Kelso
t is a very great little country which lies all about Melrose, with never a bend of the river or a turn of the highway or a shoulder of the hill, nay, scarce the shadow of any hazel bush or the piping of any wee bird but has its history, but serves to recall what once was; and because the countryside is so teeming seems to make yesterday one with to-day. The distances are very short, even between the places the well-read traveler knows; with many places that are new along the way, each haunted with its tradition, soon to haunt the traveler, while the people he meets would seem to have been here since the days of the Winged Hats.
Perhaps in order to get into the center of the ecclesiastical country—for after this being a Borderland, and a Scott-land, it is decidedly Abbots-land, even before Abbotsford came into being with its new choice of old title—the traveler will take train to Kelso, or walk there, a scant dozen miles from Melrose.
The journey is down the Tweed, which opens ever wider between the gentle hills that are more and more rounding as the flow goes on to the sea. There is not such intense loneliness; here is the humanest part of the Scottish landscape, and while even on this highway the cottages are not frequent, and one eyes the journeymen with as close inspection as one is eyed, still it is a friendly land. The southern burr—we deliberately made excuse of drinking water or asking direction in order to hear it—is softer than in the North; yet, you would not mistake it for Northumberland. We wondered if this was the accent Scott spoke with; but to him must have belonged all the dialect-voices.
It was at Roxburgh Castle that King David lived when he determined to build these abbeys of the Middle Marches, of which the chief four are Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Kelso, with Holyrood as their royal keystone.
Roxburgh was a stronghold of the Border, and therefore met the fate of those strongholds, when one party was stronger than the other; usually the destruction was by the English because they were farther away and could hold the country only through making it desolate.
Who would not desire loveliness and desire to fix it in stone, if he lived in such a lovely spot as this where the Tweed and Teviot meet? David had been in England. He was brother to the English queen Maude, wife of Henry I, and had come in contact with the Norman culture. Or, as William of Malmesbury put it, with that serene assurance of the Englishman over the Scot, he "had been freed from the rust of Scottish barbarity, and polished from a boy from his intercourse and familiarity with us." Ah, welladay! if residence at the English court and Norman culture resulted in these lovely abbeys, let us be lenient with William of Malmesbury. Incidentally David added to the Scotland of that time certain English counties, Northumberland and Cumberland and Westmoreland—as well as English culture!
David was son to Saxon Margaret, St. Margaret, and from her perhaps the "sair sanct" inherited some of his gentleness. But also he had married Matilda of Northumberland, wealthy and a widow, and he preferred to remain on the highway to London rather than at Dunfermline. So he was much at Roxburgh.
But the castle did not remain in Scottish or English hands. It was while curiously interested in a great Flemish gun that James II was killed by the explosion—and the siege of Roxburgh went on more hotly, and the castle was razed to its present low estate.