“Lord of the vale! astounding Flood!
The dullest leaf in this thick wood
Quakes—conscious of thy power;
The caves reply with hollow moan;
And vibrates to its central stone
Yon time-cemented Tower.”
There is also a “Wallace Chair” below Corra Linn; and in Bonnington House, whose beautiful grounds, to which the public have access, occupy the right bank of the river opposite both of these upper falls, there are relics of the hero who made Lanark and the Linns of Clyde one of his chief haunts.
Quite other memories—those of David Dale, “herd-boy, hawker, manufacturer, turkey-red dyer, banker, and evangelist,” and of his partner and son-in-law, Robert Owen—linger about the wheels and chimney-stacks of New Lanark, those celebrated cotton mills which were established, in days before steam had robbed water-power of great part of its workaday functions, for the purpose of carrying out a noble experiment in industry and philanthropy. And Braxfield, still lower down the stream, recalls to us the name and rural tastes—surely, not without a redeeming touch of grace and romance—of that Hanging Judge, the Jeffreys of the Scottish bench, whom Robert Louis Stevenson has immortalised as the Lord Justice Clerk in “Weir of Hermiston.”
But the Castle Hill and streets of the “ancient burgh of Lanark”—now close by, on the table-land above the river—bring back our thoughts to “Wallace wight” and to lawless and troublous times. The site of the old Royal Castle, which had harboured kings and stood sieges, is now occupied by a bowling green. Lanark Moor, where armies have mustered in the cause of the Douglases or the Stuarts, of King or Covenant, is in peaceful possession of golf and horse-racing. In the Castlegait is the site of the house where, according to a cherished tradition over which the duller Muse of History shakes the head, lived Marion Bradfute, that heiress of Lamington whom Wallace took to wife, and whom he so terribly avenged when Hazelrig, the sheriff and governor of Lanark Castle, had slain her for giving harbourage to the hero.
The valley below Lanark gradually opens up into the fruitful “Trough of the Clyde,” and becomes beautifully diversified by fertile fields, by woods and lawns, and by cottages surrounded by orchard trees, that in spring are overspread with the tinted and perfumed snow of the apple-blossom. From the right the Mouse Water flows into Clyde through the savage chasm of the Cartland Crags—opposing walls and pinnacles of rock, crowned and seamed with wood, that have apparently been riven apart to allow scant passage for the turbid little moorland stream that brawls over the sandstone reefs and ledges in the green obscurity below. Still the ghost of Wallace flits before us, for in the jaws of the Cartland defile, close to Telford’s handsome bridge over the Mouse, is the champion’s Cave, and perched on the summit of the cliffs is the “Castle of the Quaw,” associated in legend with his deeds. Another arch spanning the Mouse—the Roman Bridge at Cleghorn—has associations much more ancient; it marks the spot where Watling Street, which traversed Clydesdale and crossed Lanark Moor on its way from Carlisle to Antonine’s Wall, passed the brawling little stream.