The Scott Country

by John Geddie

Which Genius beams from Beauty’s eye.”

But while he knew by heart the whole Borderland, and had explored its chief river from where

“Tweed, Annan, and Clyde

A’ rise in ae hill-side”,

to where it enters the sea, under the time- and war-battered walls of the ancient town of Berwick, there were parts of the Tweed and its tributaries that he knew better than others. There is, in the eyes of Scott devotees, an Inner Circle, a “Holy of Holies”, of the Scott Country, and, fortunately for the pilgrim to these shrines, its centre lies where the main lines of road and rail, like those of river-drainage, converge around the meeting-place of Ettrick, Gala, and Leader with Tweed—under the shadow of the Eildon Hills and beside those two “miraculous” products of the hand and brain of man—Melrose Abbey and Abbotsford House. The creative art, in prose and verse, of the Great Magician was not often exercised on the chief stream higher up than Neidpath and Manor, or, at farthest, “Merlin’s Grave”, beside Drummelzier and under Tinnis. Nor did his genius much frequent the lower courses of Tweed, below Kelso Bridge and Wark Castle, and the inflow of the “sullen Till”, although here also are many scenes of beauty and pages of story that might well have set his imagination afire. It seems more at home, also, in the valleys of the Teviot, the Ettrick, and the Yarrow than on the Leader, the Gala, and other northern affluents of the Tweed. Accident and propinquity may have helped to determine his choice of scene and theme; but old associations and affinities may have done still more. The nearer the Border line of the Cheviots, the thicker are footprints of the clan and national frays of old—of battles and skirmishes in which Scott’s own ancestry took more than their share; and the deeper and richer the soil of tradition in which he delighted to delve. To the Teviot, the Borthwick, and the Ettrick—to Branxholm and Harden, Rankleburn and Newark—he was drawn by the call of the blood of his father’s race; an equal tie bound him to the Jed, the old home of his mother’s kin, the “hot and hardy Rutherfords”; while Yarrow, the heart of his Forest Sheriffdom, is also the core of its ballad poetry. It has to be remembered, also, that the period of Scott’s greatest literary output was also the period of failing physical powers, and that journeys through his beloved Borderland had to be more and more circumscribed to beaten paths of easy access.

It was by Kelso Bridge, beside where the wand of the Wizard Michael Scott “bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone”, that, in the fresh morning of youth, the spell of the great Border river first fell on Walter Scott. His kinsfolk lived in the neighbourhood; and several of them are buried in the Abbey Aisle. His great-grandfather and namesake, the Jacobite “Beardie” who had fought at Killiecrankie, had occupied a house in the Coalmarket; his kindly Aunt Janet resided in what is now called Waverley Lodge; his uncle, Captain Robert Scott, a lover and collecter of books, had his home at Rosebank, which he bequeathed to Sir Walter, who—“his poverty not his will consenting”—sold this house of many memories, along with “thirty acres of the most fertile land in Scotland”.

Only a few miles away, beside the stark and far-seen old keep of Smailholm, was the farm of Sandyknowe, leased from Scott of Harden by his grandfather Robert Scott, to which, between the ages of three and eleven, the little boy from Edinburgh came annually for holidays. Everyone remembers the lines that record the impression made on his youthful mind by his “barren scene and wild”—by the tall, grey, weather-beaten tower looking down from its rock upon the lone lochan, and out and away over many scenes of Border romance to “the distant Cheviots blue”; and of the legends of foray and strife that were told in the boy’s wondering ears by the “aged hind”, and that took shape afterwards in “The Eve of St. John” and other tales of the Master.

What more natural than that young Walter, “become rather delicate from overgrowth” and threatened with permanent lameness, should be sent, while twelve or thirteen years of age, to his Kelso relatives for change, outdoor freedom, and recruitment? He went to the Grammar School as pupil, and even for a time as usher, under the Rector, Lancelot Whale, from whom are drawn some of the traits of “Dominie Sampson”. He delighted his master by his recitation of the “Speech of Galgacus”, and beguiled his school companions from their lessons by his tales of old romance. He read, in the arbour of his aunt’s old-fashioned garden, or under the ancient elm that still survives, Bishop Percy’s Reliques, the identical copy of which is in Kelso Library. Among his fellow-pupils were the Ballantynes, James and John, a fateful conjunction, for out of a hint dropped in a talk with the elder of these old schoolmates grew the Scottish Border Minstrelsy—the first two volumes of which were the earliest issued from the Kelso “Ballantyne Press”, in 1802—and much else of note in Scott’s career and fortunes. A biographer may well say that it was “here he began to gather up his intellectual gains and make his friendly conquests”. Kelso gave bent and direction to his genius.

Like Smailholm, Kelso was “meet nurse for a poetic child”, for here join two “superb rivers”—Tweed and Teviot—each bringing down, from a hundred sources, its treasure of ancient story. As we have said, the beauty and romance of Tweedside do not begin in this neighbourhood. They are the endowment of the main stream from its tap-root to the sea. Berwick-upon-Tweed, for centuries a cause of contention between the Kingdoms, was at one time regarded as separate and apart from each—“England, Scotland, and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed”. Since the fifteenth century, however, it has territorially belonged to England, although situated on the north bank of the river. Its Edwardian and Elizabethan walls—the former recently placed, along with the venerable Bell Tower, the symbol of Berwick Liberties, under the protection of the Board of Works as a national relic and for preservation against the attacks of vandalism—enfold a sheaf of history. Few places have been the scenes of more furious sieges and merciless captures. Its bridge of fifteen arches, built before the Civil Wars and upheld for centuries from State funds, connects the town with Tweedmouth and Spittal to the south, although it is of small account, as a bond of union and means of traffic, compared with its upstream neighbour, the Royal Border Bridge, which carries the railway lines between England and Scotland.