Lauder and Earlston are the only places of importance in the valley. The former—it is, by the way, the only royal burgh in the shire—boasts a considerable antiquity. It is still a quaint-looking but clean town, with long straggling street, and one or two buildings—the parish kirk and Tolbooth—offering decidedly Continental suggestions. Lauder's old-worldness and isolation are at an end, however. After much agitation, a railway-line now connects it with the rest of the world, and already the signs of a new life are apparent. Within a very few years the inevitable changes will be sure to have passed over this once quiet and exclusive little town. It is the "Maitland blude," which dominates Lauder, and Thirlestane Castle, built, or renovated rather, in the time of Charles II., is still a place to see. Amongst Scottish families, the Maitlands were first in place and power. Not a few of them were greatly distinguished as statesmen and men of letters—the blind poet and ballad-collector, Sir Richard; William Maitland, the celebrated Secretary Lethington; Chancellor Maitland, author of the satirical ballad, "Against Sklanderous Tongues;" Thomas, and Mary, Latin versifiers both; and the infamous "Cabal" Duke, the only bearer of the title. Within the well-kept policies of Thirlestane, tradition has located the site of the historic Lauder Bridge, so fatal to James III.'s favourites in 1482. Dr. John Wilson, of Bombay, Orientalist and scholar, was born at Lauder in 1804, and James Guthrie, the first Scottish martyr after the Reformation, was its minister for a short period.
Earlston is seven miles down stream from Lauder. Before reaching the town of the Rhymer some spots of interest call for notice. At St. Leonard's—a little way out—a hospital off-shoot of Dryburgh, lived Burne the Violer, the last of the minstrel fraternity, a supposed prototype of the Minstrel of the "Lay," and author of the fine pastoral poem, "Leader Haughs and Yarrow," the verse-model for Wordsworth's "Three Yarrows." One verse was a great favourite with Scott and Carlyle, both of whom were known to repeat it frequently:—
"But Minstrel Burne can not assuage
His grief, while life endureth,
To see the changes of this age,
Which fleeting time procureth;
For mony a place stands in hard case,
Where blythe folk ken'd nae sorrow,
With Humes that dwelt on Leader-side,
And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow."
Blainslie, famous for its oats ("There's corn enough in the Blainslies"), and Whitslaid Tower, a long ago holding of the Lauder family, are passed a mile or two on. At Birkhill and Birkenside the road forks leftwards to Legerwood, where Grizel Cochrane of Ochiltree (afterwards Mrs. Ker of Morriston), heroine of the stirring mail-bag adventure narrated in the "Border Tales," sleeps in its lately restored kirk chancel. Chapel, and Carolside with a fine deer park, and most charming of country residences—at the latter of which Kinglake wrote part of his "Crimean War"—sit snugly to the right, in the bosky glen below.