Within the deserted walls, the widowed Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth is pictured as listening to the tale of the Last Minstrel. Local tradition has it that in the courtyard the Irish prisoners who surrendered at Philiphaugh were massacred; another story asserts that they were slaughtered on “Slainmenslee”. Newark was a royal hunting-seat in the fifteenth century; and its possession carried with it the Hereditary Sheriffdom of the Forest, which with many things else in this country came to the House of Buccleuch.
Over against Newark is Foulshiels, the birthplace of Mungo Park. Broadmeadows and Lewinhope and Tinnis are higher up the stream, which here runs between steep wooded hills, cloven by narrow side glens and with spaces of rich haughland on its margin. Yarrow burrows under banks of birch and hazel, or overshadowed by fine forest trees. The vale is “strewn with the sites of the tragedies of far-off years, forgotten by history, but remembered in song and tradition”; it is “the very sanctuary of romantic ballad-love. Its clear current sings a mournful song of the ‘good heart’s bluid’ that once stained its wave; of the drowned youth caught in the ‘cleaving o’ the craig’. The winds that sweep the hillsides and bend ‘the birks a’ bowing’ whisper still of the wail of the ‘winsome marrow’, and have an undernote of sadness on the brightest day of summer; while with the fall of the red and yellow leaf the very spirit of ‘pastoral melancholy’ broods and sleeps in the enchanted valley. Always, by Yarrow, the comely youth goes forth only to fall by the sword, fighting against odds in the Dowie Dens, or to be caught and drowned in the treacherous pools of this fateful river; always the woman is left to weep over her lost and lealful lord.” No strict identification of ballad sites and origins is possible; but the story of the “Dowie Dens” has become associated with Tinnis bank and with Deucharswire, beside Yarrow Kirk; and is said to be founded on the slaughter in 1616 of Walter Scott of Oakwood by the kin of John Scott of Tushielaw, with whose daughter, Grizel, Oakwood had contracted an irregular marriage.
TRAQUAIR
A group of authentic memories gather around Yarrow Kirk and Manse, and the bridge which carries a crossroad over the hills to Ettrick. A succession of cultured pastors have dwelt here, including Dr. Rutherford the grandfather of Scott, two generations of Russells, and the late Dr. Borland. By an unfortunate fire, in the spring of 1922, the restored church was destroyed, together with the memorials placed in it of Sir Walter, of Willie Laidlaw, his friend and amanuensis, of Wordsworth, and of the Ettrick Shepherd, all of them residents or visitors on Yarrow and worshippers in this secluded fane. In a field close by is a stone carved in rude Latin minuscules to the “Sons of Liberalis, of the Dumnogeni”, a relic of post-Roman times. Above Yarrow Kirk, the valley widens until it becomes spacious enough to hold the clear mirror of St. Mary’s Loch; the hills become bare and green and smooth, and over the ridge on the right comes the road from the Tweed by Paddyslack and Mountbenger to the Gordon Arms. It was from this road that Wordsworth, in good company, caught his first, and his last, glimpse of Yarrow—
“When first descending from the moorlands
I saw the stream of Yarrow glide
Along a bare and open valley,
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.
When last along its banks I wandered,