tweedmouth, its timber jetty, its docks, and church spire, and its waterside lumber are in the forefront. This, then, is the situation of Berwick, for centuries the best-picked bone of contention between the rival countries of England and Scotland; the Bordercockpit, geographically in the northern kingdom, but wrested from it by the masterful English seven hundred and fifty years ago, and taken and re-taken by or from stubborn Scots on a round dozen of occasions afterwards. Sieges, assaults, stormings, massacres under every condition of atrocity; these are the merest commonplaces of Berwick’s story, until the mid-sixteenth century; and the historian who would write of its more unusual aspects must needs turn attention to the rare and short-lived interludes of peace.
The Scottish Border: Berwick Town and Bridge from Tweedmouth
It was in 1550, during the short reign of Edward the Sixth, that the existing fortifications enclosing the town were begun, whose river-fronting walls are so conspicuous from Tweedmouth. The old bridge, built by James the First, was the first peaceful enterprise between the two kingdoms, for, although Berwick had for over a century been recognised as a neutral or “buffer” state, peace went armed for fear of accidents, and easy communication across the Tweed was not encouraged. There is food for reflection in comparison between that bridge and the infinitely greater work of the railway viaduct. The first, 1,164 feet in length, with only 17 feet breadth between the parapets, bridging the river with fifteen arches, cost £17,000, and took twenty-four years to build; the railway bridge of twenty-eight giant arches, each of 61½ feet span, and straddling the Tweed at a height of 129 feet, was built in three years, at a cost of £120,000. The “Royal Border Bridge,” as it was christened at its opening by the Queen, has precisely the appearance of a Roman aqueduct and belongs to the Stone and Brick Age of railways. Were it to do over again, there can be no doubt that, instead of a long array of graceful arches, half a dozen lengths of steel lattice girders would span the tide. It was at a huge cost that England and Scotland were thus joined by rail; bridge and approaches swallowing up the sum of £253,000. The first passenger train crossed over, October 15, 1848, but the works were not finally completed until 1850. In the August of that year theQueen formally opened it, nearly two years after it wasactuallyopened; a fine object-lesson for satirists. How we laugh at ceremonials less absurd than this when they take place in China and Japan.
Berwick town is seen, on entering its streets, to be unexpectedly modern and matter-of-fact. The classically steepled building that bulks commandingly in the main thoroughfare and looks like a church is the Town Hall, and displays the arms of Berwick prominently, the municipal escutcheon supported on either side by a sculptured bear sitting on his rump and surrounded by trees. It is thus that one of the disputed derivations of Berwick’s name is alluded to. At few towns has the origin of a place-name been so contested as at Berwick; and, for all the pother about it, the question is still, and must remain, unanswered. It might as reasonably have come fromaberwic, the mouth of a river, as frombergwic, the hillside village, and much more reasonably than from the fanciful “bar” prefix alluding to the bareness of the country; while of course the legend that gives the lie to that last variant, and seeks an origin in imaginary bears populating mythical woods, is merely infantile.
The church-like Town Hall, which is also a market-house and the town gaol, does indeed perform one of the functions of a church, for the ugly Puritan parish church of the town has no tower, and so the steeple of the Town Hall rings for it.
In the broad High Street running northward from this commanding building are all the prominent inns of the town, to and from which the coaches came and went until the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway in 1846. Some of the short stages appear to have been misery-boxes, according to Dean Ramsay, who used to tell an amusing anecdote of one of them. On one occasion a fellow-traveller at Berwick complained of the rivulets of rain-water falling down his neck from the cracked roof. He drew the coachman’s attention to it on the first opportunity, but all the answer he got was thematter-of-fact remark, “Ay, mony a ane has complained o’ that hole.”
The mail-coaches leaving Berwick on their journey north were allowed to take an extra—a fourth—outside passenger. Mail-coaches running in England were, until 1834, strictly limited to four inside and three outside. Of these last, one sat on the box, beside the coachman, while the other two were seated immediately behind, on the fore part of the roof, with their backs to the guard. This was a rule originally very strictly enforced, and had its origin in the fear that, if more were allowed, it would be an easy matter for desperadoes to occupy the seats as passengers and to suddenly overpower both coachman and guard. The guard in his solitary perch at the back, with his sword-case and blunderbuss ready to hand, could have shot or slashed at those in front, on his observing any suspicious movement, and it is somewhat surprising that no nervous guard ever did wound some innocent passenger who may have turned round to ask him a question. The concession of an extra seat on the outside of coaches entering Scotland was granted to the mail-contractors in view of the more widely scattered population of Scotland, and of the comparative scarcity of chance passengers on the way.
But there is very great uncertainty as to the number of passengers allowed on the mails in later years. Moses Nobbs, one of the last of the old mail-guards, states that no fewer than eight passengers were allowed outside at the end of the coaching age. Doubtless this was owing both to the complaints of the contractors that with the smaller complement they could not make the business pay, and to the growing security of the roads.
Royal proclamations used, until recent times, to specifically mention “our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed” when promulgating decrees, for as by treaty an independent State, neither in England nor Scotland, laws and ordinances affecting Great Britain and Ireland could not legally be said to have been extendedto Berwick without the especial mention of “our town.” A state whose boundaries north and south were Lamberton Toll and the Tweed, a distance of not more than four miles, with a corresponding extent from east to west, it was thus on a par with many a petty German principality. Nearly three-quarters of the land comprised within “Berwick Bounds” is the property of the Corporation, having been granted by James the First when, overjoyed at his good fortune in succeeding to the English crown and thus uniting those of the two countries, he entered upon his heritage. Lucky Berwick! Its freehold property brings in a revenue of £18,000 a year, in relief of rates.
If the streets of Berwick are disappointing in so historic a place, then let the pilgrim make the circuit of the town on the ramparts. These, at least, tell of martial times, as also do the fragmentary towers of the old castle, the few poor relics left of that stronghold by the modern railway station overhanging a deep cleft. Then, away in advance of the ramparts, still thrusting its tubby, telescopic, three-storied form forward, is the old Bell Tower, where, in this advanced post, the vigilant garrison kept eyes upon the north, whence sudden Scottish raids might be developed at any time.
Grass covers the ramparts and sprouts in tufts upon the gun-platforms contrived in early Victorian days upon them, and almost every variety of obsolete cannon, short of the demi-culverins with which Drake searched the Spanish Main, go to make up what—Heaven help them and us!—War Office officials call batteries. Guns bristle thickly upon the waterside batteries overlooking the harbour, but not one of them is modern. All are muzzle-loading pieces, fit for an artillerist’s museum, and their carriages—where they are mounted at all—are in bewildering variety, principally, however, of rotting wood. The most recent piece, an Armstrong gun not less than fifty years old, lies derelict in the long grass, and children amuse themselves by filling its hungry-looking maw with clods. Pot-bellied like all the old Armstrongs,it has a look as though it had grown fat and lazy with that diet and lain down in the long grass to sleep. Perhaps to guard its slumbers, a War Office notice beside the prostrate gun vainly forbids trespassing!
Down in a ditch of the fortifications a soldier in his shirt sleeves, his braces dangling about his legs, is tending early peas with all the tenderness of a mother for an invalid child; for, look you, early peas in these latitudes have a hard fight for it; and the fight of those vegetables for existence against the nipping blasts that sweep from off the North Sea is the only sign of warfare the place has to show. Taken as a whole, and looked at whichever way you will, the “defences” of Berwick-upon-Tweed show a trustfulness in Providence and in the astounding luck of the British Empire which argues much for the piety or the folly of our rulers. And so, with the varied reflections these things call forth, let us away up the High Street, and, passing under the archway of the Scotch Gate, spanning its northern extremity, leave Berwick on the way to Scotland.
“SeeingScotland, Madam,” said Dr. Johnson, in answer to Mrs. Thrale’s expressed wish to visit that country, “is only seeing a worse England. It is seeing the flower gradually fade away to the naked stalk.” This bitter saying of the Doctor’s comes vividly to mind when leaving Berwick on the way to Edinburgh. Passing the outskirts of the town at a point marked on the Ordnance map with the unexplained name of “Conundrum,” the country grows bare and treeless on approaching the sea, and at Lamberton Toll, three miles north, where “Berwick Bounds” are reached and Scotland entered, the scene is desolate in the extreme. The cottage to the left of the road at this point, formerly the toll-house of the turnpike-gate that stood here, is a famous place,rivalling Gretna Green for the runaway matches, legalised at the gate until 1856, when changes in the law rendered a part of the once-familiar notice in the window out-of-date. It ran, “Ginger-beer sold here, and marriages performed on the most reasonable terms”; an announcement which for combination of the trivial and the tremendous it would be difficult to beat.
Geographically in Scotland when across the Tweed, we are not politically in that country until past this cottage. Then indeed we are, in many ways, in a foreign country.
Lamberton Toll
Scots law is a fearful and wonderful variant from English. Even its terminology is strange to the English ear, which finds—hey, presto!—on passing Berwick Bounds, a barrister changed into an “advocate,” a solicitor converted into a “Writer to the Signet,” and a prosecutor masquerading under the thrilling and descriptive alias of “pursuer.” It was the laxity of Scots law that made, not only Gretna Green, but any other place over the Border from England, a resort of those about to marry and impatient of constraints, legal or family, at any period between 1753 and 1856. Gretna Green and its neighbour, Springfield, in especial, and in no small degree Lamberton Toll, were the scenes of much hasty marrying during that space of time. Marrying,bien entendu, and not giving in marriage, forthese were runaway matches, and those whose position it was to give, and who withheld their consent, generally came posting up to the toll-gate in pursuit just in time to hear the last words of the simple but effective ritual of the toll-keeper who had witnessed the declaration of the truants that, “This is my wife,” and “This is my husband,” a simple form of words which, uttered in the presence of a witness, was all that the beneficent legal system of Scotland required as marriage ceremony. This form completed, and for satisfaction’s sake a rough register subscribed, the indignant parent, who possibly had been battering on the outside of the door, was admitted and introduced to his son-in-law.
It was a century of licence (not marriage licence), that prevailed on the Border from the passing of Lord Hardwicke’s Clandestine Marriage Act in 1753 until that of Lord Brougham in 1856, which put a stop to this “over the Border” marrying by rendering unions illegal on the part of those not domiciled in Scotland, which had not been preceded by a residence in that kingdom of not less than twenty-one days by one or other of the contracting parties.
There was no special virtue in the first place across the Border-line at any point, nor did it matter who “officiated,” the person who “performed the ceremony” being only a witness and in no sense a clergyman; but it was obviously, with these legal facilities, the prime object of runaway couples pressed for time, and with hurrying parents and guardians after them, to seize their opportunity at the first place, and at the hands of the first person in that liberal minded land. Not that the Kirk looked benevolently upon this. It fined them, for discipline’s sake, and the happy couples cheerfully paid, for by doing so they acquired the last touch of validity, which, on the face of it, could not be called into dispute.
One of this long line of Hymen’s secular priesthood at Lamberton Toll had, early in the nineteenth century, an unhappy time of it, owing to an error of judgment and an ignorance of the law scarcely credible. JosephAtkinson, the toll-keeper, was away one day at Berwick when a runaway pair arrived at the gate. His wife, or another, sent them after him, and in Berwick the ceremony, such as it was, was performed. Now Berwick is a county of itself, and the inhabitants boast, or used to, that their town belongs to neither England nor Scotland. It is hinted (by those who do not belong to Berwick) that it belongs instead to the devil, which possibly is a reminiscence of the townsfolk’s smuggling days, on the part of those who duly render unto Cæsar. This by the way. Unhappily for Mr. Joseph Atkinson, Berwick owes allegiance to English law, as he found when his ceremony was declared null and void, and he was duly sentenced to seven years transportation for having contravened the Marriage Act of 1753.
Off to the Border
Halidon Hill, where the English avenged Bannockburn upon the Scots in 1333, is on the crest of the upland to the west of Lamberton Toll. Now the road runs upon the edge of the black cliffs that plunge down into the North Sea, commanding bold views of a stern and iron-bound coast. Horses, coachmen, guards, and passengers alike quailed before the storms that swept these exposed miles, and even the highwaymen sought other and more sheltered spots. Macready, on tour in the north, was snowed up here, in the severe winter of 1813–14. Coming south through the deep and still falling snow, he travelled in a cutting made in the drifts for miles between Ross Inn and Berwick-on-Tweed. “We did not reach Newcastle,” he says, “until nearly two hours after midnight: and fortunate was it for the theatre and ourselves that we had not delayed our journey, for the next day the mails were stopped; nor for more than six weeks was there any conveyance by carriage between Edinburgh and Newcastle. After some weeks, a passage was cut through the snow for the guards to carry the mails on horseback, but for a length of time the communications every way were very irregular.”
Where the little Flemington Inn stands solitary ata fork of the road, close by a tremendous gap in the cliffs, is placed Burnmouth station, on the main line, wedged in a scanty foothold, hundreds of feet above the sea. Day or night it is a picturesque place, but more especially in the afterglow of sunset, when the inky blackness of the rift in the cliffs can still be set off against the gleam of the sea, caught in a notch of the rocks, and when the lighted signal-lamps of the little junction glow redly against the sky on their tall masts, like demon eyes. A fishlike, if not an ancient, smell lingers here, for Burnmouth station is constantly in receipt of the catches made down below by the hardy fishers of the three hamlets of Burnmouth, Partinghal, and Ross, queer fishing villages of white-washed stone cottages that line the rocky shore unsuspected by ninety-nine among every hundred travellers along the road above. Herrings caught in the North Sea are cured here, packed in barrels, and sent by rail to distant markets.
Ayton, two miles onward, away from the sea, is entered in perplexing fashion, downhill and by a sharp turn to the right over a bridge spanning the Eye Water, instead of continuing straight ahead along a road that makes spacious pretence of being the proper way. Ayton itself, beyond being a large village, with a modern castellated residence in the Scottish baronial style and vivid red sandstone at its entrance, is not remarkable.
Leaving Ayton, the road enters a secluded valley whose solitudes of woodland, water, and meadows are not imperilled, but only intensified, by the railway, which goes unobtrusively within hail of this old coaching highway. On the right rise the gently swelling sides of a range of hills sloping upwards from the very margin of the road and covered with woods of dwarf oak, through whose branches the sunlight filters and lies on the ferns below in twinkling patches of gold. Here stood the old Houndwood Inn, and the building yet remains, converted—good word in such a connection—into a manse for the Free Church near by, itself a building calculated to make angelsweep; if angels have appreciations in architecture. Another, and a humbler, building carries on the licensed victualling trade, and calls itself, prettily enough, the “Greenwood Inn.” It is, in fact, a stretch of country that makes for inspiration in the rustic sort. If there were a sign of the “Robin Hood” here we should acclaim it romantic and appropriate, even though tradition tells not of that mythical outlaw in these marches. If not Robin, then some other chivalric outlaw surely should have pervaded the glades of Houndwood, open as they are, with never a fence, a hedge, or a ditch to the road, just as though these were still the fine free days of old, before barbed-wire fences were dreamed of, or notices to trespassers set up, threatening vague penalties to be enforced “with all the rigour of the law,” as the phrase generally runs.
It is a valley of whose delights one must needs chatter, although with but dim hopes of communicating much of its charm. Through it that little stream called by the medicinally sounding name, the Eye Water, wanders with a feminine hesitancy and inconstancy of purpose. It flows all ways by turns and never long in any direction, and with so many amazing loops and doublings, that it might well defy the precision of the Ordnance chartographers themselves. We bid farewell to this fickle stream at Grant’s House, and scrape acquaintance with another, the Pease Burn, flowing in another direction. For Grant’s House stands on the watershed which orders the going of several watercourses. It is also the summit level of this railway route to the North. Here, quite close to the road, is Grant’s House station, and here, bordering the road itself, are the houses that form Grant’s House itself. This sounds like speaking in paradox, but the place is a village, or rather a scattered collection of pretty cottages that have gathered around the one inn which was the home of the original Grant. The place-name seems to hint of other and less-travelled times, when these Borders were sparsely settled and wayfarers few; when but one house servedto take the edge off the solitude, and that an inn kept by one Grant. The imagination, thus uninstructed, weaves cocoons of speculation around these premises and conceives him to have been a host of abounding personality, thus to hand his name down to posterity, preserved in a place-name, like a fly in amber. But all speculations that start upon this innkeeping basis would be incorrect, for this sponsorial Grant was the contractor who made the road from Berwick to Edinburgh, building a cottage for himself in this then lonely spot, which only in later years became the Grant’s House inn.
More streams and woods beyond this point, and then comes the long and toilsome rise up to Cockburnspath, past Pease Burn, where the road takes a double S curve on the hillside, and other tall hills, to right and left and ahead, largely covered with firs and larches, seem to look on with a gloomy anticipation of some one, less cautious than his fellows, breaking his neck. Where there are no hillside woods there are grass meadows in which, if it be June or July, the haymakers can be seen from the road, haymaking, with attendant horses and carts, at a perilous angle. The Pease Burn, flowing deep down in its Dene, is spanned at a height of 127 feet, half a mile down stream, by a four-arched bridge, built in 1786.
Setin midst of these steep and twisting roads and above these watery ravines is Cockburnspath Tower, a ruined Border castle of rust-red stone that frowns down upon the road on the edge of a tremendous gully. It was never more than a peel-tower, but strongly placed and solidly built, a fitting refuge for those who took part in the ups and downs of Border forays. In the days when Co’path Tower (local pronunciation) was built, every one’s house was more orless a defensible building. “An Englishman’s house is his castle” is a figurative expression commonly used to prefigure the inviolate character of the law-abiding citizen’s domicile, but it might have been said literally of dwellers in these debateable lands. The more property he possessed, the stronger was the Border farmer’s tower. When the moss-troopers and mediæval scoundrels of every description were on the warpath, or merely out on a cattle-lifting expedition, these embattled agriculturists shut themselves up in their safe retreats. The lower floor, on a level with the ground, received the live stock; the floor above, the servants; and to the topmost story, as the safest situation, the family retired. The gate below was of iron, for your Border reiver was no squeamish sort, and would burn these domestic garrisons alive without hesitation. Therefore in the most approved type of fortress there was nothing inflammable. Sympathy, however, would be wasted on those old-time cultivators, for they all took a turn at armed cattle-lifting as occasion offered, and found the readiest way of stocking their farms with every requisite to be that of stealing what they required.
For why? Because the good old ruleSufficeth them: the simple planThat they should take who have the power,And they should keep who can.
For why? Because the good old ruleSufficeth them: the simple planThat they should take who have the power,And they should keep who can.
Short and sudden forays were characteristic of this kind of life. The Border cattle-lifter came and went in the twinkling of an eye, and drove the captured flocks and herds away with him at a rate no merely honest drover ever marshalled his sheep and heifers to market. There must have been many highly desirable, but inanimate and not easily portable, things which the raiders were obliged to leave behind, as one of this kidney regretted in casting a last glance at a hayrick he had no means of lifting. “Had ye but four feet, ye suld no stand lang there,” said he, as he turned to go.
The mouldering old tower here at Cockburnspath belonged to the Earls of Home. Beautifully situatedfor preying upon occasional travellers, the glen and the foaming torrent below have no doubt received the bodies of many a one who in the old days was rash enough to pass within sight of the old tower. The comparatively modern bridge that takes a flying leap across the ravine is the successor of an ancient one of narrower span that still, covered with moss and ferns, arches over the water, deep down in the hollow, and is popularly supposed to be the oldest bridge in Scotland. A dense tangle of red-berried rowan-trees, firs, and oaks overhangs the gorge. Altogether a place that calls insistently to be sketched and painted, but a place, from the military point of view, to be wary of; being a position, as Cromwell in one of his despatches says, “where one man to hinder is better than twelve to make way.” It was at the “strait pass at Copperspath,” as he calls it, that the great general, writing after the battle of Dunbar, found plenty to hinder.
If ever general profited more by the mistakes of the enemy than by his own tactical ability, it was Cromwell at this juncture. The Scots under Leslie had cooped him up at Dunbar, and, surrounded by the enemy, who occupied the heights and closed every defile that led to a possible line of retreat, he must, diseased and famishing as were his forces, have capitulated, for the sea was at his back, and no help possible from that direction. It was then that Leslie made his disastrous move from the hills, and came down upon the English in the levels of Broxburn, to the south of Dunbar town, where Cromwell had his headquarters; and it was then that Cromwell, seizing the moment when the enemy, coming down in a dense mass upon a circumscribed space by Broxburn Glen, retrieved the situation, and, directing a cavalry movement upon Leslie’s forces, had the supreme relief of seeing them broken up and stamped into the earth by the furious charge of his horsemen. The fragments of the Scottish army, routed with a slaughter of three thousand, and ten thousand prisoners, fled, and Cromwell’s contemplated retreat to Berwick was no longer a necessity. Indeed, thewhole of the Lowlands of Scotland now lay open before him, and he entered Edinburgh with little opposition.
Cockburnspath Tower
It is a distance of nine miles between the village of Cockburnspath and Dunbar, the road going parallel with the sea all the way. First it goes dizzily over the profound rift of Dunglass Dene, spanned at a height of a hundred and twenty-five feet above the rocky bed of a mountain stream by the bold arch of the railway viaduct and by the road bridge itself. It is a scene of rare beauty, and the walk by the zigzagging path among the thickets and the trees, down to where the sea comes pounding furiously into a little cove, a quarter of a mile below, wholly charming. Away out to sea is the lowering bulk of the Bass Rock, a constant companion in the view approaching Dunbar.
The direct road for Edinburgh avoids Dunbar altogether, forking to the left at Broxburn where the battlefield lay, where the burn still flows across the road as it did on the day of “Dunbar Drove,” as Carlyle calls that dreadful rout. Here “the great road then as now crosses the Burn of Brock. . . . Yes, my travelling friends, vehiculating in gigs or otherwise over that piece of London road, you may say to yourselves, Here, without monument, is the grave of a valiant thing which was done under the Sun; the footprint of a Hero, not yet quite indistinguishable, is here!”
Ahead, with its great red church on a hillock, still somewhat apart of the south end of the town, is Dunbar, the first characteristically Scottish place to which we come. It is not possible to compete with Carlyle’s masterly word-picture of it, which presents the place before you with so marvellous a fidelity to its spirit and appearance:—“The small town of Dunbar stands high and windy, looking down over its herring-boats, over its grim old castle, now much honeycombed, on one of those projecting rock-promontories with which that shore of the Firth of Forth is niched and vandyked as far as the eye can reach. A beautiful sea; good land too, now that the plougher understands his trade;a grim niched barrier of whinstone sheltering it from the chafings and tumblings of the big blue German Ocean.” There you have Dunbar.
The Tolbooth, Dunbar
Let us add some few details to the master’s fine broad handling; such as the fact that its streets are wondrously cobble-stoned, that those whinstone rocks are red and give a dull, blood-like coloration to the scene, and that the curious old whitewashed Tolbooth in the High Street is the fullest exemplar of the Scottish architectural style. Windy it is, as Carlylesays, and with a rawness in its air that calls forth shivers from the Southron even in midsummer. Here the stranger new to Scotland is apt to see for the first time the sturdy fishwives and lasses who, still often with bare feet, go along the streets carrying prodigiously weighty baskets of fish on their backs, sometimes secured by a leather strap that goes from the basket around the head and forehead!
One leaves Dunbar by wriggly and exiguous streets, coming through the fisher villages of Belhaven and West Barns to where the main avoiding route rejoins at Beltonford. The Scottish Tyne winds through the flat meadows on the right—at such fortunate times, that is to say, as when it does not pretend to be an inland sea and take the meadows, the road, and the railway for its province. The road, too, is flat, and the railway, which hugs it closely, the same. A good road, too, and beautiful. Midway of it, towards East Linton, are the farmsteads and ricks of Phantassie, at which spot Rennie, the engineer who built London Bridge, and heaven and Dr. Smiles alone know how many harbours, was born in 1761. “Phantassie” is a name that sorely piques one’s curiosity, so odd is it; but the group of farm-buildings is commonplace enough, if more than commonly substantial. No fantasy in their design, at any rate.
At East Linton we cross the Tyne which, crawling through the meadows, plunges here in cascades under the road bridge, amid confused rocks. The railway crosses it too, close by, and spans the road beyond; and the village huddles together at an angle of the way. A long ascent out of it commands wide views of agricultural Haddingtonshire, and of that surprising mountainous hill, Traprain Law, rising out of the plain to a height of over seven hundred feet.
Not merely a surprising hill, but one with an astonishing story. It had always been thought that treasure was buried there, among the traces of ancient buildings; and accordingly, with the permission of Right Honourable A. J. Balfour, on whose land thehill is situated, excavations were begun in 1919. It was found that the hill-top had been inhabited intermittently over remote periods, and diggings were made into successive strata of hearths and floorings. At first the “finds” were of minor articles: bronze ornaments, glass and pottery, fragments of iron, mostly of Celtic origin, but some Roman. The great discovery was made on May 12th, 1919, when a workman, driving a pick through a floor, brought up a silver bowl on the point of it. A deep recess was then discovered, filled with treasure: bowls, spoons, cups, saucers, and a miscellaneous collection of plate, mostly cut to pieces in strips folded over and hammered down into packets of silver. Although it was grievous to look upon that destruction, a good many of the fragments retained their original decoration. They appear to be partly of Romano-Christian origin, for the sacred symbol occurs among them, and on one piece is the inscription “Jesus Christus.” Other pieces are almost as certainly pagan, hearing as they do figures of Pan and Hercules. Among them were four coins: the earliest of the Emperor Valerius, whose reign beganA.D.364, and the latest of Honorius, who diedA.D.463. A metal belt of Saxon character was among this treasure-trove.
It appeared, therefore, that this hoard was a relic of one of the sea-rovers’ raids on this coast in the fifth or sixth century, and that the spoils had in some cases come from plundered religious houses. The raiders were perhaps disturbed in their activities, and buried their loot in the expectation of returning for it at some more suitable time.
But they never returned. What happened to them is a vain conjecture. They may have been found here and slain by some stronger force, and perhaps they were lost at sea. In any case, their hoard lay here for close upon one thousand five hundred years. What they had hoped to carry away is now an exhibit in the Scottish National Museum at Edinburgh.
To the north-going cyclist the road presently makes ample amends for the mile-long rise, for, once topping it,a gentle but continuous descent of four miles leads into Haddington, down a road that for the most part could scarce be bettered, so excellent its surface, so straight its course, and so beautifully sylvan its surroundings. Hailes Castle is finely seen on the left during this descent, its ruined walls and ivy-covered towers wrapped three parts round with the thick woodlands that clothe the lower slopes of Traprain Law. Mary, Queen of Scots, and her evil spirit, the sinister Bothwell, had Hailes Castle for their bower of love, and Wishart the martyr had a cell in it for a prison, so that its present beauty of decay lacks nothing of historic interest.
Nor does the fine mansion of Amisfield, through whose park-like lands the road now descends. Amisfield has lurid associations. Under the name of New Mills, it was in 1687 the scene of a dreadful parricide, and was at a later period purchased by the infamous Colonel Francis Charteris, who might aptly be termed (in Mr. Stead’s phrase), the Minotaur of his day. It was he who renamed it after the home of his family in Nithsdale. As his exploits belong chiefly to London, we, fortunately, need not enlarge upon them here. The parricide already referred to was the murder of his father by Philip Standsfield. Sir James Standsfield had set up a cloth factory here, on the banks of the Tyne, and had done remarkably well. He had two sons, Philip and John. The eldest had been a scapegrace ever since that day when, as a student at St. Andrews, he had gone to a meeting-house and flung a loaf at the preacher. It took the astonished divine on the side of the head and aroused within him the spirit of prophecy. Addressing the crowded chapel at large (for the loaf had been thrown unseen from some dark corner), he saw in a vision the death of the culprit, at whose end there would be more present than were hearing him that day; “and the multitude then present,” adds the chronicler, “was not small.”
Philip had a short and ignominious military career on the Continent, and returned home to prey upon hisfather; who, for sufficient reasons, disinherited him in favour of his younger brother. In the end, aided by some servants, he strangled the old man and threw the body in the river. For this he was hanged at Edinburgh, and as the hanging was not effectual, the executioner had to finish by strangling him, in which public opinion of that time saw the neat handiwork of Providence.
Herebegins Haddington, and here end good roads for the space of a mile; and not until the burgh is left behind do they recommence. The traveller who might set out in quest of bad roads and vile paving would without difficulty discover the objects of his search at Haddington. He might conceivably find as bad elsewhere, but worse examples would be miraculous indeed. We have encountered many stretches of road, thus far, of a mediæval quality, but the long road to the North boasts, or blushes for, nothing nearly so craggy as are the cobble-stoned thoroughfares of this “royal burgh.” The entrance to the town from the south resembles, in its picturesque squalor, that to one of the decayed towns of Brittany. Unswept, tatterdemalion as it is, it still remains a fitting subject for the artist’s pencil, for here beside the narrow street stands the rugged mass of Bothwell Castle, patched and clouted from time to time, but happily as yet unrestored. Over the lintels of old houses adjoining, still remain the pious invocations and quaint devices originally sculptured there for the purpose of averting the baleful glance of the Evil Eye.
The initial letter in the name of Haddington is a superfluity and a misuse of the letter H, the name deriving from that of Ada, Countess of Northumberland and ancestress of Scottish monarchs; foundress also of a nunnery here which has long gone the way of such mediæval things. The Tyne borders this town, andsometimes floods it, as may be readily seen by an inscription on the wall of a house in High Street, which tells how the water on October 4, 1775, suddenly rose eight feet and three quarters. A curious legend, too, still survives, recording a flood in 1358, when a nun of the pious Ada’s old foundation, seizing a statue of the Virgin out of its niche, waded into the torrent and threatened to throw it in unless the Blessed Mary instantly caused the waters to subside. That they immediately did so appears to have been taken as evidence of the effective moral suasion thus applied.
Bothwell Castle
Haddington Abbey, the successor of earlier buildings, and now itself partly ruined, stands by the inconstant river, the nave, now the parish church, and the choir roofless, open to the sky. It is here within these grass-grown walls that “Jane Welsh Carlyle, spouse of Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea, London,” lies, as the remorseful epitaph says, “suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out.” The spot where the Abbey stands, by the dishevelled and tumbledown quarter of Nungate, is the more abject now in that itstill possesses old mansions that tell of a more prosperous past. Here, on the river-bank, neglected and forlorn like everything around, is the fine old screen of the Bowling Green, where no one has, for a century past, played bowls, unless indeed the wraiths of bygone Scottish notables haunt the spot o’ nights and play ghostly games, like the Kaatskill gnomes inRip Van Winkle. It is from the other side of the river that the Abbey is best seen, its roofless central tower, theLucernia Laudoniae, or “Lamp of Lothian,” still showing those triple lancets in every face which, according to the legend, obtained for it that title. To obtain this view, the Abbey bridge is crossed, which even now vividly illustrates on its wall the ready way the old burgh had with malefactors. From it projects a great hook, rusty for long want of usage, from which were hanged the reivers, the horse-thieves, and casual evildoers, with jurisdiction of the most summary kind. No Calcraft science with it either, with neck broken in decent fashion, but just a hauling up of the rope and a tying of it to some handy stanchion, and the unhappy malefactor left to throttle by slow degrees. No other such picturesque hanging-place asthis, but what is scenery to a criminal about to be hanged like a tom-cat caught killing chickens.
Haddington Abbey, from Nungate
The crest, arms, trade-mark or badge of Haddington is a goat. There is no doubt about that, for Billy (or is it a Nanny?) has his (or her) effigy on many of the old buildings. Only by comparison and by slow degrees is it that the stranger arrives at the conclusion that it is a goat, for the drawing of many of these representations leaves much to be desired. Some resemble an elephant, others a horse, others yet what “the mind’s eye, Horatio” might conceive a Boojum to be like; but in the open space where High Street and Market Street join, the modern Market Cross, surmounted by a more carefully executed carving, determines the species.
This is the centre of the town and neater than its entrance from the south. The steepled classic building close by is not a church but the Town House, masquerading in ecclesiastical disguise, very much as Berwick’s Town Hall does. From this point it is only seventeen miles into Edinburgh; but in 1750 and for long after the coach journey employed the best efforts of the local stage during the whole day. Musselburgh, little more than eleven miles away, was reached in time for dinner, and only when evening was come did the lumbering vehicle lurch into its destination in Auld Reekie, when every one went to bed, bruised and weary with the toils of the expedition. The road at that time must have resembled the specimen of roadway still adorning the south entrance to Haddington.
Edinburgh, from Tranent
To-day, happily, it is in good condition as far as Levenhall, seven miles short of our journey’s end, whence it is bad beyond the credibility of those who have not seen it. Gladsmuir, Macmerry, and Tranent are interposed between; places that sink their memories of the battle of Prestonpans in iron-founding and coal-digging and suchlike, disregarding the futilities of the Stuarts. As for Macmerry, whose name prefigures orgies at the most of it, or sober revelry at the very least, it is odds against your finding as depressing a placewithin a hundred miles. If place-names were made to fit, why, then, Macdolour might suit it to a marvel. Why? Just because it stands at the crest of a barren knowe; an ugly row of cottages on either side, with cinders and dust, clinkers and mud in front of them, and some gaunt works within eyeshot. God knows who christened the place, or if the name signified merriment, but, if it did, either the scene has changed wholly since then, or else he was a humorist of the sardonic sort who so dubbed it. Tranent, too, a townlet subsisting upon collieries: how grimly commonplace! But it at least has this advantage, that from its elevated foothold it looks down upon the Firth of Forth, that noble firth which Victor Hugo blundered over so whimsically in rendering it as “la Premiére de la Quatrième.” Seen under the summer sun, how glorious that seaward view, with the villages of Preston and Cockenzie, half hidden by their woodlands, by the level shores. Half-way down from Tranent’s hillside you see a fine panorama: Arthur’s Seat in front, Calton Hill and its Nelson’s column, peering from behind, and the distant shores of Fife, with blowing smoke-clouds, many miles away. Between Arthur’s Seat and the Calton, Edinburgh is hid, nine miles from this point. Down in the levels in the mid-distance there are hints of Musselburgh in smoke-wreaths and peeping towers; and mayhap, while you gaze, the southward-bound train, with its white puff of steam, is seen setting forth on its long journey Londonwards. In these levels was fought the battle of Prestonpans, Sunday, September 21, 1745, around that village of Preston and those briny meads where the salt-pans used to be and are no longer.
Preston—formerly Priest’s Town—got its name at the time when it was part of the celebrated Abbey of Newbattle. The monks of that religious house were the first discoverers of coal in Scotland, and also, in the twelfth century, made this district the seat of a manufacture of salt. Prestonpans, indeed, at one time supplied the whole of the East Coast with salt, and itwas only on the repeal of the Salt Duty that this old town fell into decay. Women, known as salt-wives, a class almost as picturesque as the fish-wives of Newhaven, used to carry the salt in creels on their backs, to sell in Edinburgh and other towns.
In an orchard stands what was once the ancient village cross, erected in 1617, in place of an earlier. Well-known as the “Chapmen’s Cross,” it was the meeting-place of the chapmen, packmen, or pedlars of the Lothians. They gathered early in July, transacted the business of their guild and elected their “King” and his “Lord Deputy” for the ensuing year. The “ink-bottle,” cut in stone, into which they dipped their pens, is still visible on the base of the cross. The Bannatyne Club saved it from utter destruction, and instituted a convivial guild, the “Society of Chapmen of the Lothians,” visiting the cross every year, with Sir Walter Scott as one of their members.
The world has vastly changed since “the Forty-five.” It has, as a small detail, ceased to produce its salt by evaporation of sea water; and, a larger and more significant matter, no longer wages war for sake of dynasties. The Highlanders who fought and gained this fleeting victory for Prince Charlie were the last who drew the sword for Romance and Right Divine. Prince Charlie had moved out of his loyal Edinburgh at the approach of the English under Sir John Cope, who, of course, in that fine foolish manner of British officers, which will survive as long as the officers themselves, wholly underrated his enemy. He was defeated easily, with every circumstance of indignity, his soldiers fleeing in abject terror before the impetuous charge of the ferocious hairy-legged Highlanders, emerging, figures of grotesque horror, out of the mists slowly dispersing off the swampy fields in the laggard September sunrise.
The English numbered 2100 against the 1400 under Prince Charlie; but only four minutes passed between the attack and the flight. In that short space of timethe field was deserted and the clansmen, pursuing the terror-stricken rabble which just before had been a disciplined force, slew nearly four hundred of them. The total loss of the Highlanders in slain was thirty, nearly the whole of them falling in the first discharge of musketry. Almost incredible, but well-authenticated, stories are told of the cowardice of Cope’s regiments. Cope himself was swept away in the wild rush, vainly endeavouring to stem it, and it was not until they were two miles from the field, at St. Clement’s Wells, that he could bring them to a halt. Even then, the accidental discharge of a pistol scared them off again, and although no one pursued, they rode off with redoubled energy. This precipitate retreat of mounted troops over miles of country, from an unmounted enemy who were not pursuing them, is perhaps the most disgraceful incident in the military history of the country.
The flying infantry were in far worse case. In endeavouring to escape by climbing the park walls of Preston, they were cut down in great numbers by the terrible broadswords of the Highlanders. Colonel Gardiner and a brave few were cut down defending themselves on the field of battle. One story, of a piece with many others, relates how a Highlander, pursuing alone a party of ten soldiers, struck down the hindermost with his sword, and shouting, “Down with your arms!” called upon the others to surrender. They threw their weapons away without looking behind them, and the Highlander, his sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, drove them—nine of them!—prisoners into camp. Everywhere Cope, so helter-skelter was his flight, himself brought the first news of his defeat. He reached Coldstream that night, and did not rest until the next day he was within the sheltering fortifications of Berwick.
We will not further pursue the fortunes of the Young Pretender, but hurry on into Levenhall.
Where that battle was fought, there is to-day the most extensive cabbage-plant cultivation in Scotland. It is a usual thing in the early part of the year foralmost daily special cabbage trains to be despatched to all parts of Britain.
And so downhill, and then over the awful cobbles into the accursed town of Musselburgh. “Accursed,” not by reason of those self-same cobbles, but for the sacrilegious doings of its magistrates who rebuilt their Tolbooth, burnt after the battle of Pinkie, with stones from the Chapel of Loretto. Now that chapel, which stood at the entrance to the town, was the place of business of one of those roadside hermits of whom we have in these pages heard so much (would that he had a successor in these times, for then the road would perhaps be in better condition), and the Pope, indignant at the injury done to the wayside shrine, solemnly anathematised town and inhabitants in sleeping or waking, eating and drinking, at every conceivable time and every imaginable function. No Pope since that period seems to have removed the curse, and no one is particularly anxious that it should be removed, Musselburgh being rather proud of it than otherwise. When it begins to take effect will be quite time enough. There were those who at the close of the coaching days perceived the beginning of it, although then three hundred years overdue, but as the town has rather increased in prosperity since that period, the time evidently is not yet. Nor do the burghers anticipate it, for they still repeat the brave old rhyme:—
Musselburgh was a burghWhen Edinburgh was nane;And Musselburgh shall be a burghWhen Edinburgh is gane.
Musselburgh was a burghWhen Edinburgh was nane;And Musselburgh shall be a burghWhen Edinburgh is gane.
This, however, is a quibble, for Musselburgh derived its name from the “broch,” or bed, of mussels at the mouth of the river Esk. Looked at in this light, the statement is true enough and the prophecy a not particularly rash one. The sponsorial shell-fish have an honoured place in the town arms, in which three mussels are seen in company with three anchors: the motto “Honesty” writ large below. This wasprobably adopted at some period later than the purloining of the stones of the Loretto Chapel.
Musselburgh
The Town Hall, with that tower whose building brought about the curse, forms the centre of Musselburgh, a fishy, stony, picturesque place with four bridges over the Esk, leading to the western bank, where the fisher quarter of Fisherrow straggles towards Joppa, two miles distant. Joppa Pans are gone now, just as those other pans at Preston, but factories of sorts, with clustered chimney-stacks, are still grouped about the melancholy sea-shore, where gales set the very high-road awash on occasion. Not vulgar, modern factories, but of a certain age; old enough and grim enough to look like the scene of some thrilling story that yet awaits the telling. Somewhat thrilling is the report as to the condition of the road here in 1680, a complaint laid before the Privy Council stating that, four miles on the London side of Edinburgh, travelling was dangerous, and travellers to be pitied, “either by their coaches overturning, their horses falling, their carts breaking, their loads casting, or horses stumbling, and the poor people with burdens on their backs sorely discouraged; moreover, strangers do often exclaim thereat.” All this reads with a very modern touch tothose who know the road to-day, for it is as bad now as it could have been then, and so continues, in different kinds of badness, through adjoining Portobello into Edinburgh itself. Here seas of slimy mud, there precipitous setts, here again profound holes in the macadam, or tramway rails projecting above the road level, make these last miles wretched. Portobello, that suburban seaside resort of Edinburgh, fares in this respect no better than the rest of the way, and the original road across Figgate Whins, the lonely moor that was here before the first house of Portobello was built, could have been no worse. That house was the creation of a retired sailor who had been at the capture of Portobello in Central America by Admiral Vernon in 1739. He named it after that town, and when the present seaside resort began to spring up, it took the title. Now it has a promenade, a pier, hotels, and crowds of visitors in summer upon the sands, and calls itself “the Brighton of Scotland.” Observe that Brighton does not return the compliment, and has not yet begun to style itself “the Portobello of England.”
Leavingthe “Brighton of Scotland” behind, we come to the flat lands of Craigentinny, stretching away from the now suburban highway down to the wind-swept and desolate seashore, where the whaups and the sandpipers make mournful concerts in a minor key, to the accompaniment of the noise of the sullen breakers and the soughing of the wind amid the rustling bents. Overlooking the road, within sight and sound of the tinkling tramcars passing between Joppa, Portobello, and Edinburgh, is that singular monument, “Miller’s Tomb.”
William Henry Miller, whose remains lie beneath this pile of classic architecture, was an antiquary and bibliophile, and obtained his nickname of “MeasureMiller” from his habit of measuring the margins of the “tall copies” of the scarce books he bought. His beardless face and shrill voice led to the lifelong belief that he was really a woman. The tomb is elaborately decorated with a carved marble frieze representing the Song of Miriam and the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. Miller and his father were both Quakers, and the wealth of which they were possessed derived from a prosperous seedsman’s business in Canongate, Edinburgh. To the father came an adventure which does not fall to many men. He was married in 1789 for the third time, when nearly seventy years of age, to an Englishwoman, who conveyed him against his will in a post-chaise from Edinburgh to London.
Passing Craigentinny and Jock’s Lodge we are, in the words of the old song, “Within a mile of Edinburgh town.” The more modern and acceptable name of Jock’s Lodge is Piershill, but it has been known by the other for over two hundred and seventy years. Who the original Jock was seems open to doubt, but he is supposed to have been a beggar who built himself a hut on this then lonely road leading to Figgate Whins. Even in 1650, when Cromwell besieged Edinburgh, the spot had obtained its name, and is referred to as “that place called Jockis Lodge.” Towards the close of the eighteenth century a Colonel Piers had a villa here, pulled down in 1793, when barracks—known as Piershill Barracks—were built on the site. It is a district slowly emerging from the reproach of a disreputable past, when footpads and murderers haunted the muddy roads, or took refuge amid the towering rocks of Arthur’s Seat, Crow Hill, or Salisbury Craigs, or hid in the congenial sloughs of the Hunter’s Bog. Close by the road, at the entrance to the Queen’s Park of Holyrood, is Muschat’s Cairn, the place where Scott makes Jeanie Deans meet the outlaw Robertson. This heap of stones marks the spot where Nicol Muschat of Boghall, a surgeon, a man of infamous character, murdered his wife by cutting her throat in 1720, a crime which, with Scottish old-time mysticism, he saidwas committed by direct personal instigation of the devil. All the same, they hanged him for it in the Grassmarket, where martyrs “testified” of old and the criminals of “Auld Reekie” expiated their crimes.
Of course the approach to Edinburgh has, from the picturesque standpoint, been spoiled. Ranges of grim stone houses and sprawling suburbs now hem in the road and hide the view of Arthur’s Seat and its neighbouring eminences; but a few steps to the left serve to disclose them, the little loch of St. Margaret, and the ruined walls of St. Anthony’s Chapel on the hillside, once guarding the holy well. St. Anthony’s Chapel, within the rule of the Abbey of Holyrood, served another turn, for from its tower glimmered a beacon which in the old days guided mariners safely up the Forth, a service paid for out of the harbour dues.
The so-called “London” and “Regent” Roads that now lead directly into the New Town of Edinburgh are modern improvements upon the old approach through Canongate into the Old Town. If steep, rugged, and winding, the old way was at least more impressive, for it lay within sight of Holyrood Palace and brought the wayfarer into the very heart of Scott’s “own romantic town,” to where the smells and the dirt, the crazy tenement-houses and the ragged clouts hanging from dizzy tiers of windows, showed “Scotia’s darling seat” in its most characteristic aspects.
As Alexander Smith puts it, Scott discovered the city was beautiful, sang its praises to the world, “and he has put more coin into the pockets of its inhabitants than if he had established a branch of manufacture of which they had the monopoly.”
The distant view of Edinburgh is magnificent. The peaked and jagged masses of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Craigs, the monument-cumbered Calton Hill, the Castle Rock—all these combine to make the traveller eager to reach so picturesque a spot. Approaching it and seeing the smoke-cloud drifting with the breeze away from the hollow from which Edinburgh’s million chimneys are seen peering, oneinstantly notes the peculiar appropriateness of the Scots endearing epithet, “Auld Reekie.” But it was not only—if indeed at all—an admiration of the picturesque that made the sight of Edinburgh so welcome to old-time travellers. It was rather the prospect of coming to the end of their journey, and almost in sight of a comfortable hotel, that rendered the view so welcome to those who in the last thirty years or so of the coaching era made this trip of almost four hundred miles; but those who had come this way at an earlier period had no such comfortable prospect before them. Instead of putting up at some fine hospitable inn, such as they were used to even in the smaller English towns, they were set down at a “stabler’s,” the premises of one whose first business was to horse the coaches and to let saddle-horses, and who, as in some sort of an after-thought, lodged those who were obliged to journey about the country.
Calton Hill
A traveller arriving at Edinburgh in 1774, for instance, had indeed little comfort awaiting him. “One can scarcely form in imagination the distress of a miserable stranger on his first entrance into this city,” says one writing at this period. No inn better than an alehouse, no decent or cleanly accommodation, nor in fact anything fit for a gentleman. “On my first arrival,” says this traveller, “my companion and self, after the fatigue of a long day’s journey, were landed at one of these stable-keepers’ (for they have modesty to give themselves no higher denomination) in a part of the town which is called the Pleasance; and on entering the house we were conducted by a poor girl without shoes or stockings, and with only a single linsey-woolsey petticoat which just reached half-way to her ankles, into a room where about twenty Scotch drovers had been regaling themselves with whisky and potatoes. You may guess our amazement when we were informed that this was the best inn in the metropolis, and that we could have no beds unless we had an inclination to sleep together, and in the same room with the company which a stage-coach had that moment discharged. ‘Well,’ said I to my friend, ‘there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be able to repose ourselves at some coffee-house.’ Accordingly, on inquiry, we discovered that there was a good dame by the Cross who acted in the double capacity of pouring out coffee and letting lodgings to strangers, as we were. She was easily to be found out, and, with all the conciliating complaisance of aMaitresse d’Hôtel, conducted us to our destined apartments, which were indeed six stories high, but so infernal in appearance that you would have thought yourself in the regions of Erebus. The truth is, I will venture to say, you will make no scruple to believe when I tell you that in the whole we had only two windows, which looked into an alley five feet wide, where the houses were at least ten stories high and the alley itself was so sombre in the brightest sunshine that it was impossible to see any object distinctly.”
Private lodgings, just as those described above, were the resort of those who had neither friends nor acquaintance in Edinburgh at that time; but travellers in Scotland were nearly always exercising their ingenuity to come, at the end of their day’s journey, to the house of some friend or some friend’s friend, to whom before starting they had been careful to obtain letters of introduction. So old and so widespread a custom was this that, so far back as 1425, we find an Act of James the First of Scotland actually forbidding all travellers resorting to burgh towns to lodge with friends or acquaintances, or in any place but the “hostillaries,” unless indeed he was a personage of consequence, with a great retinue, in which case he might accept a friend’s hospitality, provided that his “horse and meinze” were sent to the inns.
Of course such an Act was doomed to fall into neglect, but the innkeepers, equally of course during a long series of years, almost ceased to exist. A few “stablers’” establishments became known as “inns” at about the period of Doctor Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh. They were chiefly situated in the Pleasance, or in that continuation of it, St. Mary’s Wynd (now St. Mary Street). These inns, such as they were, burst upon the by no means delighted gaze of the wayfarer from England as he entered the historic town of Edinburgh, and when he saw them he generally lifted up his voice and cursed the fate that had sent him so far from home and into so barbarous a country.
The Pleasance was largely in receipt of the traffic to and from the south until the construction of the North and South Bridges, opened in 1769 and 1788, diverted it to a higher level. We may look in vain nowadays in the Pleasance for the inns of that day. They are demolished and altered so greatly as to be unrecognisable; but the “White Horse,” which stands in a court away down Canongate, will give us an idea of the kind of place. Situated in “White Horse,” or Davison’s Close in Canongate, and reached from that street by a low-browed archway, it remains aperfect example of the Edinburgh inn of nearly three hundred years ago. An inn no longer, but occupied in tenements, the internal arrangements are somewhat altered, but the time when the house extended a primitive hospitality to travellers is not difficult to reconstruct in the imagination. To it, at the end of their journeys, came those wearied ones, to find accommodation of the most intimate and domestic kind. Kitchen and dining-room were one, and it was scarce possible for a guest to obtain a bedroom to himself. Dirt was accepted as inevitable. In fact, the modern “dosser” is better and more decently housed. To the “White Horse” came others—those about to set out upon their travels. Booted and spurred, wills made and saddle-bags packed, they resorted hither to hire horses for their journeys, and it is not unlikely that the old house saw in early times many a quaking laird, badly wanted by theGovernment, slinking through the archway from the Canongate, to secure trusty mounts for instant flight. Scott, indeed, has made it the scene of strange doings in hisWaverley.
The “White Horse” Inn
This is the oldest house in Edinburgh ever used as an inn, but must not be confused with that other “White Horse,” long since demolished, made famous by Doctor Johnson.
It was in 1773 that Johnson reached Edinburgh. He put up at the “White Horse” in Boyd’s Close, called, even in those uncleanly times, “that dirty and dismal” inn, kept by James Boyd. The great man immediately notified his arrival to Boswell in this short note:—
“Saturday night.—Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being just arrived at Boyd’s.”
When Boswell arrived, falling over himself in his eagerness, he found the Doctor furiously angry. Doubtless he had been conducted to his room, as was not unusually the case, by some dirty sunburnt wench, without shoes or stockings, a fit object for dislike; but the chief cause of his anger was the waiter, who had sweetened his lemonade without the ceremony of using the sugar-tongs. He threw the lemonade out of window, and seemed inclined to throw the waiter after it.
“Peter Ramsay’s” was a famous inn, situated at the foot of St. Mary’s Wynd, next the Cowgate Port. To it came travellers along both the east and the south roads. Ramsay advertised it in 1776 as being “a good house for entertainment, good stables for above one hundred horses, and sheds for about twenty carriages.” In 1790, he retired with a fortune of £10,000. But in the best of these old Edinburgh inns the beds well merited a description given of them as “dish-clouts stretched on grid-irons.”
First among the innkeepers of this unsanctified quarter to remove from it into the New Town was James Dun. He was a man notable among his kind, having not only been the first to call himself an“innkeeper” instead of a “stabler,” but the greatly daring person who first used the outlandish word “Hotel” in Edinburgh. He began “hotel”-keeping in the flats above the haberdashery shop of John Neale, who, two years before, in 1774, had built the first house in the New Town. Neale himself was a pioneer of considerable nerve, for although the New Town had been projected and building-sites laid out on what is now the chief ornament of it, Princes Street, prospective tenants were shy of so bleak and exposed a situation as this then was. They preferred to live in the dirty cosiness of the old wynds and closes, and so the New Town seemed likely to be a paper project for years to come. At this juncture the Town Council made a sporting offer of exemption from all local taxes for the first who would build a house there. Neale was this pioneer, and he built the house that still stands next the Register House, the most easterly house in Princes Street.
Dun, to whom he had let the upper part, immediately displayed a great gilded sign, “Dun’s Hotel,” whereupon the Lord Provost, representing public feeling, wrote objecting to the foreign word “Hotel,” saying that, whatever might be the real character of his establishment, he might at least avoid the scandalous indecency of publicly proclaiming it!