The Scott Country

ory. As we have said, the beauty and romance of Tweedside do not begin in this neighbourhood. They are the endowment of the main stream from its tap-root to 12 the sea. Berwick-upo

on of the Board of Works as a national relic and for preservation against the attacks of vandalism-enfold a sheaf of history. Few places have been the scenes of more furious sieges and merciless captures. Its bridge of fifteen arches, built before the Civil Wars and upheld for cent

lier Lords of Dunbar and Merse to the "Scott Country", though some have attempted to identify Cranshaws Castle or Wedderlie with Ravenswood. Wedderburn recalls the "Seven Spears". Polwarth and Marchmont, Ninewells and Nisbet, Kimmerghame and Langton, Edrington and Hutton, Chirnside and Bunkle, Duns and Greenlaw, are names steeped in the spirit of Border poetry as well as noted in local and national annals. The valleys in which lie Abbey St. Bathans, on the Whitadder, Priestlaw, on the Faseny, and Longformacus, on the Dye, seem to beckon for an inte

weed. Behind it is Swinton, the home of an ancient and knightly family from which Sir Walter was descended, on his mother's side. Over against it are the "castled steep" and "flanking walls" of Norham, the guardian of England and of the heritag

d yet more closely bound to the tragedy of the Kingdoms and to the genius of Scott, for near here is Ford Castle, where the Scottish King is supposed to have dalli

is moun

s did rus

fall in the midst of the flower

beside it, where, at a much more distant date, a generation before Macbeth, Malcolm II, King of Scots, won a victory that brought the boundary of his realm in permanence to the Tweed-stands within easy reach of Kelso. So also, on the opposite or Scottish bank, does Birgham, the soil on which William the Lion

lso and the first editor of Blackwood, who sang, from the South African veld, of "Bonnie Teviotdale and Teviot's mountains blue". The parent river makes a wide sweep, and, with its bold wooded banks, seems to embrace and protect the houses of the little market town, in the midst of which rise the ruined western towers and a fragment of the nave of the renowned Tyronesian Abbey. The place, standing so perilously near the English border, was guarded on the south and on the north by two great strongholds. Of Roxburgh or Marchmont Castle, on the narrow ridge between Tweed and Teviot, only a few walls, rising a few y

in its great Norman Abbey Church, built for purposes of war as well as of prayer. It was founded by that zealous abbey- and cathedral-rearer, David I, the son of Canmore and of Saint Margaret; and its head, as a mitred abbot who acknowledged only the jurisdiction of the Holy See, held a position that gave him a precedence

sals, and their fortunes mounted rapidly. They won new lands, and held, and still hold, the old. They kept a hawk's eye on the wild tracts of moor and pasture and peat bog, where even in the old days of foray there was, as Dandie Dinmont said, 'mair stabling for horses than change-houses for men', and where now all is utterly abandoned to the curlew and the sheep. But they moved their household gods, and extended their bounds, from the Bowmont to the Kale, from the Kale to the Teviot, and finally from the Teviot to the Tweed." Their ruined castle

rounds are-along with places already noted-the hanging woods of Stichell and Newtondon; Nenthorn, Hendersyde, Mellerstain, Makerstoun; beyond Teviot, the rich woodlands of Springwood, Woodendean, and Sunlaws; the darker pine trees around the hunting seat of Bowmont Forest; the folds in which lie the "Gypsy capital" of Kirk Yetholm, the ancient Kirk of Linton, Eckford of the Douglases a

. It is sprinkled over with battlefields and with peel towers, most of them now in ruin; every dale has been the scene of a fray, and every burn has a song or ballad tacked to its name. These Middle and West Marches were a centre of power and action, first of the House of Douglas, and then of the "Bauld Buccleuch". The "Good Sir James of Douglas" kept the peace of this troubled frontier for the Bruce; his son, the "Knight of Liddesdale", expelled the English from Teviotdale, and was killed while hunting in Ettrick Forest; his grands

Gilnockie and all his company at Carlenrig near Teviothead; and the "rank r

r tongue, Sir

o' reif an

an had hi

clan your n

from prison in Carlisle. The Minstrel's tale, in the Lay, opens at and returns again and again to Branxholm Ha'; it was at the Tower Inn, at Hawick, where the