loneliness, grandeur, and pathetic contrast with the soft environing verdure, as is done by no other combination. of scenery I know. And walk and watch them through night to early morn, and then you will know their true power:: "O' night, their broad brows shimmer In the white and weird moontide; The hills of the Tweed and the Borders generally have not the variety of rock-colour to be found in the Highlands. The pure white of the quartzite, except in isolated patches, the dark red of the walled Torridon They "the silvery sheen of the mica, and the glance of the felspar or the garnets," are awanting. But these hills have a charm of their own, and taking them through the year, especially from spring to Christmas, they show a wonderfully varied colouring, more so a great deal than certain vaunted districts of the Highlands. The Silurian rocks are generally light grey when weather-worn, when splintered or cut a fine rich blue, capable of glistening beautifully after a shower. are frequently crusted with varied mosses and lichens on the hills and moorlands. But as a rule, the rock, in the form of knob or crag, breaks the surface only occasionally. During summer the prevailing colour of the Border heights is green-the peculiar green of the hillside, a constant refreshment to the eye, its uniformity ever and anon broken and relieved by the sheen of the bracken and the fern, by interspaces of heather-bloom, and, on the far moorland heights, by the delicate tint and graceful antlers of the spreading stag-horn moss, by the pine-like spikes of the crowberry, glossy fields of blaeberry, and the rich and varying hues of the red bilberry or Idæan vine. One characteristic feature in the colouring of those hills is the hue of the screes or sclidders, the broken slaty greywacke rock, which spreads out in slanting spaces on the hillsides, and after rain is bright. with the shimmer of the shower, and then shows like a violet mass amid the surrounding green. And these high broad hill-tops have a strange affinity with the far-stretching sky above them, in all changes of atmosphere. They reflect with wondrous exactness the shadows from the passing clouds. They have a strange power of fusion with the heavens when they bear the mists on their tops; and they seem to pass into and become one with the light and the sunny air of a summer day; and of an afternoon, when the shadows from the west dim the long flowing eastern slopes, and the sun-gleam still rests on the summits, there is an unspeakable power of contrast and pathetic grandeur for eye and heart. Earth and sky seem to meet in brief but beautiful reconcilement.1 Those long, rounded, far-spreading heights, seldom visited-spaces of dreamy solitude and soul-subduing pathos are never at any season of the year without their charm. Early June decks them with a tender green, in which are set the yellow violet, the tormentil, and the rock rose-slenderest, dearest of hillside flowers. Even then, too, the cloudberry on the higher summits 1 This and the following paragraph are from the letterpress contributed by me to the River Tweed. lifts its snow-white blossom from the heart of the black peat-moss. Midsummer deepens and enriches the bloom, and brings the bracken in the lush green of the year. In early August the braes and moors are touched and brightened with the two kinds of the heather-bell, ere they gradually flush deep in large breaks of the common purple heather. Autumn, late autumn, throws the tender beauty of fading colour over the heather-bloom; and the bent of the moorland," the bent sae brown" of the old ballads, that knew and felt many a blood-stain in long gone foray and feud-that bent amid which in the grey dawn of Border legend and poetry the Queen of Faëry took her leave of Thomas of Ercildoune,—throws in October days its tresses free to the wind, with a waesome grace, touching the heart as with the hushed life of old story. And in winter the snow wraps those hills in a robe so meet that their statuesque outlines are seen and followed in their entireness and in their minute details as at no other time, standing against the heavens in the clear relief of forms new as it were from the sculptor's hand. "Oft on the morn of winter I've seen your grey crags stand, White crowned in snowy radiance, The joy of all the land." There can be little doubt that in the earliest historic The time the Border country was covered with wood. Celtic inhabitants were found by the Romans in their forests; and in England, particularly, later Teutonic settlements were made through clearances of growing timber.1 This, no doubt, applied also to the Lowlands of Scotland. We have still names that indicate felling and clearing, in Jedderfield, Hutcheonfield, and Aikerfield. The land was a forest wherever soil and elevation permitted wood to grow. In the channels of the streams, even at a considerable height, we find alternate sand and peat-moss, and inlaid there are birken boles, more. than 1000 feet above sea-level, as in the hollow at Manorhead. These may doubtless have been laid down in prehistoric times. But we have the testimony of Roman authors to the abundance of wood all over the portion of Britain they knew, and we have the record of the great clearances effected by the Emperor Severus. The extensive area covered by the old forests of the south of Scotland, which may be taken as including the vales of the Ettrick, the Yarrow, the Meggat, the Quair, the Caddon, and part of the Tweed, was but the remains of that great and ancient forest of Caledon-Coit Celidon -which stretched across the west of Scotland, including Cadzow, portions of Renfrew and Ayr, and the Carses by and beyond the Forth, piercing northwards to the great plain bounded by the Highland mountains.2 In the Border country, particularly in the secluded dales of Ettrick and Yarrow, there was abundant wood. It is possible even that the name of the original inhabitants of at least a portion of the Border district, 1 See Green, Making of England, passim. "The water of Clyde divideth Lennox on the north side from the baronie of Renfrew, and it arises out of the same hill in Calidon Wood, from whence the Annand falleth."-Holinshed, History, i. iv., quoted in an interesting article on Merlin by Mr Arthur Grant in the Scottish Review, October 1892. -Gadeni or Cadeni,-meant dwellers in the wood. Looking now at the ragged thorns and stunted birks and lowly rowans on the bare hillsides of that district, we can hardly fancy that it was once a forest in the ordinary sense of that word. Yet the evidence is clear to this effect. David I., in his charter to the Abbey of Selkirk, authorised the monks to cut wood for building or fuel as freely as he himself did.1 In 1291 Edward I. commanded Simon Fresel, keeper of the forest of Selkirk, to give to certain persons a number of oaks from the forest.2 In 1303-4 he built a large peel at Selkirk (Pelum de Selkirk) partly out of the wood of the forest.3 The same monarch granted forty oaks to the monks of Melrose. David II. gave permission to the monks of Kelso to cut trees in Selkirk and Jedwart forests for restoration of the abbey, which had been burned by the English. Some cutting was authorised in 1496, and the wood near Kirkhope, said to be the largest in the forest, survived in part at least as late as 1749. And we have the tradition that in last century one could walk from Selkirk to Ettrick, eighteen miles distant, under the shadow of the ancient trees. It is probable that the higher and more exposed sides and summits were bare of wood in old times as now; but in the valleys and haughs of the waters, and well up the hillsides, was found abundance of native trees. The birch, hawthorn, sallow-thorn, and the mountain-ash grew in the hollows, the latter showing a marked preference 1 Jeffrey, Roxburghshire, i. 88, and Charter. 2 Rotuli Scotia, i. 5 (T. C. Brown, Selkirkshire, chaps. iii., iv.) 3 Cal. Doc. Scotland, iv. 468, 469. + Rolls of Parliament, ii. (Caledonia, ii. 982). |