However Eildon got its present shape, it forms a singularly picturesque object in the landscape. And the scene that lies rolled out before anyone who chooses to climb either of the summits is one of the fairest that mortal eye ever rested upon. To the south the view is bounded only by “Cheviot’s mountains lone;” to the north, by the Lammermoors; eastwards, the Tweed valley, lustrous in its vesture of green of many shades, spreads itself out for miles beyond Dryburgh and St. Boswell’s, although the stream itself, from its way of hiding itself between deep and woody banks, is constantly vanishing from sight; westwards, beyond Abbotsford, to give variety to the view, the valley is less luxuriant, and the hills are larger, and instead of being divided into trim fields and meadows, or covered to their tops with bonny birks and hazels, present an unbroken surface of pasture-land, relieved only by patches of broom. To the south-west the outlying Ettricks keep ward over the valley where the shepherd-poet roamed and dreamed; full in view to the north-west, at the foot of the lovely Gala Water, is busy, brand-new Galashiels, blotting the blue with its smoke, and in other ways as well “sinning its gifts;” while nestling at the foot of the hill is Melrose, now a town rejoicing in “suburbs” and a hydropathic institution.
The glory of Dryburgh Abbey is its situation and immediate surroundings, in which it is certainly superior to Melrose, and even to Kelso. To get to it you leave the public highway, cross the water, and presently pace along a shady avenue, to find it at last bosomed in trees, seated on a grassy flat that slopes gently down to the river, whose music may be heard as its waves ripple by, almost insulating the site—for nowhere, perhaps, does the Tweed curl into so many loops as between Mertoun and Abbotsford. And Nature, not content with furnishing an incomparable situation and almost incomparable surroundings, has done her best with ivy and other creeping plants to hide the scars left by the hands of violent men. What now meets the eye is the western gable of the nave, a gable of the south transept, with a five-light window, and a bit of the choir and north transept—sufficient to show that the abbey was much smaller than either of its neighbours. The transept and choir are First, the nave—rebuilt in the first half of the fourteenth century—Second, Pointed, while the conventual buildings, south of the abbey, show the transition from Romanesque to Pointed. At Melrose there is not a vestige of the monastic buildings left; here they are in better preservation than the Abbey itself. The most perfect of them is the chapter-house, over against which are some immemorial yews. The founder was Hugh de Morville, Lord of Lauderdale and Constable of Scotland; the stone—an obdurate brownish sandstone—was hewn from the quarry on the Dryburgh estate which yielded its substance also for Melrose. Ravished and burnt by Edward II., the monastery was at once rebuilt, partly at the charges of Robert the Bruce. Then it was burnt by Richard II.; but it was not actually ruined until the devastating wars which broke out in the reigns of James IV. and V., when it was twice ravaged by Evers and Latoun, and once by the Earl of Hertford, who left it much as we now see it, save for the healing work of Nature and of Time. One feature of the ruins to which a peculiar interest attaches is the gloomy vault in which the “nun of Dryburgh” for years immured herself, never quitting it until dark, returning to it at midnight, and persisting in this strange mode of life until at last the night came which had no morrow, when they buried her in the adjoining graveyard. She never explained herself, but the common belief was that she had vowed never to look upon the sun during the absence of her lover, who came not back, having fallen in the affair of ’45.
How it came to pass that the dust of “Waverley” lies in St. Mary’s aisle we know from Allan Cunningham. When Sir Walter was stricken down in 1819, and was believed to be at the point of death, the Earl of Buchan, the eleventh of his line, made a somewhat fussy though well-intended appeal to Lady Scott to prevail upon her husband to be buried here beside his forbears the Haliburtons of Newmains, to whom the abbey once belonged; and Sir Walter, without seeming greatly impressed, promised that the earl should have the refusal of his bones, since he seemed so solicitous. Things, however, did not shape themselves quite as the nobleman had anticipated. Sir Walter recovered, and the earl had for three years been sleeping with his ancestors in St. Moden’s Chapel before that sad September day when the writer whose nimble pen had traced its last word was borne here, and sorrowfully laid beside his wife, whom six years earlier he had followed to the same hallowed resting-place. In the chapel now lie his eldest son, Colonel Sir Walter Scott, and Lockhart, his “son-in-law, biographer, and friend.” The aisle, it should be added, contains the dust of other families of note, including the Haigs of Bemerside, who have flourished there ever since the days of Malcolm IV., and who form the subject of one of the barbarous couplets said to have been written by Thomas the Rhymer before—all too tardily—he was appropriated by the fairies.
The Earl of Buchan spoken of above had a weakness for setting up monuments, and in indulging it he showed more public spirit than good taste. Close by his suspension bridge he built “an Ionic temple” of red sandstone, with a statue of Apollo under the dome, and a bust of Thomson perched on the top. As time went on, the statue was so much damaged (it may be hoped that something higher than a spirit of destructiveness was the motive of the image-breaking) that it had to be removed, though the bust still holds its place. A furlong or two up the stream, on a thickly timbered eminence, facing the Border, he put up a colossal statue of Wallace, hewn out of the same incongruous material, but painted white, though the paint has long since vanished. Wallace suffered many things during his life, but it was not a Sassenach who did this.
Between Dryburgh and Melrose the Tweed is swollen by Leader’s “silver tide” from the Lammermoors. On the banks of this water St. Cuthbert tended his flocks in the days of his youth; while at Earlston—formerly Ercildoune—two miles above the confluence, lived Thomas the Rhymer, whose surname appears to have been Lermont or Learmount, and who is believed to have lived in a castle of which a tower is still shown. There is no doubt that Thomas had a real existence; but whether he posed as a prophet, and had commerce with the fairies, and was finally spirited away by a hart and hind that were seen calmly parading the village, is more questionable. The poet, however, is clear enough about it all. With much detail he tells how, when the message came to the Rhymer to follow the deer, he “soon his cloaths did on,” and—
“First he woxe pale and then woxe red,
Never a word he spake but three:
‘My sand is run; my thread is spun;
This sign regardeth me.’”
Then, having bidden farewell to the Leader, he crossed the flood and was seen no more of men.