ROXBURGH CASTLE
Hume Castle, Kelso’s other bulwark—or, if it happened to be in the hands of an enemy, its thorn in the flesh—stands on high ground to the north, where its square-set form, now reduced to a shell, can be seen from all parts of the ground that lies between the Lammermoor and Cheviot. But the town had strength within itself in its great Norman Abbey Church, built for purposes of war as well as of prayer. It was founded by that zealous abbey- and cathedral-rearer, David I, the son of Canmore and of Saint Margaret; and its head, as a mitred abbot who acknowledged only the jurisdiction of the Holy See, held a position that gave him a precedence, much envied and much resented, over the superiors of the neighbouring religious houses of Jedburgh, Dryburgh, and Melrose. It was endowed with rich benefices and wide territories, but its wealth and glory all vanished in the storms of the Reformation, or, more ruthless still, of the English invasions and the Civil Wars.
A large part of the Abbey heritage has passed to the Kers, of the ducal house of Roxburghe, whose stately seat, Floors Castle, planned by Vanbrugh and completed by Playfair, commands from its terraces one of the widest and loveliest views upon Tweed. Of the Kers of Cessford, who had feuds with the rival branch of the Kerrs of Ferniehirst, as well as with the Scotts and other neighbours, it has been said that they had a genius for fighting on the winning side: “When the power of the Douglases on the Border began to crumble, they became Crown vassals, and their fortunes mounted rapidly. They won new lands, and held, and still hold, the old. They kept a hawk’s eye on the wild tracts of moor and pasture and peat bog, where even in the old days of foray there was, as Dandie Dinmont said, ‘mair stabling for horses than change-houses for men’, and where now all is utterly abandoned to the curlew and the sheep. But they moved their household gods, and extended their bounds, from the Bowmont to the Kale, from the Kale to the Teviot, and finally from the Teviot to the Tweed.” Their ruined castle of Cessford stands in a lonely place, on a slope overhanging a little side-glen of the Kale Water, some eight miles from Floors. The roof is gone, and all about is bare and deserted. A few sapling ashes grow in the crannies of the stone, but time has riven the thick walls which Surrey, in 1523, found so hard to breach, and has thrown down the grand old Crow Tree that stood so long beside Habbie Ker’s stronghold. Long before this the family had flitted to a warmer nest, and had feathered it with the spoils of Old Roxburgh Castle and of Kelso Abbey.
Scarcely less than Melrose and Abbotsford are Kelso and Floors the centre of a sanctuary of Border romance; and over the scene the forms of Hume Castle and Smailholm Tower seem to keep sentry-watch and to “shift places mysteriously, like the triple heads of the weird Eildons, as if they were pacing guard upon the hilltops”. In the setting of the picture revealed from these vantage-grounds are—along with places already noted—the hanging woods of Stichell and Newtondon; Nenthorn, Hendersyde, Mellerstain, Makerstoun; beyond Teviot, the rich woodlands of Springwood, Woodendean, and Sunlaws; the darker pine trees around the hunting seat of Bowmont Forest; the folds in which lie the “Gypsy capital” of Kirk Yetholm, the ancient Kirk of Linton, Eckford of the Douglases and Crailing of the Cranstons; the hills of Hounam and Morebattle; and, behind all, the soft blue line, rising high in Great Cheviot and sinking away towards the west, of the chain that divides the kingdoms, with peeps here and there of Haddon Rig, and Ruberslaw, and Dunion, and Minto Crags, and Penielheugh, crowned by its Waterloo monument, with other scarce less famous Border heights.
While, above the junction, the ascending valley of the Tweed holds its way westwards, so that the water-sheds of its northern tributaries are in common with those of streams flowing to the Forth and the Clyde, Teviotdale keeps throughout a line that is parallel with the Marches of the Kingdoms, from which its main channel is nowhere more than a dozen miles away as the crow flies. It follows that there is more of hazard, and with this more of romance, crowded into its annals than perhaps into those of any other area of like extent. It is sprinkled over with battlefields and with peel towers, most of them now in ruin; every dale has been the scene of a fray, and every burn has a song or ballad tacked to its name. These Middle and West Marches were a centre of power and action, first of the House of Douglas, and then of the “Bauld Buccleuch”. The “Good Sir James of Douglas” kept the peace of this troubled frontier for the Bruce; his son, the “Knight of Liddesdale”, expelled the English from Teviotdale, and was killed while hunting in Ettrick Forest; his grandson, the first of the Douglas Earls, also chased out the invaders and brought back spoils from the English side; his great-grandson, the second Earl, captured Percy’s pennon at Newcastle, and was slain at Otterburn, while riding home by the road of Redesdale and the Carter Bar with his prey; while it is of a later descendant, “Earl Tineman”, captured at Shrewsbury by a later Hotspur, that the canny saying is quoted in The Fortunes of Nigel: “Poortith (poverty) takes away pith, and the man sits full still who has a rent in his breeks”.
BRANXHOLM TOWER
A Scott of Buccleuch accompanied James V when he hanged Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie and all his company at Carlenrig near Teviothead; and the “rank reiver’s” reproach, given in one version of the ballad, was not without edge:
“Now haud your tongue, Sir Walter Scott,
Nor speak o’ reif and felonie;