It is a land dedicated to the achievements of Douglases and Scotts, but that resounds also with the deeds of Elliots and Armstrongs, and of minor and broken clans, Turnbulls and Rutherfords, Cranstouns and Olivers. It has its rich endowment of beauty as well as of history. Around the keep of Branxholm, which from the deep bank overhanging the stream has often defied its enemies, have gathered buildings of more recent date 22 and a screen of ancient trees. Below it is the Tower of Goldilands, where a marauding Scott was hanged at his own gate, and here comes in from the left the Borthwick Water. As Leyden has it:

“Where Bortha hoarse, that loads the meads with sand,

Rolls her red tide to Teviot’s western strand,

Through slaty hills, whose sides are shagged with thorn,

And springs in scattered tufts the dark-green corn,

Towers wood-girt Harden, far above the vale”—

Harden, the cradle of the branch of the Scotts from which the author of the Lay was descended; the “mountain home”, hidden in its narrow glen, to which the “Flower of Yarrow” was brought by “Auld Wat”—“a wide domain, and rich, had purple heath been grain”.

At the town of Hawick, Teviot meets Slitrig, coming from the wild bounds of Liddisdale. All roads in Teviotdale seem to lead to Hawick, the capital of its trade as well as a centre of its history. Proud as its citizens are of the leading position of the burgh in the tweed and hosiery manufacture of the South of Scotland, and of the undiminished importance of its great lamb and sheep fairs, they are prouder still of the prowess of its sons in the dark days that followed Flodden, and in other scenes of Border strife. Scott was familiar with its story, as with the streets and with the steep hills that surround this stirring little metropolis of industrial and pastoral life; and allusion 23 has already been made to the literary and legendary memories attached to the site of the Tower in which the Douglases of Drumlanrig entertained their guests and protected their rights. From the parish church of St. Mary, since often rebuilt, the heroic Ramsay of Dalhousie was carried away by the Knight of Liddisdale, to be immured and to suffer a lingering death in the Douglas hold of Hermitage—

“Did ever knight so foul a deed?”

An older memorial of the past of Hawick is the Motehill, on which justice was dispensed, and an outlook kept for enemies, in times beyond the range even of tradition. The great “Hawick Tradition” of the capture of the standard of the English marauders at Hornshole is kept green by the annual ceremony of the “Common Riding”, when Hawick is to be seen in its gayest and most jubilant mood. The words and tune of its slogan of “Teribus ye Teriodin” are supposed to have descended to it from heathen times, and to have originally been an invocation to the gods of the early Saxons and Norsemen—Thor and Odin. The defiant spirit of these warriors of old seems still to ring in the chaunt sung by the Cornet and his men as they ride round the marches in the beginning of June:

“Teribus ye Teriodin,

Sons of heroes slain at Flodden,

Imitating Border Bowmen,

Aye defend your rights and Common.”
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A few miles up the Slitrig is Stobs Castle, an ancient seat of the Elliots, which became a military centre during the Great European War; and there are many other places of note and fame on the once hazardous way, now followed by the railway, that leads across the hills to the head-streams of the Liddel and thence to those of the North Tyne, or to the “Debatable Land”, the Solway, and Carlisle. Another crowd of warlike memories and of pastoral and woodland charms awaits those who, from Hawick, or from the old Douglas seat of Cavers, lower down Teviotdale, explore the Hobkirk valley, or pass over the skirts of Ruberslaw into Rule Water—to Bonchester and to Hobkirk, where Thomson planned his Seasons, and to Southdean, where the poet spent his early years, and to the Carter Bar and the Border.

A few miles below Hawick, past Hornshole and past Denholm, the birthplace of John Leyden—the poet, the Oriental scholar, the friend of Scott, whose “brief and bright career” closed too soon in the Malay East—below “dark Ruberslaw” and the Dunion, which interposes its round-backed form between the “mining Rule” and the “crystal Jed”, and more directly under the Minto Crags and the Chesters moors, lies one of the loveliest bits on Teviot. Haughs and dells, green hills and wide sweeps of river spread around the fragments of Fatlips Castle, whose owner, a Turnbull, dwelt
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“Mid cliffs from whence his eagle eye

Full many a league his prey could spy”;

and around Minto House, the home, since the union, of the Elliots, a race great in law and in war, in song and in statecraft, with whom, through their descent from “Gibbie with the Gowden Garters”, a daughter of Harden, Sir Walter could “count kin”. Jed Water and Ale Water come in from south and north, farther down, and here, too, every foot is famous. The “Minstrel” sings of scenes, on the track of William of Deloraine, “good at need”, among them

“Ancient Riddel’s fair domain,

Where Aill, from mountains freed,

Down from the lakes did raving come;

Each wave was crested with tawny foam,

Like the mane of a chestnut steed”.

The inflow of this turbulent stream is below the fine old tree-surrounded Ancrum House. It is overshadowed by Penielheugh and by the ridge of Lilliard’s Edge, across which the main road from Carlisle, that has followed the course of the Teviot almost from its source, toils painfully over to the valley of the Tweed. On a day in 1545, Ancrum Moor

“Ran red with English blood,

Where the Douglas true and the bold Buccleuch

’Gainst keen Lord Evers stood”—

a victory to which, according to traditions, “fair Maid Lilliard” contributed manfully, until, like a hero of “Chevy Chase”, she “fought upon her stumps”.
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Jed Water is still more charged with the history and legends of the past. Much of it, including Jedburgh Abbey, is the patrimony of the branch of the Kerrs represented by the Marquis of Lothian, whose modern seat, Mount Teviot, lies opposite Jedfoot, while the ancient home of the family, Ferniehirst, begins to run to decay. It would take many pages to do justice—even “Jeddart justice”—to Jedburgh, whose townsfolk, armed with their “Jeddart staves” and to their slogan of “Jeddart’s Here!” were in the front of the Border Wars. Its Abbey, founded by David the Saint, who placed here Augustinian canons from Beauvais early in the twelfth century, is still, in spite of having been seven times burned, the stateliest and the best preserved of the medi?val religious houses of the Scott Country. The site of the Royal Castle, where in the “Golden Age” of the Borders Alexander III held court after his second marriage, has disappeared under public buildings; but the house in the Backgate is pointed out where Mary Queen of Scots lay sick to death after her perilous ride to Hermitage, as well as the lodging in the Castlegate occupied by Prince Charlie on his march into England.

His road lay over a shoulder of Carter Fell into Redesdale, where runs what is still the only way across the hills for wheeled traffic in the sixty miles between Wooler, on the Till, and Riccarton, on the Liddel, although the 27 Romans built over the Cheviots paved roads, one of which descended into the head of Kale Water, and, from the site of the old Border Trysts at Pennymuir, ran straight as a ruled line to the camp of Newstead, under Eildon. From end to end these hills are deserted, except by the shepherd and the sportsman. Along the “wild and willowed shore” of Teviot and of Jed, the “glaring balefires blaze no more”. The race of the mosstroopers—of “John o’ the Side” and “Christie’s Will”, the “Laird’s Jock” and “Hobbie Noble”—is long extinct. But there are still to be found fine products of the soil, of the type of the stalwart tenant of Charlieshope. The Border spirit may have run into manufactures, and pastoral and arable farming, and Kirk and State contentions, but anyone who fancies it is dead should attend a “Common Riding”, or an otter or fox-hunt, or a game of curling or of hand- or foot-ball in these parts; or a meeting or parting of Hawick “Teeries” or of “Jedburgh callants”. He will doubt no more.

Dryburgh Abbey is less than ten miles............