Not all merrie are the records of Carlisle! And to-day you will find the castle has suffered change. You enter through an ancient gateway, and there is still the portcullis adorned with a sadly battered piece of sculpture. Unsightly barracks, and so forth, cumber the outer ward. The half-moon battery is dismantled, and the great keep is now used as an armoury. You turn to the cathedral, and there, spite of many alterations and more or less judicious restoration, there is much to admire. We can but mention the splendid central window at the east end of the choir, the graceful arcades below the windows of the side aisles, and the carved oak work of the stalls.
At the head of the Solway Firth the SARK, a small river, or rather “burn,” which in a dry summer well-nigh vanishes, divides the two kingdoms. On the Scots side the first village on the road is Gretna Green, famed for just over a century because of its irregular marriages. Here we might take leave of England were it not that our next two rivers, the Esk and the Liddel, Scots for most of their course and rising at very different points, finally meet and pass into Cumberland, whence they flow into the Solway Firth; the Esk having made a complete circuit round the Sark. The Debatable Land already mentioned was the piece of ground between the Solway and the junction of the two streams, of each of which we must now speak.
CARLISLE, LOOKING EAST.
CARLISLE, LOOKING WEST.
The LIDDEL rises in a great morass in Roxburghshire called Deadwater. For some ten miles it is a wild mountain stream, flowing dark and sullen through a rocky glen, but as it reaches lower ground the glen widens and softens into a beautiful valley with trees and fine pasture land, whilst lower still are fertile fields. The Liddel has many tributaries, whereof we will only mention Hermitage Water, near the source. It is a wild mountain stream, and at its wildest part, amidst morasses and bare desolate mountains, stand the ruins of grim old Hermitage Castle, with its thick towers and walls and rare narrow windows. See it on some gloomy November day, when the storm spirit is abroad, and it stands the very abomination of desolation! Turn to its history, and the gloom grows ever darker; for ’tis little but a record of cruel deeds. This is one of the oldest baronial buildings in Scotland. Sir William Douglas, the “Knight of Liddesdale” and “Flower of Chivalry,” took the place in 1338 from the English. You wonder at his name! Four years later he wounded and seized at Hawick Sir Alexander Ramsay, Sheriff of Teviotdale, of whose appointment he was jealous, and, throwing him into a deep dungeon at Hermitage, left him to starve. A few chance droppings from the granary protracted his miserable existence through seventeen awful days. His captors, hearing his groans, at length took him out and gave him—not bread, but a priest, in whose arms Ramsay expired! The “Flower of Chivalry” was finally slain by the Earl of Douglas, head of his house, whilst hunting in Ettrick Forest. It was whispered the Earl had discovered that his Countess entertained a guilty passion for the murdered man. A rude old ballad represents her as coming out of her bower when she heard of the crime, and proclaiming her own shame—
“And loudly there she did ca’,
It is for the Lord of Liddesdale