Nearby, and near the highways, is the deserted farm cottage, the birthplace of Mungo Park, who traveled about the world even as you and I, and I fancy his thought must often have returned to the Yarrow.
The driver will point out the Trench of Wallace, a redout a thousand feet long, on the height to the North; and here will come into the Border memories of another defender of Scotland who seems rather to belong to the North and West.
Soon we reach the Kirk of Yarrow, a very austere "reformed" looking basilica, dating back to 1640, which was a reformed date, set among pleasant gardens and thick verdure. Scott and Wordsworth and Hogg have worshiped here, and from its ceiling the heraldic devices of many Borderers speak a varied history.
Crossing the bridge we are swiftly, unbelievingly, on the Dowie Dens of Yarrow.
"Yestreen I dream'd a dolefu' dream;
I fear there will be sorrow!
I dream'd I pu'd the heather green,
Wi' my true love on Yarrow.
"But in the glen strive armed men;
They've wrought me dole and sorrow;
They've slain—the comeliest knight they've slain—
He bleeding lies on Yarrow.
"She kiss'd his cheek, she kaim'd his hair,
She search'd his wounds all thorough;
She kiss'd them till her lips grew red,
On the dowie houms of Yarrow."
Then we come into the country of Joseph Hogg. The farm where he was tenant and failed, for Hogg was a shepherd and a poet, which means a wanderer and a dreamer. And soon to the Gordon Arms, a plain rambling cement structure, where Hogg and Scott met by appointment and took their last walk together.
Hogg is the spirit of all the Ettrick place. Can you not hear his skylark—"Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless"—in that far blue sky above Altrive, where he died—"Oh, to abide in the desert with thee!"
And now the driver tells us we are at the Douglass Glen, up there to the right lies the shattered keep of the good Lord James Douglass, the friend of Bruce. Here fell the "Douglass Tragedy," and the bridle path from Yarrow to Tweed is still to be traced.
"O they rade on and on they rade,
And a' by the light of the moon,
Until they came to yon wan water,
And there they lighted down."