That it never throve to any remarkable extent in its earlier history may possibly be in part due to its dangerous proximity to Tantallon Castle, the hold of the Douglases, Earls of Angus. Every visitor to North Berwick, after he has surmounted the Law and wandered his fill by the beach, makes an excursion to Tantallon Castle. The coast eastward is bold and precipitous, and fretted by the waters of the North Sea, for we are now at the very lip of the Firth of Forth; and the Bass Rock, lying opposite the beautiful curve of Canty Bay, looks like a mass of the shore-cliffs washed bodily out to sea. Just where the coast is wildest and least accessible one sees—
“Tantallon’s dizzy steep
Hang o’er the margin of the deep.”
The eyrie of the Douglas is now a mere shell; but the extent and immense thickness of the walls still proclaim its strength in the days when it was a proverb to “ding doon Tantallon and make a bridge to the Bass.” On three sides it was protected by the sea, and
“Above the booming ocean leant
The far-projecting battlement.”
On the land side were those gate-works and walls which Marmion cleared, after bidding bold defiance to the “Douglas in his hall,” and behind which the turbulent Earls of Angus, for their part, so often bade defiance to their Sovereigns. James V. once brought up against it “Thrawn-mu’d Meg and her Marrow,” and other great pieces of mediæval ordnance from Dunbar, where three lords were placed in pawn for their safe return. But he failed to “ding doon Tantallon”; that feat was reserved for the Covenanters.
Now the spirit of Walter Scott seems to haunt the ruins, in company with the ghosts of “Bell-the-Cat,” and the other dead Douglases who built or strengthened these storm-battered walls. The Magician of the North has waved his wand over the Forth from Ben Lomond to Tantallon and the Bass!
John Geddie.
NORTH BERWICK, FROM THE HARBOUR.
BERWICK-ON-TWEED.
THE TWEED.
CHAPTER I.
FROM BERWICK TO KELSO.
Leading Characteristics—The View from Berwick—Lindisfarne—The History and Present State of Berwick—Norham Castle and Marmion—Ladykirk—Tillmouth—Twisell Castle and Bridge—Ford Castle and Flodden—Coldstream—Wark Castle—Hadden Rig.
“A bonny water” was the phrase used of the Tweed by a peasant-woman whom Dorothy Wordsworth met when she came to spy out the Border river. Homely as the expression is, it would not be easy to find another quite so meet. To grandeur, to magnificence, the stream can make no claim, either in itself or in its surroundings. Of screaming eagles, of awful cliffs, of leaping linns, of foaming waves, it knows nothing. No more horrid sound is heard in its neighbourhood than the cry of the pale sea-maw; its banks are rarely precipitous, never frightful; it has not a single waterfall to its name; and, save where its surface is gently ruffled by glistening pebbles, it flows smooth as (pace the poet) the course of true love usually is. Yet of charms more gracious how profuse it is! In its careless windings, its silvery clearness, its sweet haughs and holms, its affluence of leaf and blade, its frequent breadth of valley, it is dowered with all the amenities of a large and generous landscape, distributed into combinations of incessant variety. Nor does it owe much less to art and association than to Nature. It glides or ripples by some of the most impressive ruins, ecclesiastical and secular, in all Scotland. At point after point it shines, for the inner eye, with “the light that never was on sea or land.” If over other Scottish streams as well the magician’s wand has waved, the Tweed is twice blessed, since it can speak not only of “Norham’s castled steep” and “St. David’s ruined pile,” but of Ashestiel, and Smailholm, and Abbotsford. And then its course takes it through the very heart of the Debateable Land—birthplace of myth and legend, of fairy tale and folk-song—battlefield where hostile races and envious factions and rival clans have met in mortal strife. For centuries it was the wont of its waters to reflect the fire-bale’s ruddy glare, of its banks to resound with the strident Border-slogan; and until long after the coalition of the Crowns its fords continued to be crossed by reiving marchmen in jack and helmet, driving before them their “prey,” or scurrying before the avenging “hot trod,” led on by blaring bugle-horn and mouthing bloodhound.
HIGH STREET, BERWICK, WITH THE TOWN HALL.
THE ROYAL BORDER BRIDGE, BERWICK.
A bonny water it truly is, but not a brisk. Except in time of spate, it pursues its way, not wearily, it may be, but certainly lazily, and even wantonly, often wimpling into curves and loops which half suggest that, forgetful of its destiny, it is about basely to wind back to whence it came, and calling to mind Mr. Swinburne’s river, of which all that can be said is that it creeps “somewhere safe to sea.” When in the chiming humour, which is not seldom, it sings sweetly enough, but crooningly rather than liltingly—less to you than to itself, or in accompaniment to the birds that pour out their lavish strains along its banks. Not that there is any particular reason why it should take life more seriously. To things commercial it does not condescend. It is tidal only to Norham, and none but mere cockle-shells can get even so far. And if it has a drainage basin second only to that of the Tay among Scottish streams, it has never been alleged that in this respect there is any failure of duty. Let it be said, too, that while it rarely hastes, on the other hand it seldom rests. The “mazes” to which it is addicted are not usually “sluggish;” to the spiky rush or the cool shiny discs of the water-lily it shows no special favour; while dark pools “where alders moist and willows weep” are only to be found by those who seek. Exciting the influences of the stream are not; but they are at any rate cheerful.
THE COURSE OF THE TWEED.
One whose only knowledge of the Tweed is gained from what can be seen of it at Berwick, and when the tide is out, would not be likely to think of it more highly than he ought to think. For even at its “latter end” it seems to have no great sense of the dignity of life; it rolls neither broad nor deep, and does little more than trickle into the larger life to which it has all along so indolently tended. Nor is it here altogether happy in the surroundings which it owes