HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN THE BORDER
CHAPTER I BERWICK, TWEED, WHITADDER
The "Border" is a magical word, and on either side of a line that constantly varied in the course of English and Scottish victories and defeats, all is enchanted ground, the home of memories of forays and fairies, of raids and recoveries, of loves and battles long ago. In the most ancient times of which record remains, the English sway, on the east, might extend to and include Edinburgh; and Forth, or even Tay, might be the southern boundary of the kingdom of the Scots. On the west, Strathclyde, originally Cymric or Welsh, might extend over Cumberland; and later Scottish kings might hold a contested superiority over that province. Between east and west, in the Forest of Ettrick, the place-names prove ownership in the past by men of English speech, of Cymric speech, and of Gaelic speech. From a single point of view you may see Penchrise (Welsh) Glengaber (Gaelic) and Skelfhill (English). Once the Border, hereabouts, ran slantwise, from Peel Fell in the Cheviots, across the Slitrig, a water which joins Teviot atHawick, thence across Teviot to Commonside Hill above Branksome tower, to the Rankle burn, near Buccleuch, an affluent of Ettrick. Thence, across Ettrick and Yarrow, over Minchmuir, where Montrose rode after the disaster at Philiphaugh, across Tweed, past the camp of Rink, to Torwoodlee, goes that ancient Border, marked by the ancient dyke called the Catrail, in which Sir Walter Scott once had a bad fall during his "grand rides among the hills," when he beat out the music of Marmion to the accompaniment of his horse's hooves. The Catrail was a Border, once, and is a puzzle, owing to its ditch between two ramparts. There are many hill forts, mounds even now strong and steep in some places, on the line of the Catrail. The learned derive the word from Welsh cad, Gaelic Cath, "a battle," and some think that the work defended the Border of the Christian Cymric folk of Strathclyde from the pagan English of Northumbria. In that case, Sir Herbert Maxwell has expressed the pious hope that "the Britons were better Christians than they were military engineers." Is it inconceivable that the word Catrail is a mere old English nickname for a ditch which they did not understand, the cat's trail, like Catslack, the wild cat's gap, and other local cat names? I am no philologist!
Once when taking a short cut across a hill round which the road runs from Branksome to Skelfhill, I came upon what looked like the deeply cut banks of an extinct burn. There was no water, and the dyke was not continued above or below. Walking on I met an old gentleman sketching a group of hill forts, artificial mounds, and asked him what this inexplicable deep cutting might be. "It is the Catrail," he said: I had often heard of it, and now I had seen it. The old man went on to show that the Border is still a haunted place. "Man, a queer thing happened to me on Friday nicht. I was sleeping at Tushielaw Inn, (on the Upper Ettrick) I had steikit the door and the windows: I woke in the middle o' the nicht,—there was a body in the bed wi' me!" (I made a flippant remark. He took no notice of it.) "I got up and lit the candle, and looked. There was naebody in the bed. I fell asleep, and wakened again. The body was there, it yammered. I canna comprehend it." Nor can I, but a pah of amateur psychical researchers hastened to sleep a night at Tushielaw. They were undisturbed; and the experience of the old antiquary was "for this occasion only."
"My work seeks digressions," says Herodotus, and mine has already wandered far north of the old Border line of Tweed on the east, and Esk on the western marches, far into what was once the great forest of Ettrick, and now is mainly pasture land, pastorum loca vasta. In the old days of the Catrail and the hill forts this territory, "where victual never grew," must have been more thickly populated than it has been in historic times.
