The Duke was not greatly impressed with the military value of the castle. He called it “an old hen-coop,” but it held securely enough the other miserable prisoners who were sent into Carlisle after Culloden. Four hundred of them awaited their doom in the grim dungeons, throughout the hot weather of 1746, and in October the executions began. Ninety-six fell to the hangman, and others were transported beyond seas. In batches of half-a-dozen or a dozen at a time, they were called forth from their captivity and drawn on hurdles to that Hanoverian Golgotha, Gallows Hill, south of the city, where they were hanged and afterwards quartered, in the bloody-minded old way; their heads afterwards set upon poles over the Scotch Gate.
You may see relics of that savage time, even now, in the cell fashioned in the thick eastern wall of the keep: the prison occupied by Macdonald of Keppoch. He whiled away the tedium of imprisonment by decorating the walls with designs, executed with a nail, and there they still remain. At this day Carlisle Castle is a somewhat shabby military depôt. The outer bailey is a parade-ground skirted with barracks, and the inner ward and keep are War Office storehouses. But it is in the unexpected modern surroundings of the public library that the most tragical memento of that time brings the hazards of rebellion with greatest vividness before you. This is a plaster cast of a monument erected to Dr. Archibald Campbell in the Savoy Chapel, London. The Chapel was largely destroyed by fire in 1864, and with it the marble monument. The unfortunate doctor was a non-combatant who acted as surgeon to the rebels at Culloden, and escaped abroad from that disastrous field. He returned, after seven years, to his Scottish home, thinking he might then safely do so; but was informed against and executed.
XXV
CARLISLE COACHING
The greatest figure in the coaching world up north was Teather, who was principal contractor for mails and stage-coaches in all that lengthy territory of 166 miles between Lancaster and Glasgow. The careers of the Teathers reflect the fortunes of the road. John Teather, the father, was originally landlord of the “Royal Oak,” Keswick, which does not stand on the main route to the north; but he left the comparative obscurity of that Lakeland town for the bustling activities of Carlisle, and from that strategic coaching position worked the coaches sixty-five miles south to Lancaster, and 101 miles north, to Glasgow.
Eight mails entered and left Carlisle daily, and seven stage-coaches; and eighty horses were kept for the proper working of them. Teather and his son managed this important business: the younger succeeding to it in 1837 and, in the general wreck brought about by railway extension, living to end where his father had begun, as landlord of the “Royal Oak” at Keswick.
With the coming of the nineteenth century, some steps were taken to make Carlisle a port. It was thought that a ship-canal from a place called Fisher’s Cross on the Solway, to Carlisle, a distance of twelve miles, would make the ancient city a place of commercial importance; and accordingly the canal was cut, 1819-23, at a cost of £90,000, and Fisher’s Cross was dignified by the new name of “Port Carlisle.” The enterprise never paid its way, any steps that might in after years have been taken to improve the position being rendered impossible by the coming of railways; while the irony of fate long ago overtook the canal, in its conversion into a railway.
It was in December 1846 that the first railway ran into Carlisle from the south. This was the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, long since absorbed into the London and North-Western. In September 1847 the Caledonian Railway, from Carlisle to Moffat, carried on the new methods another stage, and in the following February it was further extended to Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was necessarily the death-blow of the coaches along the main route. My old friend, Mr. W. H. Duignan, of Walsall, who remembers that time, travelled from Carlisle to Glasgow by the last mail-coach. He went to the “Bush” hotel and booked a seat for the occasion.
The bookkeeper remarked, when he gave his name, “I think I have often booked you before, sir, have I not?”