[Original]
A d——d deep, black, blackguard-looking abyss of a hole it is, and goes straight down from the road-side, as perpendicular as it can do, to be a heathery brae. At the bottom there is a small bit of a brook, that you would think could hardly find its way out from the hills that are so closely jammed round it."
And so, finally, having overshot the limits of Tweed and her tributaries, we cast back to the hills on the immediate border-line of the two kingdoms, and pass into the country of Dandie Dinmont.
CHAPTER XVI LIDDESDALE, HERMITAGE, CASTLETON
Coming into Liddesdale by the route followed by Prince Charlie, over the hills by Note o' the Gate, one finds, a few miles past that curiously-named spot and no great distance from the road, the scene of a momentous battle of ancient times. It is claimed that it was here on Dawstane Rig the mighty struggle took place in the year 603 between Edelfrid, King of the Northumbrians, and Aidan, King of the Scots, the result of which, says Bede, writing a century and a quarter later, was that "from that time no king of the Scots durst come into Britain to make war on the Angles to this day." As written by Bede, the name of the place where the battle was fought is Uaegsastan,—a "famous place," he calls it. Dalston, near Carlisle, also claims the honour of being the true site of this great defeat of the Scots; But Dawstane Rig seems the more probable spot, for, judging from the number of camps in the immediate vicinity, it must assuredly in old days have answered the description of a "famous place." There are numerous signs, also, that a great fight did at some remote period take place here; traces of escarpments are numerous on the hill side, arrowheads and other suggestive implements have frequently been picked up, and over all the hill are low cairns or mounds of stones, probably burial places of the slain. So far as I am aware, no excavations have ever been made here, the dead—if these stones do indeed cover the dead—sleep undisturbed where they fell. But if the work were judiciously done, it would be interesting and instructive to make a systematic search over the reputed battle ground.
Not far distant from this ancient field of battle, but a little closer to the base of Peel Fell, runs a Roman road, the old Wheel Causeway, and into, or almost into, this road comes the Catrail, here finally disappearing. I have never heard any suggestion made of a reason why this Picts' Work Dyke should stop abruptly in, or at least on the very verge of, a Roman high-way. It is difficult to accept the theory that the Catrail was a road, because, in places where it crosses streams, no attempt is made to diverge towards a ford, or even to an easy entrance to the river bed; it plunges in where the bank is often most inconveniently precipitous, and emerges again where it is equally steep. Yet if it was not a road, why should it run into and end in a recognised road that must have been in existence when the Catrail was formed?
Up the Wheel Causeway, a little distance beyond the spot where the Catrail disappears, and between the Wormscleuch and Peel burns, there stood at one time an ancient ecclesiastical building, the Wheel Chapel, of whose walls faint traces still remain. It was in this building that Edward I of England passed the night of 24th May 1296, during his Bolder Progress; in the record of his expedition the chapel is spoken of as the "Wyel." When the Statistical Account of 1798 was written, probably a considerable part of the ruin yet stood, for the writer of that account speaks of it as being of "excellent workmanship," and "pretty large." And he remarks on the great number of grave-stones in the churchyard, from which he con eludes that the surrounding population must at one rime have been very considerable. Over all this district, indeed, that seems to have been the case. Chapels were numerous among these hills; in this part of Liddesdale there were no fewer than five, and the Wheel Chapel itself is not more than six miles or so, as the crow flies, from Southdean, where it is certain that about the date of the battle of Otterburne the population was much more dense than it is at the present day.