What changes little more than one hundred years have wrought in this countryside. Six years before the Statistical Account of 1798 was penned, there were neither roads nor bridges in Liddesdale; "through these deep and broken bogs and mosses we must crawl, to the great fatigue of ourselves but the much greater injury of our horses," pathetically says the reverend writer of the account. Every article of merchandise had to be carried on horseback. Sir Walter Scott himself—in August 1800—was the first who ever drove a wheeled vehicle among the Liddesdale hills, and we know from "Guy Mannering," and from Lockhart's "Life," pretty well what a wild country it then was. There was not an inn or a public house in the whole valley, says Lockhart; "the travellers passed from the shepherd's hut to the minister's manse, and again from the cheerful hospitality of the manse to the rough and jolly welcome of the homestead." Inns, to be sure, even now are not to be found, and are not needed, by every roadside, but at least there are excellent main roads down both Liddel and Hermitage, and a main line of railway runs through the valley; the moors are well drained, and the necessity no longer exists to "crawl" through broken bogs and mosses. Yet still the hills in appearance are as they were in Scott's day, still they retain features which render them distinct from any other of the Border hills; they are "greener and more abrupt.... sinking their sides at once upon the river."
"They had no pretensions to magnificence of height, or to romantic shapes, nor did their smooth swelling slopes exhibit either rocks or woods. Yet the view was wild, solitary, and pleasingly rural. No enclosures, no roads, almost no tillage,—it seemed a land which a patriarch would have chosen to feed his flocks and herds. The remains of here and there a dismantled and ruined tower showed that it had once harboured beings of a very different description from its present inhabitants,—those freebooters, namely, to whose exploits the wars between England and Scotland bear witness." The description might almost have been written today. The wild, hard riding, hard living freebooter of Johnie Armstrong's day is gone, leaving but a name and a tradition, or at most the mouldering walls of some old peel tower. But Dandie Dinmont himself, I think may still be found here in the flesh, as true a friend, as generous, as brave and steadfast as ever was his prototype,—but no longer as hard drinking. The days of "run" brandy from the Solway Firth are over, and the scene mentioned by Lockhart is now impossible, where Scott's host, a Liddesdale farmer, on a slight noise being heard outside, the evening of the traveller's arrival, banged up from his knees during family prayers, shouting "By——, here's the keg at last!"
On hearing the previous day of Scott's proposed visit, he had sent off two men to some smuggler's haunt to obtain a supply of liquor, that his reputation for hospitality might not be shamed. And here it was, to the great prejudice of that evening's family worship! I do not suppose that the present day "Dandie" leisters fish any longer,—though one would not take on oneself rashly to swear that such a thing is even now entirely impossible, but certainly within recent years fox hunts have taken place amongst these hills much after the fashion described in "Guy Mannering." In such a country, indeed, what other means can there he of dealing with the hill foxes?
There is another road into Liddesdale from the north, that which comes from Hawick up the Slitrig, past Stohs camp, then through the gap in the hills by Shankend and over the watershed by Limekilnedge, where Whitterhope Burn—tributary of Hermitage Water—takes its rise. As you drop down to heights less elevated, you pass on your left the Nine Stane Rig, a Druidical Circle, but locally more famed as the spot where the cruel and detestable Sorcerer, Lord Soulis, came to his grisly end. "Oh, BOIL him, if you like, but let me be plagued no more," cried (according to tradition) a Scottish Monarch, wearied by the importunities of those who endlessly brought before him their grievances against the wicked lord. So—as Leyden wrote—
"On a circle of stones they placed the pot,
On a circle of stones but barely nine;
They heated it red and fiery hot,
Till the burnished brass did glimmer and shine.
"They rolled him up in a sheet of lead—
A sheet of lead for a funeral pall;