Highways and Byways in the Border

CHAPTER IX GALASHIELS AND THE GALA, LINDFAN

And now we come to a once beautiful stream, of which, in the present condition of its lower stretches, it is not easy to speak with due moderation.

 
"Deil take the ditty trading loon
Wad gar the water ca' his wheel,
And drift his dyes and poisons down
By fair Tweed side at Ashiesteel."
 

It is not the Tweed at Ashiesteel, however, that in this instance is injured, but the Gala at Galashiels, and Tweed below that town. "It would," says the Official Report issued in 1906 by H.M. Stationery Office, "be impossible to find a river more grossly polluted than the Gala as it passes through Galashiels," – a verdict with which no wayfarer along the banks of that dishonoured stream will be inclined to disagree. The grey-blue liquid that sluggishly oozes down the river's bed among stones thick-coated with sewage fungus, is an outrage on nature most saddening to look upon. He does wisely who stands to windward of the abomination. It is true that of late years much has been done, much money spent, in the praiseworthy effort to bring purity into this home of the impure; but to the lay eye improvement is yet barely perceptible. "Fools and bairns," however, they tell us, "should never see half-done work." The filter-beds of the extensive sewage works are said to be not yet in working order, and so one may not despair of even yet living long enough to see Gala as Gala should be.

In the meantime, and till the entire sewage scheme is in full working order, there are – if one may judge from reports in the daily Press, – a few minor improvements not quite out of reach of the inhabitants. On 15th July, 1912, an evening paper published the account of "another" dead pig which at that date was lying in the river "immediately in front of the main entrance to the Technical College." The carcase, we are told, was "much decomposed, and attracted huge swarms of flies." This paper, in commenting on the corpse of an earlier defunct pig, which a few days before had reposed in the same tomb, remarks that "it has been the custom up to now for all kinds of objectional matter to be deposited on the river banks or thrown into the bed of the river to await the first flood to carry it down to the Tweed."

"The river," the journal continues, "is at present at its lowest summer ebb, and during the heat wave the smells arising from decomposing matter have been overpowering." In an arctic climate, there may perhaps be some excuse for the proverb: "the clarder the cosier," but it seems scarcely applicable to Gala; and there might, one would imagine, be other and more modern methods of dealing with decomposed pigs than that of floating them into outraged Tweed. The condition of "fishes that tipple in the deep" and quaff cerulean dyes in every stream, is not likely to be improved by a diet of sewage fungus and decayed pig, any more than is the health of human dwellers by the banks likely to benefit by the proximity of decomposing animal matter.

The history of Galashiels is mainly industrial, mainly the history of the'"Tweed" trade. There were mills of a sort in the town as early as 1622, but even a hundred and fifty years later the trade cannot have greatly harmed the river; only 170 cwt. of wool were then used in all the mills of Galashiels, and there was no such thing as the manufacture of modern "tweeds." All the wool then used was made into blankets, and "Galashiels Greys," (whatever fearful fowl they may have been). The term "tweeds" came later, one is given to understand, and arose through the mistake of an English correspondent of one of the Galashiels manufacturers. This gentleman misread a letter, in which the Scottish writer spoke of his "tweels." The Englishman, having read the letter somewhat carelessly, and knowing that Galashiels was somewhere near the river Tweed, hastily concluded that the goods under discussion were termed "tweeds," and gave his order accordingly. The name was universally adopted in the trade, and now – as the professional cricketer said about "yorkers," – "I don't see what else you could call them."

Galashiels has a tradition to which it clings, that it was once a royal hunting seat. Mr. Robert Chambers says that the lodge or tower used by the Scottish monarchs when they came here a-hunting was pulled down only so recently as about the year 1830. It was called the Peel, a strong square tower with small windows, "finer in appearance than any other house in the whole barony, that of Gala alone excepted." From it a narrow lane called the King's Shank led to the town. I cannot say it the name survives in Galashiels.

But there is another tradition in which perhaps Galashiels takes greater pride, the tradition connected with the plum tree in the Town's Arms. (Though what the little foxes are doing at the foot of the tree, and what they have to do with the legend, none can say. Perhaps they are English foxes; and they got the plums – sour enough, as it turned out.) The incident commemorated is said to be this: During one of the invasions of Edward III, a party of his soldiers had taken up their quarters in Galashiels. The country no doubt had been pretty well harried and laid waste – Edward's men had plenty of practice – and they may have been careless, with the carelessness begotten of overconfidence. Anyhow, they straggled through the? woods, looking for wild plums, the story goes – though one would imagine that the only plums they would be likely to find there would be sloes, not a fruit that one would expect to tempt them far afield. But perhaps, as some say, they were robbing an orchard – if there were orchards in Scotland in the fourteenth century. In any case, a party of Scots, either a passing armed band, or, as Galashiels would fain believe, the inhabitants of the town themselves, swearing that they would give the southern swine sourer plums than any that had yet set their teeth on edge, fell on the English, drove them in headlong rout to the banks of Tweed opposite to where Abbotsford now stands – the Englishmen's Dyke, they call the spot – and slew them to a man. "Soor Plums in Galashiels" has for centuries been a favourite air in the town, though the words of the song have perished.

Gala as a stream has been badly misused by man – at and below the town poisoned by sewage and mill refuse, above the town overfished, and poached, almost to the extinction of its trout. Matters now, however, are, I believe, vastly improved as regards sport; the Galashiels Angling Association works with & will to make things what they should be in a stream once so famed, and one hears that its efforts are meeting with the success they deserve. But it can never come back to what it must have been "lang syne," say in Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's day.

That gentleman records that he and a friend fished one day from Bankhouse down to Galashiels, and turning there, fished Gala up to its junction with the Ermit Burn, then followed the latter to its source on Soutra Hill, and found at the end of the day that they had filled three creels; their total catch was over thirty-six dozen trout. A good many were caught in the burn with worm, of course, and most of the trout taken were probably very small, but it shows what possibilities these small Border streams might hold if they were well treated. Nobody, however, one may hope – no reasonable mortal out of his teens, that is – now wants to catch over four hundred trout in a single day under any circumstances. Even to the very juvenile schoolboy there can be but the very minimum of sport in jerking fingerings on to the bank. If a fixed limit of size could be imposed; if the close season were continued for another fortnight or three weeks in Spring; and, above all, if the sale of trout could be prohibited by law until at least the beginning of April, our Border fishing would be improved beyond recognition. Great takes are made now, with worm, early in the season, when the waters are discoloured and the trout lean and ravenous; and long before they are in anything like condition either to give sport or to be decently fit for food, vast quantities of fish from the Border streams are sent off to the English markets. If those markets were kept closed a few weeks longer, many a trout would have a chance to reach maturity that is now sacrificed in extreme youth to put a few "bawbees" into a poacher's pocket. The great takes at the season's opening are not made by fair fishing. The writer was informed, three or four years ago, by the solitary porter of a very small Tweed-side railway station – himself a keen and skilful fisher – that on 2nd March of that year two men had consigned to Manchester from that one little station one hundred and ten pounds weight of trout. How were they caught? Certainly not by fair means. They are not fishers who take trout after this fashion. These are the men who, to suit their immediate wants and their own convenience, would deplete every stream in the Border and put a speedy end to all sport. As things are at present there is practically nothing to prevent them from taking what they please from any water.

However, to return to Gala. Here, as everywhere in the Border, vast are the changes that the past sixty or seventy years have wrought on the face of nature. Even at a time so comparatively recent as that when the present North British line of railway from Edinburgh to Carlisle was being constructed down the valley, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder remarks on the revolution that in his own experience a few years had made. "We know of no district," says he, "which has been so completely metamorphosed since the days of our youth as that of Gala Water." In his boyhood, the whole wore a pastoral character. Crops were rare, and fences hardly to be met with.

Not a tree was to be seen, except in the neighbourhood of one or two old places, and especially at and around Torwoodlee and Gala House, near the mouth of the river. Everything within sight was green, simple, and bare. Then he contrasts this with the appearance of the valley at date of his writing, when "the whole country is fenced, cultivated, and hedged round. Thriving and extensive plantations appear everywhere."

Could he see it, he would find the change even more marked now, with the "thriving plantations" grown and extended, countless trains thundering up and down the line day and night, and above all with his little village of "two thousand two hundred and nine inhabitants" grown into a great and busy town.

In ancient days, this valley through which Gala flows was called Wedale, – the Dale of Woe, the Valley of Weeping, for here says Professor Skene, was fought one of King Arthur's great battles against the Pagans. At what is now the village of Stow – the Stow (old English, "place,") of Wedale – the Bishops of St. Andrews had a palace; and here, by the Lady well at Torsonce, stood in Arthurian days a church famed for its possession of fragments of the True Cross, bestowed, it was said, by King Arthur himself.

Here, too, were preserved in great veneration, long years after Arthur had passed away "to be king among the dead," portions of that miraculous image of the Blessed Virgin which, the old historian Nennius tells us, the king bore into the stress of battle that day among the hills of Wedale. And here, till about 1815, lay a very large stone on whose face was the well marked impression of a foot, said by tradition to have been the imprint of the foot of the Virgin. To be converted into road-metal has doubtless been its fate. There are still, I believe, in Stow, the remains of a very old church, not, however, those of the original church of Wedale.

Leaving Galashiels by road past Boldside, with a glimpse of the Eildons and Abbotsford to the left, three miles from the town and immediately above the junction of Tweed with its tributary the Ettrick we cross the former river. Hard by, to the right, in a wood on top of Rink Hill, are the remains of a very fine British camp. Here for the time we again quit the banks of Tweed, and proceed up Ettrick. A mile from the junction of the rivers, we pass near the old churchyard of Lindean, where once stood the ancient church in which, the night after his assassination in 1353, lay the bloody corpse of Sir William Douglas, the Knight of Liddesdale, slain by his kinsman.

In connection with this churchyard, there used to exist a belief that greatly troubled the minds of country folk in the surrounding district. Away back in those evil times when the Plague raged through Scotland, very many of its victims were buried in a common grave in Lindean churchyard. But the church was demolished after the Reformation, and the churchyard gradually fell out of use as a place of burial. There came a time when the people had no farther need for it; why, thought some practical person, should it not be ploughed up and cultivated? There was but one thing that saved it from this fate; – not reverence for the ashes of the rude forefathers of the hamlet that lay here at rest, but the sure and certain belief in the minds of their descendants that in the event of the soil being disturbed, there must inevitably be a fresh outbreak of the dreaded Plague. It is curious and interesting to read of the blind horror with which our ancestors in their day regarded this scourge; but their horror is not hard to understand. Sanitation did not exist in those times, medicine as a science was impotent to curb the ravages of the dreaded pestilence. The people were helpless; to save themselves there remained only flight. And in what remote spot might flight avail them in a Plague-swept land! In that outbreak during the seventeenth century, temporary houses, or shelters, were erected in many parts of the Border, and into them were hurried persons smitten by the pestilence – and often, no doubt, persons suffering from some very minor ailment which their panic-stricken neighbours diagnosed as Plague. It is not to be supposed that once there, they would get much, if any, attention; they would simply take their chance – a slender one – of recovery. And if they died, so great was the dread in the minds of the living that, in many instances, to save unnecessary risk, the authorities merely pulled down the building over the dead bodies, and heaped earth on top. At a period even so late as in the writer's boyhood, there were many spots – perhaps in very remote districts there may yet be a few – where the Plague was said to be buried, and where to disturb the soil was believed to be a matter of extreme danger; the pestilence, like some malevolent fiend long held down, would inevitably break loose, and again Grim Death would hurl his darts broadcast at old and young, rich and poor. In his Scenes of Infancy Leyden alludes to the belief:

 
' "Mark, in yon vale, a solitary stone,
Shunned by the swain, with loathsome weeds o'ergruwn!
The yellow stonecrop shoots from every pore,
With scaly sapless lichens crusted o'er:
Beneath the base, where starving hemlocks creep,
The yellow Pestilence is buried deep.
 
 
Here oft, at sunny noon, the peasants pause,
While many a tale their mute attention draws; *
And, as the younger swains, with active feet,
Pace the loose weeds, and the flat tombstone mete,
What curse shall seize the guilty wretch, they tell,
Who drags the monster from his midnight cell."
 

All manner of precautions were adopted to hinder the spreading of the pestilence. Orders were even issued forbidding the assembling together of more than three or four persons at any one place, but the Privy Council Records of the time show that this regulation was obeyed only when it suited the people to observe it. There were limits to the dread in which the pestilence was held, and even fear of the consequences did not always reconcile the Borderers to such an interference with their liberty. It is on record that, in 1637, when, in the execution of his duty as Convener of the Justices of his county, Sir John Murray of Philiphaugh went to Selkirk, he found that a marriage was about to take place, and that most part of the community had been invited to be present. Sir John at once forbade the assemblage, and, later, he sent for the father of the bride, a man named James Murray, and informed him that on no account would more than four or five guests be permitted. But James was not to be thus coerced. "Na, na!" he cried, "If ye be feared, come not there. But the folk are comin'."

So Sir John called on the bailies to commit the offender at once to prison. The bailies, however, were probably included in the number of the wedding guests, and were looking forward to the "ploy" with as great pleasurable anticipation as was even the most irresponsible of those invited. They paid no heed to Sir John's demand; "there was no obedience given thereto," say the Records. And next day, when the postponed wedding took place, "there was about four or five score persons who met and drank together all that day till night." Whether Sir John remained to take any part in the festivities we are not told, but of this at least we may be very sure: his interference did not tend to lessen the amount of liquor consumed on the occasion.

CHAPTER X SELKIRK

Two miles up the river from Lindean you come to Selkirk. But this is not the route by which that town should be approached; by the Galashiels road, one is in the heart of Selkirk almost before one is aware of any streets. To see properly the old royal burgh clinging to the steep side of its hill, and to realise the beauty of its situation, it is necessary to come from Galashiels up Tweed by the road diverging at Rink. Thence cross Yair Bridge, go by that beautiful highway through the shaggy woods of Sunderland Hall, past Ettriek-bank and the Nettley Burn, down by Linglie, across Ettrick by the old bridge, and so up into the Market Place of Selkirk by the Green, (which is not anything in the nature of a lawn, but, on the contrary, a rather steep road).

This is a route longer, but to those not pressed for time, one infinitely more pleasant and beautiful than the direct way between the two towns. By it you see the exquisite bit of Tweed valley that lies between the junction and Yair Bridge, and, pausing as you cross that bridge, you have on either hand a prospect infinitely fair of heathery hill, green, leafy wood, and glorious river, the latter, above you on the right, hurrying down from Yair Cauld, a glittering sheet of eddying water, sweeping in magnificent curve past its elms at the foot of a mighty tree-clad brae; then passing beneath your feet, chafing and hoarsely roaring, it plunges through between imprisoning rocks, till once more comparative peace is gained in reaches dear to the heart of salmon fishers. Then you leave the bridge at Yair, and climbing an easy gradient, pass along by a pleasant, shady road through rich woods, over the hill to Ettriekbank, where tradition says Queen Mary crossed the Ettrick on her way to Jedburgh in 1566.

In itself, Ettriekbank possesses no feature of interest, but it recalls to mind the fact that here, in 1818, two harmless-looking hawkers with a cart were wont to call at intervals, ostensibly to sell fish. Had their real errand been known, it is little fish they would have sold, and short would have been their shrift at the hands of the roused and horrified country-folk. They were Burke and Hare, the notorious body-snatchers, and the real purpose of the cart in which they brought fish was to carry back to Edinburgh the bodies they might procure in the country.

Burke and Blare! Still, after the lapse of close on a century their memory is held in execration in the Border, still is their name a kind of vague horror even to those to whom it may convey little else, and who are almost wholly ignorant of what hideous crimes were committed by the pair. It was, of course, not only dead bodies that they took. These they ravished from new made graves; but they took also living men, drugged or filled with drink, and murdered them for the sake of the price their corpses would bring as subjects for dissection by some of the doctors of that day. Hare turned king's evidence. After the trial and execution of his accomplice, he was smuggled away to the United States. There his identity was discovered, and an infuriated mob threw him into a limekiln, where he was badly burned and his eye sight destroyed. After a time, when the rage and horror aroused by his misdeeds might to some extent be supposed likely to have died away, he returned to England, and as late as 1855 he was alive and in London. A blind, white haired, frouzy, ragged old man, led by a dog, used daily to slouch up Oxford Street, turn at the Circus towards Portland Place, post himself near where the Langham Hotel stands, and beg there from charitable passers-by. How many of them would have given, had they known that this old man was Hare, a ruffian stained with the blood of perhaps half a score of victims? How many of them, shrinking aside, would have stepped into the foulest gutter rather than be contaminated by even brushing against the hem of his filthy old garments? Few then knew who he was; but there are men yet alive who may possibly remember having seen him. An eminent London surgeon, who died, comparatively speaking, but the other day, very well remembered, and occasionally spoke of, the grizzly old ruffian who stood, with tapping stick, holding a bowl for alms. The late Mr. Serjeant Ballantine, too, in his Reminiscences describes the appearance of the man.

Immediately after passing Ettriekbank, the road, coming suddenly out from a clump of trees, breaks into view of a wide and pleasant valley, with a goodly prospect of wood and heathery hill stretched far to the west and south. Down this valley sweeps the gravelly bed of Ettrick; on its farther bank, on the flat haugh, stand a long line of mills and the station of a branch line of railway. Above, rising abruptly, tier upon tier in cheerful succession, trees and houses that blend into the smiling face of Selkirk. And perhaps it is by reason of the width of the setting in which they are placed, or because down the mighty funnel of the valley comes rushing the west wind that sweeps all smoke away, but somehow it seems that the mills on the haugh below the town give no air of squalor or of dirt to the landscape.

Would that one could say the same with regard to the effect of their dyes and refuse on the condition of the river. By a steep red "scaur" below Linglie there once was a pool clearer than amber, across which in summer weather small boys, breathless but greatly daring, essayed to swim. Farther down, at the back of Lindean Flour Mill, was another, where in the long twilights of June,

 
".. trout beneath the blossom'd tree,
Plashed in the golden stream,"
 

and whence many a pounder and half-pounder was drawn by eager young fishers. Where is that seductive amber-clear water now? Alas! in these days it is of a sickly blue tint, smelling evilly; and the stones in its bed, that once were a clear, warm grey, with yellow boulders interspersed that flashed in the stream of a sunny day like burnished copper, – they are slime-covered and loathsome, things to be shunned. Surely more can be done to check this pollution of our beautiful streams. So far as can be ascertained, there is but one of the mills of Selkirk that strives (and I believe it strives successfully,) so to deal with its refuse that the water it uses may be returned to Ettrick in a condition that does not defile that stream. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that during the autumn floods salmon do run the gauntlet of Ettrick's lower reaches, and in countless numbers congregate below Selkirk Cauld (or weir), where the difficulty of ascent acts as a partial check on their continued migration. On a day in the month of November, if there should happen to be a considerable flood in the river, this cauld is a sight worth going a long way to look at. A wide rushing sea of tawny, foaming water – a hundred yards from bank to bank – races over the sloping face of the cauld, and, where it plunges into the deep pool at foot, rears itself in a mighty wave, with crest that tosses in the wintry breeze "like the mane of a chestnut steed." From daylight till dark you may watch the fish, – big and little, from the thirty-pound leviathan to the little one or two-pound sea trout – in their eagerness to reach the spawning-beds of the upper waters, hurl themselves high in air over this great barrier-wave, then, gallantly struggling, continue for a while their course up the rushing torrent, till gradually they lose way and come tumbling back, head over tail, into the pool from which half a minute before they had emerged. It is like standing by one of the jumps in an endless kind of tinny Grand National Steeple-chase; so many fish are in the air at once at any given moment that one becomes giddy with watching them. Probably a good many do in time accomplish the ascent, or perhaps get up by the salmon-ladders in mid-stream, but the great majority are swept back, over and over again. Those that make their attempt near the side, in the shallow water out of the main force of the current, are frequently taken in landing-nets (by water-bailiffs stationed there for the purpose), and are carried up and set at liberty in the smooth water above the cauld. It must be confessed that a considerable number are also taken in this way, or with the help of a "cleek," by poachers. The bailiffs cannot be everywhere; and a salmon is a temptation before which (in the Border) almost the most virtuous of his sex might conceivably succumb. The average Borderer, indeed, I believe would cheerfully risk his life sometimes, rather than forego his chance of "a Fish." – "The only crime prevalent [in Selkirk] is that of poaching," says the Rev. Mr. Campbell, minister of the parish for fifty years, writing in 1833. There was one, greatly sinning in this respect, of whom nevertheless, because of his gallant end, I cannot think without a feeling almost of affection. He – with a fish where no fish should have been – was hopelessly outmanoeuvred by the bailiffs, escape cut off on every side, and only the river, red, swollen, and cold as ice, open to him. "Here's daith or glory for Jockie!" he cried, and plunged into a torrent from which he came no more alive.

A little higher up than the cauld is the Piper's Pool, where, until he was hit by a chance bullet that brought him rolling like a shot rabbit down the brae into the water, a piper stood piping that September morning of 1645, when Montrose and Leslie were striving for the victory. On the bank above, those inhabitants of Selkirk who cared to run some risk – which was probably the whole community – took up their position and watched the fight as from a grand stand. There is no better vantage point imaginable.

Leslie, I suppose, crossing opposite the gap called Will's Nick, (not far from Lindean), came up the left bank of Ettrick and, hidden by the fog, skirted along the edge of the hills till he was within striking distance of the Royal camp, when he took them, no doubt, both in flank and in rear. But how did a man of Montrose's experience allow himself to be thus fooled? Montrose passed the night in Selkirk, and he received no information whatever of any hostile movement. It was too late when he and what mounted men he could hastily collect came thundering and foaming through the shallow stream next morning, and went spurring over the flat haugh against the enemy. Someone besides Traquair must have played him false. It is inconceivable that he had no pickets out, or employed none of his cavalry on outpost duty. If they were out, in spite of the fog they could not fail to have got in touch with some part of Leslie's force. No large body of troops could have come undetected by a route so obvious, if those on the look-out for them were doing their duty.

Selkirk on this occasion saw war, as it were from the dress circle. The town was burned to the ground by the English after Flodden, and at various other odd times, but I do not think that it ever saw much actual street fighting such as was the experience of Jedburgh again and again. Selkirk was out of the main current of invasion, and it was only odd "spates" that came her way, such as when, in 1304, Edward I passed through the town on his march back to England; and again when in 1309 Edward II, following an unexpected route to the north, took her on his way. Still, Selkirk had always been familiar with at least the pomp and circumstance of war. The town was old when Earl David founded its abbey in 1113; probably it had always been a headquarters of the Scottish Kings and their retinue, when hunting in the Forest. Certainly William the Lion, Alexander II, and Alexander III all passed a good deal of time in his castle, which of old stood on an eminence in what are now the grounds of Haining, near the "head" of the town. Probably the Court came here chiefly for the purpose of hunting; the Forest of Ettrick was famed for its deer, as its men – unlike the majority of their countrymen – were famed for their archery. At Falkirk, in 1298, the English themselves bore witness to the warlike prowess of the men of Selkirk, as well as to their stature and fine appearance. At Bannockburn the sons of the forest distinguished themselves. And again at Flodden.

Regarding the part borne by her sons in the last-named great struggle, there are many trad-'fons to which the inhabitants of Selkirk cling tenaciously. Some, I fear, will not bear too close investigation, Traditions are mis-chancey things to handle; it does not always do to enquire too closely if one would retain one's faith. A large body of the men of Selkirk and the Forest went to Flodden, and they fought as they always did fight. That much, at least, is certain. But who shall say how many returned from that fatal field? The Burgh Records are silent. There is a mournful gap of two months in the history of the town; not an entry of any sort for eight weeks in the autumn of 1513. And, says Mr. Craig-Brown in his History of Selkirkshire, "Quite as mournful and significant are the frequent services of heirs recorded after the battle." Selkirk suffered severely at Flodden. There, as elsewhere, her sons did their duty; and they fell gloriously. One could wish that that might suffice: it is an ungrateful task to rake among the dead cinders of time-honoured traditions. But it is the detestable habit of the day to leave none of our ancient beliefs unassailed: the more beloved the tradition, the more likely is some one to remain unsatisfied till he has upset it. Yet it must be admitted that few of our cherished legends emerge triumphant when assailed by the scoffer. That, for instance, of Fletcher and the English standard captured at Flodden, which has been revered in Selkirk by so many generations of Souters, I fear, when it is investigated, must crumble into dust.