If, as Sydney Smith has said, "it is good for any man to be alone with nature and himself"; if "it is well to be in places where man is little and God is great"; then assuredly it is well to be alone, or with a friend "who knows when silence is more sociable than talk," up in the great solitude by Gameshope Burn. Nowhere in Scotland can one find a glen wilder or more impressive, nowhere chance on a scene which more readily helps the harassed mind to slip from under the burden of worldly cares. For half a mile or more from its mouth hut a commonplace, open, boulder-strewn mountain burn, above that point the broken, craggy hills fall swiftly to the lip of a brawling torrent, which drops foaming by linn after linn deep into the seething black cauldrons below, lingers there a minute, then hurries swiftly onward by cliff and fern-clad mossy bank. Above each pool cling rowan trees, rock rooted, a blaze of scarlet and orange if the month be September, but beautiful always at whatever season you may visit them. Everywhere the air is filled with the deep murmur and crash of falling waters; yet, clamber to that lonely old track which leads to the solitary cottage of a shepherd, and around you is a silence almost oppressive, emphasised rather than broken by the ill-omened croak of a raven, or by the thin anxious bleat of a ewe calling to its lamb from far up the mountain side.
[Original]
A mile past the shepherd's substantially built little house—it had need be strong of frame to stand intact up here against the winter storms—on your left is Donald's Cleuch, reminiscent of the Reverend Donald Cargill, a hero of the Covenant, Minister of the Barony Church in Glasgow in 1655, who was afterwards deprived of his benefice for denouncing the Restoration. The legend is, I presume, that Cargill hid somewhere in the wild moorland hereabout, up the Donald's Cleuch burn perhaps, or a long mile further on, by Gameshope Loch. A man might have lain long, in the summer time, amongst these rugged hills, safe hidden from any number of prying dragoons; but Heaven help him if he lay out there in the winter season. All is wild, broken country, peat-hags, mosses, and deep cleuchs, over which one goes best a-foot—and, of necessity, best with youth on one's side if the journey be of any great length.
From the height at the head of Donald's Cleuch burn, one looks down on that gloomy tarn, Loch Skene, lying but a few short miles on the Yarrow side of the watershed. Mr. Skene of Rubislaw tells—it is in Lockhart's life—how when Sir Walter Scott and he visited this loch, a thick fog came down over the hills, completely bewildering them, and "as we were groping through the maze of bogs, the ground gave way, and down went horse and horsemen pell-mell into a slough of peaty mud and black water, out of which, entangled as we were with our plaids and floundering nags, it was no easy matter to get extricated." Savage and desolate are perhaps the words that best describe Loch Skene; yet, in fine summer weather, how beautiful it may be! How beautiful, indeed, all this wild waste of hills where those dour old Covenanters were wont to lurk, never quite free from dread of the dragoons quartered but a few miles away over the hills at Moffat. Tales of the Covenanting times, such, for instance, as "The Brownie of Bodesbeck," used to possess an intense fascination for Scottish boys; every Covenanter was then an immaculate hero, and, I suppose, few boys took any but the worst view of Claverhouse, or refused credence to any of the countless legends of him. and of his diabolical black charger, of which we firmly believed the story that it could course a hare along the side of a precipice. A point in some of those tales that used to interest and puzzle at least one boy, was the mysterious fashion in which a fugitive would at times disappear from ken when hard pressed on the open moor, and when apparently cut off from all chance of escape. A possible explanation presented itself to me one day, a summer or two back, when making my way across the bleak upland that lies between Gameshope Loch and Gameshope Burn. As I walked over the broken peaty surface of the plateau, but not yet arrived where the land begins to drop abruptly into the Gameshope Glen, a covey of grouse got up almost at my feet. The day was windless and very still, and as I stood watching the flight of the birds, the faint melodious tinkle of underground water somewhere very near to me fell on my ear. Glancing around, I saw on the flat ground in front of me within a yard of my feet, what appeared to be a hole, almost entirely concealed by heather. It was from this direction that the sound of the drip, drip of falling water seemed to come. Kneeling down, I pulled the heather aside, and found a hole two or three feet in diameter, and beneath it a roomy kind of chamber hollowed out of the peaty soil. It was a place perhaps five feet deep, big enough at a pinch to conceal half a dozen men; a place from which—unless there was a way out from below—a man might never find exit, if inadvertently he fell in and in his fall chanced to break a limb. In that wild region the prospect of his ever being discovered by searchers would be very small. Unseen of man, he might lie in that peaty grave till his bones bleached, rest in that lonely spot till the last dread trump called him forth to judgment.
The day after I had chanced on this strange cavern, I returned with a friend to whom I wanted to show it, and though we knew that we must be often within a few yards of the spot, search as we might we never again found that hole. Was it in some cache such as this—perhaps in this very spot—that Covenanters sometimes lay hid? Here two or three might have lain for days or weeks at a time, sheltered from wind or rain and secure from hostile eyes; it would be warm enough, and the drip of water into it is so slight as to be hardly worth naming. Doubtless if one took careful landmarks it would be easy to find again, once knowledge of its whereabouts was gained. And so the lurking Covenanters would have had small difficulty; but without such landmarks, to find it except by chance seems hopeless. None of the shepherds knew of the hole, save one old man who said he had heard there was some such place. But one might go a hundred times across that moor, passing close to the hidden mouth, and unless the faint tinkle of water betrayed it, or by remote chance one blundered in, its existence would never even be suspected. It is a place worthy to be the abode of the Brown Man of the Muirs; and the district is wild and lonesome enough to breed the most eerie of superstitions.
Harking back now to the Tweed,—a little way above the bridge at Tweedsmuir on the right bank there is a huge standing stone, called the Giant's Stone, of which various legends are told. Two other stones lie close at hand, but these appear to be mere ordinary boulders. According to the Statistical Account of the Parish of 1833, this Giant's Stone is the sole survivor of a Druidical Circle; all its fellows were broken up for various purposes, and carted away; and we may be sure it was from no feeling of compunction that even the one was spared. Residents tell us that it was from behind this stone that a wily little archer in days of old sent an arrow into the heart of a giant on the far side of Tweed. The range is considerable; it must have been a glorious fluke. But I rather think the place that is credited with this event, and with the veritable grave of the slain giant, is higher up Tweed, opposite the Hawkshaw burn. Somewhere up this burn stood Hawkshaw Castle or Tower, home of that Porteous who gained unenviable notoriety for his feat of capturing at I alia Moss, with the aid of some of the moss-trooping fraternity, one of Cromwell's outposts, sixteen horse in all, and in cold blood afterwards executing the unfortunate troopers. A contemporary historian relates that: "The greatest releiff at this tyme was by some gentillmen callit moss-trouperis, quha, haiffing quyetlie convenit in threttis and fourties, did cut off numberis of the Englishes, and seased on thair pockettis and horssis." The "pockettis and horssis" were all in the ordinary way of business; it is another affair when it comes to cutting the throats of defenceless captives.
A few miles further on, the road we follow passes Badlieu, a place famed as the home, away back in the eleventh century, of Bonnie Bertha, who captured the roving heart of one of our early Scottish Kings as he hunted here one day in the forest. Unhappily for Bertha, there was already a Scottish Queen, and when news of the King's infatuation came to that lady's ears, she—queens have been known to entertain such prejudices—disapproved so strongly of the new menage, that one afternoon when the king (who had been absent on some warlike expedition) arrived at Bertha's bower, he found the nest harried, and Bertha and her month-old babe lying dead. And ever after, they say, to the end the King cared no more to hunt, nor took pride in war, but wandered disconsolate, mourning for this Scottish Fair Rosamond. But how the rightful Queen fared thereafter, tradition does not say.
And now we come to Tweed Shaws, and Tweed's Well, the latter by popular repute held to be the source of Tweed. But there is a tributary burn which runs a longer course than this, rising in the hills much nearer to the head-waters of Annan. As is well known,