A Walk from London to John O'Groat's / With Notes by the Way

by Elihu Burritt

Another day brought me into the midst of a wild region, which might be called No-man’s-land; although most of it belongs to the Duke of Northumberland. It is all in the solitary grandeur of heather-haired hills, which tinge, with their purple flush, the huge, black-winged clouds that alight upon them. Only here and there a shepherd’s cottage is to be seen half way up the heights, or sheltering itself in a clump of trees in glen or gorge, like a benighted traveller bivouacking for a night in a desert. Sheep, of the Cheviot breed mostly, are nearly the sole inhabitants and industrials of this mountainous waste. They climb to the highest peaks and bring down the white wealth of their wool to man. It was pleasant to see them like walking mites, flecking the dark brows of the mountains. They made a picture; they made a tableau vivant of the same illustration as Landseer’s lamb looking into the grass-covered cannon’s mouth.

This is the Border-land! Here the fiercest antagonisms of hostile nationalities met in deadly conflict. Fire and blood, rapine and wrath blackened and reddened and ravaged for centuries across this bleak territory. Robber-chieftains and knighted free-booters carried on their guerilla raids backward and forward, under the counterfeited banner of patriotism. Scotch and English armies led by kings marched and counter-marched over this sombre boundary. Never before was there one apparently more insoluble as a barrier between two peoples. Never before in Christendom was there one that required a longer space of time to melt. Never before did the fusing of two nationalities encounter more fierce and prolonged opposition. Did ever patriotism pour out a swifter and deeper tide of chivalrous sentiment against merging one in another?—against uniting two thrones and two peoples in one? Did patriotism ever fight bloodier battles to prevent such a union, or cling to local sovereignty with a more desperate hold?

This is the Border-land! Look up the purpled steeps of these heathered hills. The white lambs are looking, with their soft, meek eyes, into the grass-choked mouths of the rusty and dismantled cannon of the war of nationalities between England and Scotland. The deed has been consummated. The valor and patriotism of Wallace and Bruce could not prevent it. The sheep of English and Scotch shepherds feed side by side on these mountain heights, in spite of Stirling and Bannockburn, of Flodden and Falkirk. The Iron Horse, bearing the blended arms of the two realms on his shield, walks over those battle-fields by night and day, treading their memories deeper and deeper in the dust. The lambs are playing in the sun on the boundary line of the two dominions. Does a Scot of to-day love his native land less than the Campbell clansman or clan-chief in Bruce’s time? Not a whit. He carries a heartful of its choicest memories with him into all countries of his sojourning. But there is a larger sentiment that includes all these filial feelings towards his motherland, while it draws additional warmth and strength from them. It is the sentiment of Imperial Nationality; the feeling of a Briton, that does not extinguish nor absorb, nor compete with, the Scot in his heart;—the feeling that he is a political constituent of a mighty nation, whose feet stand upon all the continents of the earth, while it holds the best islands of the sea in its hands;—the feeling with which he says We with all the millions of a dominion on which the sun never sets, and Our, when he speaks of its grand and common histories, its hopes, prospects, progress, power and aspirations.

There was a Border-land, dark and bloody, between Saxon England and Celtic Wales. For centuries the red foot-marks of savage conflict scarred and covered its wild waste. Never before did so small a people make so stout, and desperate and protracted struggle for local independence and isolation. Never did one produce a more strong-hearted and blind-eyed patriotism, or patriotism more poets to thrill the listeners to their lays with the intoxicating fanaticism of a national sentiment. On that Border-land the white lambs now lie in the sun. The Welsh sentiment is as strong as ever in the Snowdon shepherd, and he may not speak a dozen words of the English tongue. But the Briton lives in his breast. The feeling of its great meaning surrounds and illumines the inner circles of his local attachment. He may never have seen a map of the Globe, and never have been outside the wall of the Welsh mountains; but he knows, without geography, who and what Queen Victoria is among the earth’s sovereigns, and the length and breadth of her sceptre’s reach and rule around the world.

There was a Border-land between Britain and Ireland, blackened and scarred by more burning antagonisms than those that once divided the larger island. The record of several consecutive centuries is graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and by the more incisive teeth-marks of hate. The slumbering antipathies of race and religion even now crop out here and there, over the unfused boundary, in hissing tongues of flame. The Briton and the Celt are still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman’s breast; but it is not a war of extermination. His ardent nature is given to martial memories, and all the battles he boasts of are British battles, in which he or his father played the hero number one. The history of independent Ireland is poor and thin; still he holds it back in his heart, and hesitates to link it with the great annals of the “Saxon” realm, and thus make of both one grand and glorious record, present and future. He cannot yet make up his mind to say We with all the other English-speaking millions of the empire, as the Scotsman and Welshman have learned and loved to say it. He cannot as yet say Our with them with such a sentiment of joint-interest, when the histories, hopes, expansion and capacities of that empire unroll their vista before him. But the rains and the dews of a milder century are falling upon this Border-land. The lava of spent volcanoes that covered it is taking soil and seed of green vegetation. The white lambs shall yet lie on it in the sun.

What a volume might be filled with the succinctest history of the Border-lands of Christendom! France was intersected with them for centuries. Seemingly they were as implacable and obdurate as any that ever divided the British isle. Local patriotism wrote poetry and shed blood voluminously to prevent the fusion of these old landmarks of pigmy nationalities. It took nearly a thousand years to complete the blending; to make the we and the our of one great consolidated empire the largest political sentiment of the men of Normandy, Burgundy or Navarre. Long and fierce, and seemingly endless was the struggle; but at last, on all those old obstinate boundaries of hostile principalities, the white lambs lay in the sun.

There are Border-lands now in the south and east of Europe foaming and seething with the same antagonisms of race and language; and Christendom is tremulous with their emotion. It is the same old struggle over again; and yet ninety-nine in a hundred of intelligent and reading people, with the history of British and French Border-lands before them, seem to think that a new and strange thing has happened under the sun. Full that proportion of our English-speaking race, in both hemispheres, closing the volume of its own annals, have made up their minds to the belief that these Border-lands between German and Magyar, Teuton and Latin, Russ and Pole, bristle with antagonisms the like of which never were subdued, and never ought to be subdued by human means or motives. To them, naturally, the half century of this hissing and seething, insurrection and repression, is longer than the five hundred years and more it took to fuse into one the nationalities of England and Wales. What a point of space is a century midway between the ninth and nineteenth! Few are long-sighted enough in historic vision to touch that point with a cambric needle. It may seem unfeeling to say it or think it; still it is as true as the plainest history of the last millenium. There is a patriotism that looks at the future through a gimlet hole, and sees in it but a single star. That patriotism is a natural, and most popular sentiment. It was strong in the Welshman’s breast a thousand years ago, and in the Scotsman’s half that distance back in the past. But it is a patriotism that has its day and its rule; then both its eyes are opened, and it looks upon the firmament of the future broadside on, and sees a constellation where it once saw and half worshipped a solitary star. Better to be the part of a great WHOLE than the whole of a little nothing.

These continental Border-lands may see the face of their future history in the mirror of England’s annals. They are quaking now with the impetuous emotions of local nationality. They are blackened and scarred in the contest for the Welsh and Scotch independence of centuries agone. But over those boundary wastes the grass shall yet grow soft, fair and green, and there, too, the white lambs shall lie in the sun.

My walk lay over the most inhospitable and unpeopled section I ever saw. Calling at a station on the railway that passes through it, I was told by the master that the nearest church or chapel was sixteen miles in one direction, and over twenty in another. It is doubtful if so large a churchless space could be found in Iowa or even Kansas. I was glad to reach Hawick, a good, solid town but a little way inside of the Scottish border, where I spent the sabbath and the following Monday. This was a rallying and sallying point in the old Border Wars, and was inundated two or three times by the flux and reflux of this conflict, having been burnt twice, and put under the ordeal of other calamities brought upon it when free-booting was both the business, occupation and pastime of knighted chieftains and their clansmen. It is now a thrifty, manufacturing town, lying in the trough of the sea, or of the lofty hills that resemble waves hardened to earth in their crests. Just opposite the Temperance Inn in which I had my quarters, was the Tower Hotel, once a palatial mansion of the Buccleuchs. There the Duchess of Monmouth used to hold her drawing-rooms in an apartment which many a New England journeyman mechanic would hardly think ample and comfortable enough for his parlor. There is a curious conical mound in the town, called the Moat-hill, which looks like a great, green carbuncle. It is thought by some to be a Druidical monument, but is quite involved in a mystery which no one has satisfactorily solved. It is strange that no persistent and successful effort has been made to let day-light through it. Some workmen a long time ago undertook to perforate it, but were frightened away by a thunder-storm, which they seemed to take as a reproof and threatened punishment for their profanity. The great business of Hawick is the manufacture of a woollen fabric called Tweeds. It came to this name in a singular way. The clerk of the factory made out an invoice of the first lot to a London house under the name of Twilled goods. The London man read it Tweeds, instead of Twilled, and ever since they have gone by that title. As Sir Walter Scott was at that time making the name “Tweed” illustrious, the mistake was a very lucrative one to the manufacturers of the article. Here, too, in this border town commences the chain of birthplaces of eminent men, who have honored Scotland with their lives and history. Here was born James Wilson, once the editor of The Economist, who worked his way up, through intermediate positions of public honor and trust, to that of Finance Minister for India, and died at the meridian of his manhood in that country of dearly-bought distinctions.

On Tuesday, Sept. 8th, I commenced my walk northward from this threshold town of Scotland. Followed down the Teviot to Denholm, the birth-place of the celebrated poet and linguist, Dr. John Leyden, another victim who offered himself a sacrifice to the costly honors and emoluments of East Indian official life. One great thought fired his soul in all the perils and privations of that deadly climate. It was to ascend one niche higher in knowledge of oriental tongues than Sir William Jones. He labored to this end with a desperate assiduity that perhaps was never surpassed or even equalled. He died hugging the conviction that he had attained it. This little village was his birthplace. Here he wrote his first rhymes, and wooed and won the first inspirations of the muse. His heart, as its last pulses grew weaker and slower, in that far-off heathen land, took on its child-thoughts again and its child-memories; and his last words were about this little, rural hamlet where he was born. A beautiful monument has been erected to his memory in the centre of the large common around which the village is built. On each of the four sides of the monument there is a tribute to his name and worth; one from Sir Walter Scott, and one taken from his own poems, entitled “Scenes of my Infancy,” a touching appeal to his old friends and neighbors to hold him in kind remembrance.