"Drygrange with the milk-white yowes,
Twixt Tweed and Leader standing,"
the latter stream blends its waters with those of the Tweed, where the foliage is ever at its thickest and greenest; and looking up the glen towards Newstead and Melrose, another vision of rare beauty meets the eye. Framed in the tall piers of the railway viaduct (150 feet high)—not at all a disfigurement—the gracefully-bending Tweed, no more fair than here, with the smoke rising above the Abbeyed town, Eildon in the foreground, and the blue barrier of the hills beyond, make up a picture such as may come to us in dreams.
VII. LIDDESDALE
From the Author's chapter in Cassell's "British Isles." (By permission.)
The Liddel rises in the Cheviot range, close to Jedhead, at an altitude of six hundred and fifty feet above sea level, and after a course of seven-and-twenty miles, with a fall of five hundred and forty-five feet, it joins the Esk at the Moat of Liddel, below Canonbie, near the famous Netherby Hall, twelve miles north of Carlisle and about eight from Langholm. It is fed by a score of affluents, of which the chief are the Hermitage and Kershope Waters, the latter constituting for nine miles or so the immediate boundary between the two countries. From its geographical position as cut off from the main division of the county, Liddesdale has little in common with the valleys of the Tweed and Teviot. A Liddesdaler, for instance, seldom crosses over to Tweedside, nor can a Tweedsider be said to have other than a comparatively slight acquaintanceship with his southern neighbour of the shire. Indeed, Liddesdale has been described as belonging in some respects more to England than to Scotland, and in a sense, it may be said to be the very centre of the Border Country itself.