It is a flat, featureless country that stretches north from Stanwix across the nine miles to the Border-line. Miserable villages that are merely collections of gaunt cottages little better than hovels, often built of “dubbin,” i.e. clay and straw, occur at intervals. Nearly all of comparatively modern date, they point unmistakably to the fact that it is not so very long since to live in the Debatable Land was hazardous, and not to be thought of by the law-abiding. Very well indeed for moss-trooping vagabonds and cow-stealers, but not for the responsible, or those who wished for a quiet life.
Passing Goslin Syke, where a marshy stream crosses the road, we come to Kingstown, where the road branches right and left. On this, the last stage to the Border, this parting of the ways meant much to eloping couples, bound for Scotland and marriage immediately on reaching Scottish soil.
The geography of Gretna and the Border is, so far as roads are concerned, somewhat involved, and requires careful explanation. Up to 1830, when the wide-spreading sands of the Esk were bridged, the way for coaches and all road-traffic lay circuitously through Longtown to the right of where the fork of the roads now occurs; but in that year the New Road, or the “English Road,” as it was commonly called, was opened, causing much interference with what the inhabitants of Springfield had almost come to regard as their “vested rights.” For, as the accompanying plan will show, Springfield lay directly on the route into Scotland; and Gretna Green merely to one side of it. But here again it behoves the historian to be careful and not rashly to assume that the early marriages were made at Springfield, and should therefore have been named after it. As a curious matter of fact, this village did not come into existence until 1791, when it was built by the then landowner, Sir William Maxwell, who named it from a farm standing there. It was then, and for long after, the home of people professing to be weavers, but really, almost without exception, a set of drunken Border blackguards who, when not helplessly intoxicated, were smugglers and poachers and wastrels generally, and, living in the marches of the two countries, respected the laws of neither.
Springfield, immediately after its rise, took away most of the marrying business of Gretna, being nearer the magical dividing-line.
MAP OF OLD AND NEW ROADS FROM CARLISLE TO GRETNA GREEN.
THE LONGTOWN ROAD
Blackford, on the Longtown road, is of the one unvarying pattern here, and is followed by the hamlet of West Linton, by the river Lyne, where a cottage or so, a farm, and the whitewashed “Graham’s Arms,” with its motto, “N’Oublie,” stand stodged in the mud. Fir-trees and a laurel-bordered road then lead to the by-way where Arthuret church, standing solitary, serves for churchless Longtown, half a mile distant.
In Arthuret churchyard there is shown a broken cross, said to mark the grave of Archie Armstrong, the famous Court fool of James the First and Charles the First. James brought him south, from the Border, where he had early distinguished himself as a sheepstealer in Eskdale; and his impudence and invincible effrontery brought him a long period of success at Court. But at last he overreached himself, in his enmity to Archbishop Laud. On one occasion, saying grace at Whitehall, he exclaimed, “Great praise to God and little laud to the Devil,” and all the Court sniggered; but when, in 1637, he met Laud at a time when the Scots were rising against the Archbishop’s attempts at dictation in religious matters, and asked, “Wha’s fool the noo?” the jester’s licence had grown beyond endurance, and he was dismissed. He lived many years longer, and earned the reputation of an extremely usurious lender of money, to whom no sharp practices came amiss. The cross shown as marking his resting-place is really a portion of an ancient Scandinavian monument.
SIR JAMES GRAHAM