XXX
“Seeing Scotland, 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legalised at the gate until 1856, when changes in the law rendered a part of the once-familiar notice in the window out-of-date.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.
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, for these 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. Joseph Atkinson, 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.
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 at a 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 angels weep; 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 served to 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.