XXXI
Set in 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 or less 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 rule
Sufficeth them: the simple plan
That 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 situated for 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, the whole of the Lowlands of Scotland now lay open before him, and he entered Edinburgh with little opposition.
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.
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 Carlyle says, 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 the hill 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 began A.D. 364, and the latest of Honorius, who died A.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 his father; 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.