Tweed Dales E-Book

Donald Smith

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 331

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

An exploration of the Scottish Borders, Tweed Dales covers six journeys spanning from the Eildon Hills to Tweeddale, Kelso to Gala Water, Ettrick to Teviotdale. The long history of the Borders and their unique culture is evoked through key personalities, events, stories and folklore. Both accomplished storytellers, Donald and Elspeth spin the magic of the stories of Borders history with passion and vitality.

Leseprobe

ELSPETH TURNER grew up in the Scottish Borders. She held a senior lectureship in Economic and Social History at the University of Edinburgh and is returning in retirement to these and other storytelling roots after career shifts to facilitate equal access to higher education for school leavers – she was the first Director of Lothians Equal Access Programme for Schools and later a researcher and co-author in the field of Children’s Rights with her husband, the late Stewart Asquith. She latterly worked for the Scottish Funding Council and lives in Edinburgh.

DONALD SMITH is a storyteller, novelist and playwright and founding Director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre. He was also a founder of the National Theatre of Scotland, for which he campaigned over a decade. Smith’s non-fiction includes three previous Journeys and Evocations, co-authored with Stuart McHardy, Freedom and Faith on the Independence debate, and Pilgrim Guide to Scotland which recovers the nation’s sacred geography. Donald Smith has written a series of novels, most recently Flora McIvor. He is currently Director of Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland.

First published 2017

ISBN: 978-1-912147-21-2

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emissions manner from renewable forests.

Maps © OpenStreetMap contributors (www.openstreetmap.org), available under the Open Database License (www.opendatacommons.org) and reproduced under the Creative Commons Licence (www.creativecommons.org).

Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon and Din by 3btype.com

The authors’ right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Photographs (except where indicated) and text © Elspeth Turner and Donald Smith 2017

Dedicated to

The late Nancy and

Hamish Turner and the bairns

of their Border bairns

and

David, Jean, Mary,

Pat and Nancy Smith,

children of Kirkurd Manse

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book was sparked by our involvement in the ‘Seeing Stories’ project which explored links between landscape features and stories connected with them in four European regions. The choice of the river Tweed catchment was an obvious one not least because the Scottish Borders was so fortunate in their recorders and interpreters, most notably James Hogg, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Chambers. In modern times, John Veitch’s History and Poetry of the Scottish Border, W. S. Crockett’s The Scott Country, Walter Elliot’s The New Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 1805–2005, and Alastair Moffat’s The Scottish Borders have all added to the treasury, and we acknowledge our debt to the insights and materials collected by their authors and to those to whom they were indebted. Amongst the storytellers past and present, John Wilson, Sir George Douglas, Andrew Lang, John Buchan, Winifred M. Petrie, Jean Lang, and, in our own day, James Spence, Walter Elliot and Charlie Robertson have kept the tales of the Tweed Dales flowing.

Our thanks too to the poets who, inspired by the landscape, lore and history of the area, gave us a wealth of evocative words with which to illustrate the journeys. We thank Tim Douglas, Mhairi Owens, Isabella Johnstone, Dorcas Symms and Catriona Porteous for permission to quote their work and Will H Ogilvie’s trustees for permission to quote his. Among the song makers we thank Eric Bogle for permission to quote from his original composition ‘No Man’s Land’, and Janette McGinn for permission to quote from her late husband Matt McGinn’s song ‘The Rolling Hills of the Border’. Last but not least, thanks to the many who shared information, memories and stories with us, to Fiona Melrose and, for his assistance with photographs, Gordon Melrose.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Journey 1

The Eildon Hills and Melrose

Journey 2

Ettrick and Yarrow

Journey 3

Tweeddale

Journey 4

Galawater, Wedale and Lauderdale

Journey 5

Kelso and Yetholm

Journey 6

Teviotdale

Timeline

Introduction

The Scottish Borders lie between the Moorfoot and Lammermuir Hills to the north, and the Cheviot Hills and England to the south. People born and raised in this part of Scotland have a mindset that is neither Scottish nor English. They are Borderers. Their outlook and experience is as distinctive as the landscape and its geographical position within mainland Britain. These have their origins in geological events and are the context for the ebb and flow of people bringing new ways of seeing and doing things.

The landscape and the tussles for political, economic and spiritual control influenced how Borderers understood their world, and also their cultural and spiritual experience. Indeed, the landscape and its topographic features had a profound influence on the minds of the many visionaries, mystics, writers, thinkers, innovators and artists who came from or were inspired by this area.

There was a particular fascination with hills and rivers. Hilltops, especially those with wide vistas or panoramic views, are important to invaders and defenders of any land, and also have an influence on how travellers experience it. Hills look different depending on the angle of approach – and the means by which you approach them: on foot, by horse, by train, car or plane. All the hills of volcanic origin in the Borders look small seen first from high ground north, west or south of them. But they grow and change colour when you travel, as the early settlers did, down into the river valleys to reach them. The hill that looks like one hill can become two or three as your angle of approach changes and even, as the Eildon Hills do, four.

This shape-shifting quality, and the fact that people raised animals and took them to high summer pastures, might explain why hills feature so prominently in Border folk tales and legends. Hills are where fairies live, where sleeping armies rest, where the membrane between this and other worlds is thinnest, and where people disappear. These stories have their origins in the beliefs of the earliest settlers for whom the shape of the landscape was important. They revered nature, the land and trees.

Sometime later, the spiritual focus of the early farmers switched to celestial beings and the changing of the seasons. It took many generations and the development of religious institutions for monotheistic Christian beliefs to first overlap and then overtake primeval belief systems in the Scottish Borders. As late as the 13th century, the learned men of Europe believed not only in the existence of stars and planets but also in the predictive power of astrology. They combined knowledge of the physical world and the healing power of plants with alchemy and the presumed magical properties of substances. It was said that one such individual journeyed overnight on a flying horse to carry out diplomatic missions. Another claimed to have spent seven years with the fairies beneath the Eildon Hills and returned with the gift of prophecy. We meet Michael Scot and Thomas the Rhymer later.

There was magic in the hills but there was also something in the water. The river Tweed brought water and people together as it headed for the North Sea. Rivers loom large in Border history, legend, story and ballad. Until roads and railways snaked across the landscape, the easiest way to travel was along river valleys. As the towns of today bear witness, junctions of rivers were convenient places to trade goods and to meet for ceremonial events. Water has a special and enduring place in rituals and spiritual beliefs, while the junctions of rivers were associated with movement between one world and the next. Rivers and their banks also feature prominently in tales of family honour with their avenged and ill-fated lovers. The Tweed and its tributaries played a big part in shaping the outlook and mindset of Borderers.

However, the river was, until fairly recently, also a barrier. Bridges across the Tweed were few until the 18th century as were, for much of its length, places it could be forded safely. This effectively split the area in two: the lands north of the river and the lands to the south. There were also significant differences in how people saw and did things in the western, middle and eastern sections of the Tweed. People had a sense of belonging to a particular tributary or stretch of the Tweed each with its own character, set in a distinctive landscape with its own river of stories and creative outpourings. These have trickled down to us and are continually added to in spoken, written, musical, theatrical and visual forms – and sometimes all of them at once. Threads of ancient and more recent belief systems blend to create a richly textured story in much the same way as raw wool is transformed into the woollen textiles for which the Scottish Borders are famed.

The distinctive blend of emotions and responses each landscape stirs up are echoed in stories filtered through the voices of storytellers, the pens of poets and historians, and the tools of artists and crafters. We hope you will experience these too, as you journey with us through the landscape.

The Journeys

The six circular journeys are designed to give you a glimpse into the experiences and outlook of people in six distinctive landscapes. The routes described are for people with wheels of some kind. And like a wheel, journeys 2 to 6 are spokes radiating from the hub of journey 1. There are however many places travellers might want to abandon their wheels and take to the hills or the river bank. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 opened up access to the countryside in Scotland, but there are a few limitations as set out in the Scottish Outdoor Access Code of 2005 (www.outdooraccess-scotland.com).

The journeys follow the roads network, but intersect at various points with cross-country walking and cycle routes which pass through the area. Whilst road directions are correct at date of publication, things change so do take along a current map. Detailed guides for the Border Abbeys Way, the Southern Upland Way, the St Cuthbert’s Way, the Sir Walter Scott Way, the John Buchan Way, local walks around towns and some villages, and opening hours of visitor attractions are readily available from visitor information centres and online.

The journeys can be done in any order and explorers can join a route at any point and slip between them as time, mood, interests and weather suggest. All journeys are however described and mileages measured with a start and end point at Tweedbank Station, the terminus (for now) of the newly restored Borders Railway Waverley line running from Edinburgh. For rendezvousing purposes, nearby Abbotsford, the quirky home of master storyteller Sir Walter Scott, is equally suitable.

Each journey is prefaced by a brief introduction outlining key influences, historical events and people to set the scene.

Journey 1

The Eildon Hills and Melrose

Mertoun Doocot

Halfway between the Cheviot Hills on the English border and Edinburgh on the other side of the Lammermuir Hills, the river Tweed runs like a glittering zip along the subterranean join between the uplands to the north and the undulating lands to the south. Having travelled through hard grey silurian rocks to the west, the river meets softer red sandstone and limestone rocks and heads east on a winding course through a fertile river plain to the sea. Standing guard over this natural crossroads in the ancient landscape, with its iconic trio of manmade bridges, is the northernmost Eildon Hill, a haunting and haunted legacy of a volcano which woke up then fell asleep unwitnessed. Where better to sense how the Border landscape must have looked and felt to the procession of peoples who came into the Tweed valley?

Here we meet the Selgovae, a Celtic British Iron Age tribe and their neighbours to the east, the Votadini. They left no written records but built an impressive hilltop enclosure on the North Eildon. We meet the Romans who built their Scottish headquarters at the foot of the North Eildon. They came and went several times between 79 CE and around 220 CE. They left the Celtic tribes with an impressive road network, and the task of establishing a new power balance in the area.

Then came the Anglo-Saxon Northumbrians and, with them, the English language, Christianity and the first abbeys. Eventually the Kingdom of Northumbria stretched as far north as the Firth of Forth but over the 11th century the Scots won back some of the land. For a brief time, the Tweed was the new frontier. But then the Normans crossed the English Channel in 1066, swept north to subjugate the Kings of Northumbria and, by marrying into the Scottish royal family in the early 12th century, gained power in Scotland. This was not a conquest, but the Normans brought new ways of doing things which continue to this day to influence how Borderers live.

From the days of David I, Scotland’s monarchs had three priorities: to secure and defend the border; to order the day to day and spiritual lives of the people; and to develop Scotland’s economy, so gathering funds for their own projects. Achieving the first priority involved granting land to nobles, many of them Anglo Normans, in return for a pledge to provide a set number of fighting men as the king required. The second was achieved by reforming the law, establishing a second wave of abbeys and creating the parish structure to serve secular as well as ecclesiastical administration. And the third was achieved by land grants which generated rent paid for by sales of crops, animals and their produce; by setting up burghs and licensing them to hold markets; and by taxing the flow of goods and services. Capitalism had arrived!

The new system opened up opportunities for Borderers, while the pressure on nobles to meet their obligations to the monarch had some unintended consequences. Nobles were responsible for protecting the families of those who owed them military service. As well as vying for power and influence by courting royal favour, and making judicious marriages, many of the most powerful families between the Tweed and the Cheviots had, by the 15th century, taken to reiving. That is, they were helping themselves to their rivals’ assets, usually the cattle they relied on for food. Long running feuds with neighbours and even relatives became a way of life, despite the human cost in lost lives and loves.

This state of affairs arose directly from the uncertainties of living near a politically unstable frontier. In order to make life for his Border subjects less uncertain or, as he put it, to ‘make the key keep the castle and the bracken bush keep the cow’ King James I ordered the wealthiest landholders to build tower houses and they willingly obliged. A second wave followed a century later after Henry VIII of England had ordered his nobles to build tower houses ‘for resisting the Scottis men’. Towers however served their defensive purpose rather too well as far as royalty were concerned, because some of their owners regarded themselves as above the law and beyond royal authority. Paradoxically, the exchange of land for military service became the means by which the Border Reivers wielded considerable power and threatened Scotland’s economic and political stability. Attempts by successive monarchs to ‘daunton’ them had only temporary success, because the rulers’ inability to protect those close to a contested border meant local families continued to put their own people and interests first. They literally had to fight for their lives. The reiving culture therefore persisted until conditions in the area changed with the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

People living around the Eildons generally suffered less from English attempts to regain Scotland than those closer to the border, but the 16th century was a distressing and uncertain time. Terrible damage was inflicted by English troops, especially during Henry VIII of England’s ‘rough wooing’ of the 1540s. This brutal attack was triggered by Scotland’s refusal to marry the infant Mary Queen of Scots to his infant son. And there was religious upheaval when, during the Scottish Reformation, Roman Catholicism was outlawed, the abbeys closed their doors and Presbyterian Calvinism became the only spiritual creed to which people could publicly profess.

The local population carried on as best they could. The whirring of spinning wheels and the clacking of handlooms became everyday sounds from the second half of the 17th century but the technological revolution which later mechanised textile-making processes largely bypassed this part of the borders. The area was also on the fringes of major changes in agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries. Perhaps this is why the stories of past peoples, their ways of life and thinking and their stories seem particularly close to the surface in this area. It is a good place to start our journey.

As we travel through this landscape we meet a monk who averted a famine, a Scot and a Scott – one a multilingual wizard, the other a wizard with words. And we hear how a heart came home alone, how a horse trader got more than he bargained for, and how two scheming monks were outwitted.

The Journey: 32 miles

From Tweedbank Station turn left at roundabout (signed Melrose), follow signs for A68 (signed Edinburgh/Jedburgh), take first exit at roundabout (signed Edinburgh) and proceed to Leaderfoot viewpoint.

The Romans were greeted by the striking sight of three hills outlined on the horizon as they approached for the first time and went on to name their Scottish headquarters Trimontium (‘three hills’). A short walk up the disused road running parallel to the river takes us to a monument on the site of the camp and a series of viewing platforms with information boards. Just imagine sitting with two or three thousand others in the most northerly amphitheatre of the Roman Empire watching the Roman equivalent of Edinburgh’s Military Tattoo.

The Romans were not the first to make their mark on this landscape. The Celtic British hilltop enclosure on North Eildon was the largest of its kind in Scotland and, like Trimontium, seems to have been used intermittently. It latterly consisted of 300 or so huts which probably housed the crowds who gathered periodically to pay taxes, attend political gatherings or celebrate the turning of the seasons. Fires lit on Eildon Hill North are visible from much of the Tweed valley so when the Anglo-Saxon Northumbrians arrived they named the hills ‘the Aeled-dun’, meaning firehill.

Leaving Leaderfoot turn right and, at roundabout, take second exit onto A6091 (signed Galashiels, Melrose) then first right onto B6361 (signed Newstead).

Newstead is the oldest continuously inhabited village in Scotland. The numerous wells archaeologists have discovered here – more than 200 – tell us that the area was already pretty crowded when the Romans arrived. Everyone who lived here relied on these wells for fresh water. During the Bronze and Iron Ages, metal workers fashioned a variety of items here, some of which became offerings to the gods or goddesses associated with particular wells, springs or pools. Quite why some wells had a spiritual significance while others did not is a mystery but the Romans too, when they closed the wells supplying Trimontium, had their priests appease the water gods with animal and metal offerings such as swords or shields. The stories and legends of pre-Christian Anglo Saxon times are full of watery tales, and the holy wells, so important to early and later Christians, were often sited at places with earlier spiritual associations.

Proceed to Melrose and park.

Newstead was home to the masons who built the 12th century abbey in Melrose. Later we visit Old Mailros, the site of an abbey built six centuries earlier a couple of miles downstream, but we are greeted now by the rosy ruins of Melrose Abbey. This second abbey was founded by David I, the reforming king, in 1136. The Cistercian monks, brought from Riveaulx in Yorkshire, came with a mission to contemplate, grow things, convert the locals and pray for their souls. They were also record keepers, and the Abbey became famous for learning and the production of books. Much of what we know about this area’s early history comes from the Chronicle of Melrose. Begun in 1140, it pieces together the history of the first abbey at Old Mailros and goes on to document the story of this abbey until 1270. Stories about the monks were of course also told by local people. The most memorable ascribe the achievements of religious men to their ability to work miracles and see visions. Such tales reflect belief in a spiritual cosmos, though one with often practical implications.

Monks and Miracle Workers

Drythelm, a venerable monk at Mailros, was given to visions and seeings. But he had not always been a man of religion. Earlier in his life, he had fallen ill, so ill in fact that that those tending him gave him up for dead. The next morning however they found him not only awake but with an amazing tale to tell about his travels through the realm of the spirits.

He had, he said, been guided along a path by a heavenly being clothed in shining light with, on one side, blazing fires and, on the other, freezing snows. The souls of mankind were, he saw, being tossed from one extreme to the other. Eventually Drythelm was led into a place of total darkness and silence and left alone but presently his guide reappeared in the form of a star which led him into open light and towards a wall endless in its dimensions and without doors or windows. As they approached, Drythelm was suddenly transported atop the wall and found himself looking down into a meadow full of flowers and lush grasses through which people in white robes wandered at their ease.

Drythelm returned from this journey to bodily consciousness and recovered to tell his story and indeed to become a monk and to devote the rest of his life to ascetic prayer and meditations. He also bathed daily in the Tweed whatever the weather, refusing afterwards to dry his robe. One time, when he was bobbing amidst ice on the river, Drythelm was asked how he could endure such cold, to which he replied shortly, ‘I have felt worse cold’, remembering less Borders winters than the frozen wastes of the underworld.

And Waltheof (Walter), the second abbot of Melrose (who just happened to be David I’s stepson), was said to have miraculously saved around 4000 starving people. When the harvest failed, more and more desperate people came to camp in the fields and woods around the Abbey hoping the monks would share what food they had with them. Walter did not fail them. He ordered that the grain in the Abbey’s granaries be distributed until it ran out. The monks in charge of the stores reckoned that there was only enough to last for two weeks but somehow the supplies lasted three months, just long enough for the next year’s grain to ripen and be gathered.

Any doubts that Walter could work miracles were set aside when, 11 years after his death in 1159, his coffin was opened and his body was as fresh as the day it was buried. It was opened again 36 years later and again 34 years after that. On both occasions, it was recorded that there were no signs of decay.

Quite why Abbot Walter’s body did not decompose defies scientific explanation. However, whilst he may have had divine assistance to stave off famine, he could also have supplemented the grain with other food stored by the monks including apples from the Abbey’s vast orchards. Descendants of these very apple trees are still grown in Priorwood Gardens in Melrose. The Abbey also owned more than 5,000 acres of pasture and woodland spread across Lauderdale, Ettrick and Tweeddale. By 1300 this abbey alone was producing five per cent of all Scottish wool and exporting most of it to Northern Europe. The monks themselves took no part in the day to day running of the Abbey’s enterprises but relied on the labour of ‘lay brothers’ whose lives were hard compared with the monks, and local labour working under one master or another.

The wealth and political power of the abbeys however made them a target in troubled times. And in the Abbey’s early years, the monks brought trouble to their own door. Scuffles with neighbouring ecclesiastics were not unknown, for example in 1269 when the Abbot of Melrose and some monks attacked properties in Wedale belonging to the Bishop of St Andrews. They were excommunicated for killing one man and wounding others and, we presume, expelled from the Abbey.

Indeed, although monks were exempt from providing the military service other landholders owed the king, the Melrose monks donned armour and sallied forth with the Abbot’s blessing to fight the cause of a Scottish King. They rode out, for example, for Robert the Bruce which prompted an enraged Edward I to order the destruction of the Abbey in 1322. It was rebuilt with a grant from Robert the Bruce when he became king. Inconveniently for Scotland’s finances, the grant far exceeded the money in the Scots treasury at the time but Robert honoured his pledge and the Abbey was rebuilt, only to be attacked by Richard II in 1385. He however felt so bad about it afterwards that he gave money to rebuild! The masons brought in to repair the damage added gargoyles of a fat monk and a pig playing the bagpipes, suggesting not only that they had a free hand in embellishing the building but also that they were not Scots.

The Abbey was attacked a final time in 1545. By then the efforts of a succession of popes to persuade the monks of this and other monasteries to honour their vows and live frugally had clearly failed as these lines from that time sadly suggest:

The monks of Melrose made good kail,

On Fridays when they fasted

They wanted neither beef nor ale

As long as their neighbours’ lasted.

Not long after the final assault on the walls of Melrose Abbey, all Roman Catholic institutions were swept aside in the Reformation, the doors of the Abbey closed and the buildings were left to crumble.

And so, this abbey lay being raided for building stone by townspeople until Sir Walter Scott spearheaded the first campaign to rescue it. He wrote:

If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight;

For the gay beams of lightsome day

Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray.

When the broken arches are black in night,

And each shafted oriel glimmers bright,

When the cold light’s uncertain shower

Streams on the ruined central tower…

When distant Tweed is heard to rave,

And the owlet to hoot o’er the dead man’s grave,

Then go – but go alone the while –

Then view St David’s ruined pile.

Scott later confessed that he never had seen it by moonlight but those who have followed his instruction bear no grudge. John Geddie said of Melrose Abbey that it is ‘memorable even more for its legendary and literary associations than for its actual history’. And perhaps it is.

King Robert the Bruce, alongside whom the soldier monks of Melrose fought and who regained Scotland’s independence, found eternal rest in Melrose Abbey… or at least, his heart did.

The Heart of Robert the Bruce

‘A noble heart may have nane ease gif freedom fail’, are the words inscribed near Bruce’s heart at Melrose. These words are from the chivalrous epic of John Barbour, following the famous lines:

A! Freedome is a noble thing!

Freedome makes man to have liking:

Freedome all solace to man givis:

He livis at ease that freely livis!

Barbour’s ‘Brus’ is concerned as much with the King’s knightly virtues as his political and military struggles. Bruce had sworn that if he escaped death in the wars to keep Scotland free, he would go on pilgrimage or crusade to Jerusalem. But age and illness thwarted his desire so his dying wish was that his heart be taken to the Holy Land. Sir James Douglas, another of Barbour’s knightly heroes, was entrusted with this sacred task. However, he was killed en route, fighting the Saracens in Spain. According to Barbour:

The good lord Douglas pressed the enemy so hard

they fled in disarray, and Douglas gave pursuit

as a hunter leads the pack, with William Saintclair

the gallant knight of Roslin.

But when the Saracen saw how few were in the band,

not more than ten in number, they rallied with main force,

closing round the knights. Seeing Saintclair surrounded

like to fall, Sir James tore the casket from his neck–

‘To Bruce, to Bruce!’ he cries – hurls the heart into the host

and follows to the fray.

Douglas was himself killed but his body and the casket containing the heart of Robert the Bruce were brought back and Bruce’s heart buried in Melrose Abbey.

Melrose Abbey was built on the edge of a village called Fordel – a place to ford the river – which later took the Abbey’s name and grew into a town. The annual Eve of St John torchlight procession of masons from the Lodge of St John around the Abbey is a fitting reminder that the town owes its existence to the Abbey and its masons.

The Abbey was one of Scotland’s four principal places of medieval devotion, bringing pilgrims from near and far. Melrose consequently became a political as well as a spiritual meeting place. The great and the good (or not so good) gathered here to sign documents and treaties such as the 1424 Treaty of Melrose which James I hoped would bring to heel members of the Douglas family, by then a particular threat to his authority.

Melrose fell on hard times after the Abbey closed in the middle of the 16th century. During the following century, however the town became a major producer of linen cloth, much of it destined for distant markets. When demand for linen collapsed with the coming of cotton, Melrose tried with only temporary success to compete effectively in the making of cotton and woollen cloth. The mechanised production methods of the first industrial revolution however needed fast running rivers and the middle-aged Tweed was not a contender. So when Catherine Spence left Melrose for Australia with her family at the age of 14 in 1839, she left it at a low ebb. By the time she returned to visit in 1865 as one of that country’s foremost social reformers, an advocate for women and children and a champion of equality, the fortunes of the town had revived, thanks in no small part to Sir Walter Scott. People flocked to Abbotsford, the ruined Abbey and other sites mentioned in his poems and novels particularly after the coming of the railway in 1849. This compact and peaceful little town punched well above its weight. And, being the home of seven-a-side rugby and the renowned Borders Book Festival, it still does.

We cannot leave Melrose without mention of the wizard Michael Scot who, as Walter Scott recounted in his epic poem, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, is said to be buried in Melrose Abbey with his Book of Magic. One of many stories of how Michael Scot used his wizardry credits him with causing three hills to be created from one.

Michael Scot and the Eildon Hills

The story goes that the Devil sent three demons to distract Michael Scot from using his skills and magical powers for good ends. They had come, they said, to help him but it was not long before Michael figured out what they were up to. Getting them to leave, however, proved to be quite a challenge. In the end, he came up with the idea of setting them an impossible task.

And so, one night, he sent them off to create three Eildons from what was then one hill. Michael was sure that would keep them occupied for ever! In the morning however they were back having completed the task in a single night. The next task Michael set them was to throw a kerb of stone across the River Tweed. Surely, thought Michael, the flowing water would thwart their attempts. But yet again they returned having completed the job, some say at Ednam, some say at Kelso.

Finally, after many more unsuccessful attempts to get rid of them, he sent them off to the coast to make ropes from sand… and there they still are some say, unable to complete the task because, of course, the sea washes away their efforts twice a day.

There are in fact four Eildons. Little Eildon is what remains of the neck of the volcano. But the legend said three so three it has been ever since. We of course know how old these hills are and when humans arrived in the area. But that knowledge is recent and this story was once as plausible an explanation of how this exceptional cluster of hills came to be as any other, especially if you believed Michael Scot lived a long life, as wizards do.

Michael Scot also had a reputation for prophesy. That was not unusual in medieval Europe. Some, like local men Drythelm and Cuthbert, devoted themselves to the monastic life after they had visions they believed were sent by God. It was also common belief that the future could be read in the stars. Quite how Michael Scot’s prophesies came to him we don’t know but some of them were uncannily accurate. For example, he warned the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II that he would die near a city associated with the Roman goddess Flora. Frederick avoided Florence after that… but died at Fiorentina, a town also associated with Flora. Scot even prophesied his own death from a stone falling on his head and, despite his efforts to avoid that fate, it seems that was what carried him off.

Darnick Tower

Born in the Tweed valley in the 1170s, Michael Scot was in fact one of Europe’s most learned men in his day. He lived and worked at one time or another in Oxford, Paris, Palermo, Salerno and Toledo and mixed with people who were the pioneers of their time in scientific discoveries, mathematics, medicine and philosophy. Michael was educated by monks and took holy orders before becoming the mediaeval equivalent of a modern academic. Having mastered multiple languages, he also worked as a translator and adviser to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Popes Innocent IV and Gregory IX. Indeed, he is credited with reintroducing Aristotle’s writings to European readers by translating them from Arabic, the only language in which some survived. Such was his detailed knowledge of human biology that he was commissioned to write manuals and he happened to be in Salerno and Toledo when the alchemists, the forefathers of modern chemistry, discovered how to distil alcohol. If he brought back this knowledge and used it in preparing his medicines, we have him to thank for hangovers and for the later whisky industry.

So why is this clever man remembered more for his prophesies and his supernatural feats than his academic achievements? One reason may be that Michael seemed pretty eccentric in the eyes of his Tweedside neighbours. He was said, for example, to wear strange clothes and to have fed guests on food spirited from the royal kitchens of Spain and France. And a story got around that he had travelled to Rome and back, a journey that took others weeks, in a single night. His purpose in going was to find out the date of Shrove Tuesday, a date relevant to establishing the date of Easter which fell differently each year. He had probably learned how the date was worked out while he was in Italy, but it was said that he had travelled there and back on a big black horse which he had traded for his shadow and flew faster than the wind or an unspoken thought between lovers. We will never know but perhaps some of the stories told and retold about the superhuman exploits of Michael Scot the Wizard came from the mouth of the man himself.

And what of the Book of Magic that is said to be buried with Michael Scot? Might this have been a manuscript written in Arabic script? Dante, and later, Walter Scott, are responsible for Michael’s portrayal in literature as a master of the dark arts. Dante was writing 70 years after Michael Scot’s death at a time when the Roman Catholic Church was less tolerant of pre-Christian practices and the eighth crusade against the Moors (Muslims) had just ended with the loss of Jerusalem. The fact that Michael, besides being a ‘false prophet’ according to Dante, was a translator of Arabic writings and had worked for Frederick II, whose tolerant attitude to Muslims and Jews upset the Popes of his day, may explain the hostility. Walter Scott’s later portrayal of Michael in the ‘Lay of the last Minstrel’ only compounded his dark reputation. The making and breaking of reputations by the written media is no recent phenomenon! Whatever the truth about this clever, enquiring man, he was already a mystery and a legend in his own time.

Proceed to Darnick past Melrose rugby ground and at Y junction take left onto High Cross Avenue (signed Darnick).

Darnick is, as the winding road hints, an old settlement. Two of Darnick’s original three towers survive, Fishers Tower as a ruin and Darnick Tower, a fine 16th century tower house, as a private residence. A teenage James V took refuge here during the Battle of Melrose Bridge in 1526. This battle later became known as Skirmish Field to distinguish it from the Battle of Melrose in 1378. On that earlier occasion, a Douglas defeated English troops who had pursued his men from Berwick upon Tweed.

Skirmish Field

A skirmish means a small battle but that is a relative term in the Borders. This fracas also involved the Douglases, supported by the Maxwells and the Kers. The Earl of Angus, chief of the House of Douglas, had the young King James V (his stepson) in guardianship when they came to Jedburgh to hold a Justice Court. But the teenage King was chafing at his confinement and sent a secret message to Sir Walter Scott of Branxholm and Buccleuch, the renowned Borders scrapper ‘Wicked Wat’, taking up an offer to rescue him.

Acting on this, Walter Scott accompanied by 600 men intercepted the Earl of Angus’s much smaller party on their way north with James. James was quickly got out of harm’s way and watched impatiently from the battlements of Darnick Tower to see which side would prevail. He saw the attacking band of Scots and Eliots get the upper hand and no doubt thought his dream of being free to rule in his own right was about to come true. But then a substantial band of Kerrs and Armstrongs, who had earlier left the royal escort, returned and James’s would-be rescuers fled the field, having killed around 100 of the Earl of Angus’s supporters but lost around 80 of their own. At a spot later marked by the Turn Again stone, one of Scott’s men, James Elliot, turned back on their pursuers and stabbed the leader of the Kerrs.

The King, subdued and frustrated, travelled on to Edinburgh leaving behind a death to be avenged – as 26 years later it was when the Kerrs killed Walter Scott in the High Street of Edinburgh. This feud continued with considerable loss of life on both sides until, finally, a diplomatic marriage ended hostilities.

This bloody event was one of many incidents which sparked the family feuds and lawlessness that plagued the borders between the 13th and the 16th centuries. James V did however shrug off the controlling hand of the Earl of Angus two years later and immediately got down to sorting out the dire state Scotland’s finances had got into following the Battle of Flodden. He struck a deal with Pope Paul II