Below Denholm, but on the other side of the river, nearly opposite the junction of Rule Water with Teviot, is Minto, in the fourteenth century a property owned by one of that unruly clan, the Turnbulls. Later, it passed to the family of Stewart, and finally, somewhere about the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was bought by Sir Gilbert Elliot, ancestor of the Minto branch of that family. The present house dates only from 1814, but it has a curious legend attached to it, which is mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's diary, under date 23rd December, 1825. He says: "It is very odd that the common people about Minto and the neighbourhood will not believe at this hour that the first Earl is dead." [He died in June, 1814.] "They think he had done something in India which he could not answer for—that the house was rebuilt on a scale unusually large to give him a suite of secret apartments, and that he often walks about the woods and crags of Minto at night, with a white nightcap and long white beard. The circumstances of his having died on the road down to Scotland is the sole foundation of this absurd legend, which shows how willing the public are to gull themselves when they can find no one else to take the trouble. I have seen people who could read, write, and cipher, shrug their shoulders and look mysterious when this subject was mentioned. One very absurd addition was made on occasion of a great ball at Minto House, which it was said was given to draw all people away from the grounds, that the concealed Earl might have leisure for his exercise."
To the east of Minto House are Minto Crags, towering precipitous to a height of over seven hundred feet. On the summit is the ruin called Fatlips Castle, which is said to have been the stronghold of the fourteenth-century owner of Minto, Turnbull of Barnhill, a notorious Border freebooter. A small grassy platform, or level space, a little below the ruin, is called Barnhill's Bed, "Where Barnhill hew'd his bed of flint,"—a convenient spot, no doubt, in old days on which to station a sentry or look-out.
The third Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto was apparently in his own way something of a poet, but the ever tolerant Sir Walter Scott, to whom he used to read his compositions, confesses that the verses were "but middling," Sir Gilbert had, however, a better title, at least to collateral fame; he was the brother of the Jean Elliot who wrote that undying lament, the "Flowers of the Forest."
It is curious to note that in 1374 the church of Minto belonged to the diocese of Lincoln.
Here at Minto, if credence in the reality of Fairies no longer lingers amongst the people,—one of the writers of this volume records, some chapters back, that he found traces of the belief not very many years ago still surviving at Flodden Edge,—at least but a very few generations have passed since it died. Throughout Teviotdale, perhaps to a greater extent than in any other part of the Border, tales still are told which show how strong was once this belief in the existence of the Little Folk, and many of the customs that, we are told, were followed by country dwellers in order to propitiate the Good People, or to thwart their malevolence, are very quaint, Should it chance, for instance, that at the time a child was born the blue bonnet usually worn by the husband was not kept continually lying on the mother's bed, then there would be the most imminent danger of that child being carried off by the Fairies, and a changeling being left in its place. Many a fine child has been lost through neglect of this simple precaution. Generally, if the abduction took place before the child had been christened, a pig or a hedgehog, or some such animal, was substituted for the infant; but if the Fairies did not succeed in their design till after the child's baptism, then they left another bairn in its place, usually a peevish, ill-thriven, wizen-faced little imp. A tale is told of a woman who lived at Minto Cragfoot, and whose child, in consequence of some trifling lark of precaution in the matter of the blue bonnet, was carried off, and in the end was rescued only by the superior knowledge and power of a Presbyterian minister. Whilst she herself was engaged one day in gathering sticks for her fire, the woman had laid her child beside a bush on the hill side. She neither heard nor saw anything unusual, but on going to pick up her child at the close of her task, instead of her bonny, smiling little son she found only a thin, wasted, weird little creature, which "yammered" and wept continually. Recourse was had to the Reverend Mr. Borland, (first Presbyterian minister of Bedrule after the Reformation,) and that gentleman at once unhesitatingly pronounced that this was no mere human child. The mother must go to the cliffs, said Mr. Borland, and there gather a quantity of the flowers of the fox glove, (locally called "witches thimbles,") and bring them to him. These Mr. Borland boiled, poured some of the extract into the bairn's mouth, scattered the boiled flowers all over its body, then put it in its cradle wrapped in a blanket, and left it all night alone in the barn. Mr. Borland took the key of the door away with him, and gave instructions that under no circumstances was anybody to enter the barn until he returned next day. The anxious mother watched all night by the door, but heard no sound; never once did the child wail. And next morning when Mr. Borland arrived he was able to hand to the mother her own child, fat and smiling as when carried off by the fairies. It was a heroic remedy, but probably the sick child did not swallow much of that decoction of digitalis. In any case, they did not have coroners' inquests in those days, and had the worst come to the worst, the uncomplaining fairies would have borne the blame.
It was up Teviot, in the days when witches flourished, that a poor woman lived, whose end was rather more merciless than that inflicted on most of her kind. A man's horse had died suddenly,—elf-struck, or overlooked by a witch, of course. To break whatever spell the witch or elf might have cast over other animals the owner of the dead horse cut out and burnt its heart. Whilst the fire was at its fiercest and the heart sizzling in the glow, there rushed up a large black greyhound, flecked all over with foam and evidently in the last stage of fatigue, which tried persistently to snatch the heart from the fire. One of the spectators, suspecting evil, seized a stick and struck the animal a heavy blow over the back, whereupon, with a fearful yell, it fled, and disappeared. Almost at that instant, a villager ran up, saying that his wife had suddenly been taken violently ill; and when those who had been engaged in burning the heart went in to the man's cottage, they found his wife, a dark-haired, black-eyed woman, lying, gasping and breathless, with her back, to their thinking, broken. She, poor woman, was probably suffering from a sudden and particularly acute attack of lumbago. But to those wise men another inference was only too obvious. She was, of course, a witch, and it was she who, in the guise of a greyhound, had tried to snatch the horse's heart from the fire, and who had then got a stroke across her back that broke it. They insisted that she should repeat the Lord's prayer,—an infallible test, for if she were a witch she would be sure to say: "lead us into temptation, and deliver us not from evil." And so, when the poor woman, her pain failed to get through the prayer to their satisfaction, they bound her, carried her away, and burnt her alive in the fire where the horse's heart had been roasted.
Two or three miles across the river from Minto is Ruberslaw, a rugged hill, towering dark and solitary, a land-mark for half the Border. More than any of its distant neighbours in the Cheviot range, it seems to draw to itself the hurrying rain clouds, more than any other it seems to nurture storms. About its grim head all Teviotdale may
"see with strange delight the snow clouds form
When Ruberslaw conceives the mountain storm—
Dark Ruberslaw, that lifts his head sublime,