Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 117, vol. III, March 27, 1886

No. 117.—Vol. III.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 1886.
A few miles beyond the walls of ‘merrie Carlisle,’ and only just across the Border on the Scottish side, is a lonely old-world little village, whither, in days not yet remote, frequent couples, in life’s bright golden time, hurriedly resorted; no less eager to cross the bridge spanning the river Sark, which here forms the boundary of the two kingdoms, than, with blind trust in the future, to undertake the all-untried responsibilities of forbidden wedlock. The village itself consists of a long straight street of cleanly whitewashed houses, beyond which stretches the solitary tract of Solway moss, scene of many a Border foray, and of one miserable ‘rout’ in the days of the Scottish Jameses; while, towards England, the landscape is bounded by the ‘skyey heads’ of the Cumberland mountains, clad in such hues of grayish green as nature uses to modify her distant tints. Curious to view a spot so far renowned, albeit without design of invoking aid from any chance survivor of the ‘high-priests of Gretna Green,’ we alighted on the platform of its roadside station on the Glasgow and South-Western Railway one summer afternoon, and pursuing our way towards the village in company with a not uncommunicative policeman, quickly found many illusions dispelled, by no means least the widespread legend as to the officiating blacksmith. Our attention was ere long called to the figure of a middle-aged, by no means clerical-looking man, at the time engaged in filling his pipe by the wayside, with whom we entered into conversation. Nowise anxious to magnify his apostleship, our new friend somewhat deprecatingly acknowledged that the priestly mantle had descended upon his too unworthy shoulders, and that, indeed, but a few days prior to our visit, he had been called on to exercise the weighty functions of his office.
This man, by trade a mason, spoke, not without regret, of the good old days when fugitive lovers crowded to the Border village, the poorer sort being most often united at the tollhouse just across the bridge, while the more well-to-do betook themselves to the hotel, which, though no longer devoted to uses hymeneal, still stands at the entrance of the village street. The priestly office, it was said, had been filled, more or less worthily, by many, who, claiming no unbroken descent, had in a somewhat casual sort of way succeeded to it; and amongst others concerned in what certainly appeared to have been the staple trade of the place, the local postman was indicated as custodian of registers reaching back into the palmy days of Border marriage, and containing names no less remarkable for nobility of birth than for the possession of wealth and acres.