In the Border Country

by W. S. Crockett

"The Arno and the Tiber lang
Hae run full clear in Roman sang;
But, save the reverence o' schools!
They're baith but lifeless dowy pools,
Dought they compare wi' bonny Tweed,
As clear as ony lammer-bead?"

Wordsworth, too, sang of the "gentle Tweed, and the green silent pastures," though his winsome Three Yarrows is the tie that most endears him to the Lowland hearts. Since Scott's day the voices in praise of Tweed have been legion. "Who, with a heart and a soul tolerably at ease within him, could fail to be happy, hearing as we do now the voice of the Tweed, singing his pensive twilight song to the few faint stars that have become visible in heaven?" says John Wilson in his rollicking "Streams" essay (no "crusty Christopher" there, at any rate). Thomas Tod Stoddart, king of angling rhymers,

"Angled far and angled wide,
On Fannich drear, by Luichart's side;
Across dark Conan's current,"

and all over Scotland, but found not another stream to match with the Tweed:

"Dearer than all these to me
Is sylvan Tweed; each tower and tree
That in its vale rejoices;
Dearer the streamlets one and all
That blend with its Eolian brawl
Their own enamouring voices!"

Remember, too, Dr. John Brown's exquisite Tweed's Well meditation, a prose sermon to ponder over any Sabbath, and Ruskin's homely reverie—"I can never hear the whispering and sighing of the Tweed among his pebbles, but it brings back to me the song of my nurse as we used to cross by Coldstream Bridge, from the south, in our happy days—

"For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view,
With her barefooted lasses, and mountains so blue."

One thinks also of George Borrow's fascination for the Scottish Border, when he asks ("Lavengro") "Which of the world's streams can Tweed envy, with its beauty and renown?" and of Thomas Aird's pathetic retrospect—"the ever-dear Tweed, whose waters flow continually through my heart, and make me often greet in my lonely evenings." Nor do we forget John Veitch, that truest Tweedsman of his time, always musing on the Tweed, never at home but beside it, and of whose Romance and History there has been no abler exponent.

Of the name Tweed itself, the meaning and origin are uncertain, and it is hopeless to dogmatize on the subject except to say that there is an apparent connection with the Cymric Tay, Taff, Teith, and Teviot—more properly "Teiott," the common pronunciation above Hawick. Mr. Johnston ("Place-Names of Scotland") traces it to the Celtic twyad—"a hemming in"—from "twy to check or bind," which is a not unlikely derivation. As to the source of the Tweed there is the curious paradox that what passes for its source is not the real fons et origo of the stream. Poetically, the Tweed is said to take its rise in the tiny Tweed's Well among the Southern Highlands, 1250 feet above sea level, and close to where the marches of Peeblesshire, Lanarkshire, and Dumfriesshire meet. But strictly speaking, the correct source is the Cor or Corse Burn, a little higher up, which, dancing its way to the glen beneath, receives the outflow of the Well as a sort of first tributary. For purposes of romance, however, Tweed's Well will always be reckoned as the source, as indeed it must have been so regarded ages ago. The likelihood is that Tweed's Well was one of the ancient holy wells common to many parts of Scotland. And since tradition speaks of a Mungo's Well somewhere in these solitudes, the probability is that we have it here in the heart of these silent lonely hills. There is the tradition of a cross, too, at or near Tweed's Well, borne out in the place-name Corse, which, we know, is good Scots for Cross. That such a symbol of the ancient faith stood here long since "to remind travellers of their Redeemer and to guide them withal across these desolate moors," is more than a mere picturesque legend. It is a prolific watershed this from which Tweed starts its seaward race. South and west, Annan and Clyde bend their way to the Solway and the Atlantic, as the quaint quatrain has it:

"Annan, Tweed, and Clyde
Rise a' oot o' ae hillside,
Tweed ran, Annan wan,
Clyde brak his neck owre Corra Linn."