University of Virginia Library

The description of the journey to Fairyland in the old ballad is exquisitely poetical—few things more so:—

Sir John de Seagrave was appointed Governor of Scotland by Edward I., and marched from Berwick towards Edinburgh, about the beginning of Lent, with an army of twenty thousand men, consisting chiefly of cavalry, and officered by some of the best and bravest leaders of England. Among these were two brothers of the governor, whom Hemingford designates as “milites strenuissimi,” and Robert de Neville, a nobleman who had greatly distinguished himself in the Welsh wars. This powerful force was divided into three sections, one of which was commanded by Seagrave himself, the second by Ralph de Manton, and the third by Neville; and, on approaching Roslin, as no enemy was met with, each encamped on its own ground, without any established communication with the others. Sir John Comyn and Sir Simon Frazer, who were at Biggar with a small force of eight thousand cavalry, marched from that place during the night, to take the enemy by surprise, and attacked Seagrave with his division on the Moor of Roslin. The commander, with his brother and son, as well as sixteen knights and thirty esquires, were made prisoners, and the Scots had begun to plunder, when the second division appeared. This also was routed with great slaughter, and Ralph de Manton taken captive. No sooner, however, was this second triumph achieved, than the last division, under Neville, appeared in the distance. Worn out with their march and two successive attacks, the first impulse of the Scots was to retreat; but the proximity of the enemy rendered this impossible, and a third conflict commenced, which, after being obstinately disputed, terminated in the death of Neville, and the total rout of his followers. The carnage is said to have been dreadful, as the whole of the prisoners taken in the first and second engagements were necessarily put to death.

Macbeth.

Gorton lies between Roslin and Hawthornden, and on the same side of the river as the latter. It is celebrated for its caves, which are in the cliff facing the river, and so covered up with bushes and brambles that it is difficult to discover the entrance to them. They are cut in the form of a cross, and are supposed to have been the abode of hermits. During the unhappy reign of David II., when Scotland was overrun by the English, they yielded refuge to Sir Alexander Ramsey of Dalwolsey and a band of chosen followers, noted for patriotism and gallantry.

The cotemporary accounts of the battle of Flodden, English and Scottish, are now admitted to be full of error and exaggeration; and, indeed, no circumstantial account, freed from these, was given of it till the days of Pinkerton. Some corrections, even of it, with some additional particulars, will be found in Tytler's Scotland, vol. v. Dr Lingard makes the number of the Scottish army forty thousand; and cotemporary English statements admit the English to have been twenty-six thousand; Mr Tytler remarking, that it is by no means improbable that this was rather a low estimate. It is that assumed in the rare tract entitled The Batayle of Floddon-felde, called Brainston Moor, some years ago reprinted by that eminent antiquary, Mr Pitcairn, whose Celebrated Criminal Trials have thrown such a mass of light on the curious mediæval history of Scotland.

The Solway is remarkable for the rapidity with which its tides make and recede. Few things more graphic have ever been penned than the detailed account of the phenomena characterising the spring-tides in the Solway Firth, as given in the novel of Redgauntlet. The line in the ballad of “Lochinvar,”

is familiar to the memory of all lovers of poetry.

Tytler's History of Scotland, vol. v. p. 82.

It is ascertained that the well-known and beautiful verses now sung as “The Flowers of the Forest” are the production of a lady of family in Roxburghshire, evidence of this fact having been produced by the late Dr Somerville of Jedburgh, to Sir Walter Scott; but it is equally true that the stanzas were only engrafted on the floating remnants of an ancient, and probably nearly contemporary ballad—the lines of the first stanza,

and the concluding one,

being all that remain to tell of its existence, save another imperfect line, which, however, conveys an affecting image—

To the great delight of all the lovers of Scottish music, the original melody of the song, along with those of “Bonny Dundee,” “Waes my heart that we should sunder,” “The last time I came o'er the Muir,” “Johnny Faa,” and several other established favourites, was recently discovered in the Skene MS.—a collection of ancient music, written between the years 1615 and 1620; and bequeathed, about twenty years ago, by Miss Elizabeth Skene of Curriehill and Hallyards, to the Faculty of Advocates. It was published in 1838, under the able editorship of Mr Dauney. By competent judges the old air is declared to differ from the modern one only in being at once more simple and more beautiful; and knowing it to have been sung by the bereaved of Flodden Field, does not destroy a single association, or disturb a single sentiment. By how many smoking hearths, through how many generations, has it caused tears to flow!

The present house of Hawthornden is a mansion apparently of the seventeenth century, engrafted on the ancient baronial castle, in which Ben Jonson visited the Scottish poet, and from whose remains it is apparent that it had been constructed in times when comfort was less studied than security. It is still in the possession of the Drummonds through the maternal line; but, although yet partly furnished, Sir Francis Walker Drummond, the father of the present proprietor, removed the family residence to a more commodious mansion in the vicinity. Among its relics are a number of Jacobite portraits, and a dress worn by the Chevalier in 1745.

The Scottish founder of the Drummonds is said to have come from Hungary with Margaret, queen of Malcolm Canmore, seven hundred years ago. In the days of Robert the Bruce, Walter de Drummond was, according to Stowe's Annals, clerk-register to that illustrious monarch, and one of his commissioners in concluding a treaty of peace between England and Scotland at Newcastle in 1323. In David the First's reign, the Drummonds rendered themselves prominent by implacable and sanguinary feuds with the Monteiths — the betrayers of Wallace — which were only terminated by royal command, by a charter of agreement, dated on the banks of the Forth, over against Stirling, 17th May 1360, in the presence of Sir Hugh Eglinton and Sir Robert Erskine of Alloa, the King's two justiciaries, and which is still preserved in the family charter-chest.

Through Queen Annabella, the family became connected with the royal line of Scotland; and that lady's brother, Sir Malcolm Drummond, having married Douglas, heiress of Mar, succeeded to that ancient earldom. For his distinguished service at the battle of Otterburn, in having taken prisoner Sir Ralph Percy, the brother of Hotspur, he was rewarded with a pension of five hundred pounds per annum from the customs of Inverness, and was in great reputation with David Bruce, and with the second and third Roberts. The principal line of the Drummonds afterwards became Earls and Dukes of Perth— which titles they forfeited for their adherence to the cause of the Stuarts. They are now represented.

Beneath the foundations of the ancient building there is a remarkable souterrain, supposed to have been a retreat of the aboriginal Britons, and which consists of several apartments, lighted by apertures in the face of the precipice, and furnished with a draw-well. In later times it served as a place of concealment to Sir Alexander Ramsay and other patriots, who had endeavoured to rescue Scotland from the tyranny of Edward III. Hawthornden, from its exquisite scenery, its ruins, its caves, and its classical associations, is still a great source of attraction to multitudes of summer ramblers. In 1843 it was visited by Queen Victoria and her suite.

In this favourite haunt of his meditations, it is said that Drummond composed his curious discourse on Life, Death, and Immortality, which he has not very appositely termed The Cypress Grove. It is throughout indicative of his peculiar genius and turn of mind, and in style bears more than a remote analogy to Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. It is said to have been written after the author's recovery from a dangerous illness.

“Notwithstanding his close retirement and serious application to his studies,” says the biography attached to the first uniform edition of the works of Drummond, (Edinburgh, folio 1711,) “love stole in upon him, and did entirely captivate his heart; for he was on a sudden highly enamoured of a fine, beautiful young lady, daughter to Cunningham of Barns, an ancient and honourable family. He met with suitable returns of chaste love from her, and fully gained her affections. But when the day for the marriage was appointed, and all things ready for the solemnisation of it, she took a fever, and was suddenly snatched away by it, to his great grief and sorrow. He expressed his grief for her in several letters and poems; and with more passion and sincerity celebrated his dead mistress than others use to praise their living ones.”

After his bereavement Drummond went abroad, and travelled through Germany, France, and Italy, his chief places of residence being Paris and Rome. While on the Continent, he visited the most famous universities, formed friendships with the most learned men, and made an excellent collection of books in the ancient and modern languages—part of which he bequeathed to his Alma Mater, the College of Edinburgh, and part of which may yet be seen at Hawthornden. While in his forty-fifth year, and after having spent many seasons in literary retirement, he accidentally saw Elizabeth Logan, grand-daughter to Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig, and was so struck with her likeness to his first love—whose memory he had ever fondly cherished—that he paid his addresses to, and married her.

Drummond was a devoted Cavalier, and his end is said to have been hastened by the fate of Charles I. He died on the 6th December of the same year, at the age of sixty-four. To me he has always seemed to hold nearly the same place in reference to Scottish, that the Earl of Surrey does to English literature. Both are remarkable for taste, elaboration, and fine touches of nature, and were possessed of the same chivalry of character. In this they differed—the one died by, and the other for, his master.

Several fine monuments of the Lords of Seton and of their Ladies yet remain in tolerable preservation within the chapel of Seton, both inserted into the walls, and strewed along the dilapidated floor, and contain epitaphs in part legible. Grose in his Antiquities has given us that at length which commemorates the courage, the calamities, and the unflinching fidelity of George, the fifth baron, the friend of Queen Mary, in whose cause he suffered exile. He it was whose funeral procession, by a strange coincidence of circumstances, intercepted for a few minutes on the road the triumphant progress of her son, James the Sixth, and his court retinue, on their way south to take possession of the English throne; a touching episode, which Mr Tytler very appositely employs to conclude his History of Scotland. The stone on which the King sate, while his retinue joined in paying the last services to the dead, is still shown, and forms a projection in the circular turret, at the south-west corner of the ancient garden-wall.

The greater part of the floor of the area of the chapel is strewn with tombstones of elaborate workmanship, but cracked, broken, defaced, and nearly illegible. This arose from the building having, through a long series of years, been allowed to remain literally open in door and window. For some time past, more attention has been paid to it, the Earl of Wemyss, the proprietor, having secured the windows and doorway.

At a remote period this chapel was endowed by the wealthy house of Seton as the parish church; and other establishments being subsequently added to it, it was rendered collegiate in the reign of James the Fourth. Many curious particulars of the additions to, and the alterations made on the ancient structure, may be found in the quaint and interesting little book, The Chronicle of the House of Seatoun, by Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, (Glasgow Reprint, 1829.) An aisle was added by Dame Catherine Sinclair, wife of the first lord, and the choir roofed with stone by George, the third lord, whose widow, Jane, in turn demolished Dame Catherine's aisle, replacing it by one of better proportions, which gave to the whole structure the complete form of the cross. It is also recorded that she equipped the church and its officiating priests with a complete stand of purple velvet, embroidered with the same devices, and richly gifted the altar with plate and other decorations. These, however, only held out more cogent inducements to plunder to the army of the Earl of Hertford in 1544, who, after laying waste Holyrood, Loretto, and other adjacent establishments, ransacked and burned the chapel. The present edifice is not of great extent, and is surmounted by a spire, which does not seem to have ever been raised to the intended elevation.

Through several centuries the family of Seton occupied a first rank in Scotland, in wealth, retinue, and high connection. After the forfeiture of the vast estates of the De Quinceys, at the termination of the succession wars of the Bruce and Baliol, these were conferred by King Robert, in large part, on the Setons, who had remained faithful to his cause; and on Sir Chrystal, who had been instrumental in saving his life at the battle of Methven, he conferred the hand of his sister. From this circumstance, a sword supporting a royal crown was added to the Seton arms, which originally consisted of three crescents with a double tressure, flowered and counter-flowered with fleurs-de-lis. In the reign of James the Sixth, the Lords of Seton became Earls of Winton. In 1715, George, the fifth and last Earl, took up arms for the Stuarts. He escaped from the Tower of London by sawing through the bars of the windows, and ended his chequered life at Rome in 1749. His magnificent estates were forfeited, and with him closed his long and illustrious line. Seton is now the property of the Earl of Wemyss and March, and Winton of Lord Ruthven. Within the last two or three years the Earl of Eglinton has also assumed the title of Earl of Winton. Diu maneat.

The Seton family were strongly attached to the Roman Catholic faith, which they warmly fostered by their influence and by munificent ecclesiastical endowments. The Protestant Reformation was obstinately opposed by George, Lord Seton, and after its accomplishment the family, although devoted royalists, almost ceased to interfere in public matters. The ancient bias, however, again showed itself in the first Jacobite rebellion, which proved fatal to the house of Seton.

The house, or rather palace of Seton, as it was commonly termed, was demolished towards the close of last century, and a large unmeaning castellated mass of building reared in the immediate vicinity of the site, which for many years, along with the sea-house of Port Seton, which was in 1844 destroyed by fire, was used as barracks for the militia. It was during this occupancy that the interior of the chapel, then open and exposed, suffered such dilapidation.

The ancient palace was a strong turreted edifice, evidently built at various times, although the general style of ornament was that of the sixteenth century. On various parts of it were inscribed the words Un Dieu, un Foy, and un Roy, un Loy, as expressing the sacred and civil tenets of George, Lord Seton, the friend of Mary. Some portions of the structure were evidently, however, of much greater antiquity, and the whole was surrounded by a loopholed wall with turrets, which also included the chapel. Some fragments of this wall yet remain to the north of the ancient garden, which, with its buttressed and crumbling enclosures, yet exists—a curious memento of past times.

From the time of Bruce downwards, the palace of Seton was occasionally the abode of the Scottish kings; and after the junction of the crowns, it was visited by James the Sixth and by Charles the Second. On the former occasion, we are informed in The Muses' Welcome to the High and Mighty Prince James, printed in the following year, (1618,) that on the 15th May “the King's Majestie come to Sea-toune,” where he was enlarged in a Latin poem by “Joannes Gellius a Gellistoun, Philosoph. et Med. Doc.”

From the connection of the house of Seton with the once powerful family of Buchan, “thre Cumming schevis” were also quartered with their arms, (Chron. of House of Seytoun, p. 37); and by intermarriage its male descendants have come to represent the illustrious families of Gordon, Aboyne, and Eglinton. The great houses of the Seton Gordons are descended from Margaret Seton, who married Alan de Wyntoun about the middle of the fourteenth century, her second son, Sir Alexander, having espoused the heiress of the house of Gordon.

Of the ancient palace of Seton, as stated in the text, scarcely one stone is left upon another, and it is difficult amid the grass to trace out the lines of its foundations.

In the text, reference is made more to the situation of Kelburn Castle and its capabilities than either to its real antiquity, or to historical events connected with it. Its appearance under a fine April sunset, and the associations awakened by the surrounding scenery, were such as are there faintly delineated.

In a more concentrated form, (that of a square tower,) Castle Kelburn is, however, of very considerable antiquity, most of the present additions having been made by David, Earl of Glasgow. Richard Boyle, Dominus de Kaulburn, is mentioned in a transaction with Walter Cumyn in the reign of Alexander the Third, the hero of Largs; and Robert de Boyville of Kelburn, and Richard de Boyville of Ryesholm, were subscribers of the Ragiment Roll in 1296, both of which properties are to this day possessions of the family.

Kelburn Castle is thus noticed by old Pont:—“Kelburne Castell, a goodly building, veill planted, having werey beutifull orchards and gardens, and in one of them a spatious room adorned with a christalin fontane cutte all out of the living rocke. It belongs heritably to John Boll, laird thereof.”

The Papingo is a bird less known to Sir William Jardine or to Mr James Wilson than to heraldry; and in the days when the bow and arrow were used in war throughout the whole of Europe, by several of the acts of the old Scotch Parliament, the young men of every parish were strictly commended, in spite of the Sir Andrew Agnews of their age, to practise archery, for an hour or two every Sunday, after divine service. When this custom fell into desuetude in almost every other quarter, archery appears to have remained even to our own day as a favourite recreation and accomplishment at Kilwinning, the most distinctive kind being the shooting at the Papingo, which is cut in wood, fixed in the end of a pole, and placed about a hundred and twenty feet high, on the steeple of the monastery, the archer who shoots it down being honoured with the title of Captain for the year. The laws and usages of the Company are known only by tradition prior to 1488, but from 1688 regular records have been kept. At this latter period a piece of plate was substituted for a sash, which had been the victor's reward from the former era. This sash, or benn, was a piece of taffeta or Persian, of different colours, chiefly red, green, white, and blue, and not less in value than £20 Scotch.

The festival of the Papingo is still annually held at Maybole, in the same county; and from a curious description of it in the history of the Somerville family, Sir Walter Scott acknowledges to have drawn the hint of the inimitable serio-comic descriptive scene in Old Mortality, wherein Goose Gobbie, in his negligé armour, runs full tilt at the Noah's ark carriage of Lady Margaret Bellenden, the unfailing remembrancer of King Charles the Second, of blessed memory.

On a field between the ancient village of Preston and Cockenzie, there exists—or very recently existed—a tree of this description, which tradition points out as being near the spot where Colonel Gardiner received his mortal wound. I have more than once regarded this leafy monument of the brave with feelings of no ordinary interest. It is within sight of the house wherein the hero's family were then living.

The Bass is only accessible at one flat shelvy point to the south-east,—the sole landing-places, and these but a few feet wide, being the south and north sides of this point. To command these there is a small fortalice, now unroofed, and in ruins. To the west the cell in which Blackadder was imprisoned and died is still pointed out, with its three small ironbarred windows; and half-way up the acclivity, a little beyond the ancient garden, where now not even a “flower grows wild,” are the remains of a Roman Catholic chapel, which, when the island was made the bastille of Scotland, state necessity converted into an ammunition magazine.

The Bass is about a mile and a half from the shore, and nearly the same in circumference. Around it the sea has been fathomed to the depth of 180 feet; and as the rock rises above it to the height of 420, the total elevation from the base is about 600 feet. Its most precipitous aspect is towards the north, where the descent to the ocean is almost a sheer perpendicular; and below there is a remarkable caverned passage leading completely through the rock to the southward, which is navigable in calm weather even at full tide.

Tradition asserts that the Bass was the residence of Baldred, the disciple of Kentigern, in the sixth century; and he is regarded by Major, and by Spotswood, (vide Church History,) as the apostle of East Lothian, having fixed his cell at Tyningham, and preached through the neighbouring country. This account is countenanced by Smith's Bede, (p. 231-254,) where it is said that a Saxon monastery, dedicated to him, existed there. The diocese of the saint is described by Simeon as “tota terra quæ pertinet ad monasterium Sancti Balthere quod vocatur Tyningham a Lambermore usque ad Escemuthe (Inveresk.”) Consequently it comprehended the whole superficies of East Lothian.

In 1406 the unfortunate King Robert the Third placed his son, afterwards James the First, of poetic memory, in this fortalice on the Bass, as being the stronghold of greatest security against the machinations of his uncle, the cruel and perfidious Duke of Albany. It was for many generations the property of the ancient family of Lauder, who styled themselves of the Bass, and who are now, I believe, represented by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder of Fountainhall and Grange, the accomplished author of the Account of the Morayshire Floods, A Coasting Voyage round Scotland, The Wolf of Badenoch, and other well-known works. It is supposed, however, that their mansion was not on the island, but on the shore near North Berwick; and a flat stone in the cemetery of the Auld Kirk is said to mark out their resting-place.

The island was afterwards converted into a state-prison, alike for civil and ecclesiastical delinquents; and during the reigns when Presbytery was proscribed and persecuted, many of its adherents, as testified by the pages of Wodrow, were confined here. The most distinguished of these was Blackadder, whose memoirs have been ably and interestingly written by Dr Crichton.

Opposite to the Bass, and on three sides surrounded by the sea, rise the majestic ruins of Tantallon Castle, the great strong-hold of the ancient Douglases, from which they defied alike the threats of the foe and the commands of the sovereign. It could only be approached from the west, and by a drawbridge defended by a massive tower and a double ditch. The walls, which form an irregular hexagon, are of enormous strength and thickness. Over the entrance the memorable emblem of the “bloody heart” may still be traced. The stronghold arose with the settlement of the Douglases in East Lothian under Robert the Second; and such was its power of security and resistance, that popular conviction, as evinced by the saying,

regarded its destruction as among impossibilities.

Quantum mutatum ab illo!—The very mention of Tantallon carries back the mind to the days of chivalry and romance, and to Archibald Bell-the-Cat, as depicted in the glorious pages of Marmion.

In early times such was the reputation of the fishery in the neighbourhood of the Isle of May, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, that it was resorted to even by the fishermen of other countries. A curious authentication of this fact exists in a MS. life of St Kentigern, (Bibl. Cotton. tit. A. xix.,) written about the end of the reign of David the First:—

See as quoted in M`Pherson's Notes on Winton, vol. ii. p. 479.

The same site remains to this day the most favourite fishing-station on the Forth — turbot and other fine fish being thence supplied to the London and Edinburgh markets.

It is curious to remark that the existing varieties of sea-fowl frequenting the Bass are almost exactly the same as those described and enumerated by the naturalist John Ray, in his curious visit to the island in 1661, (Itineraries, p. 191-194.) The most celebrated of these then and now is the gannet or solan-goose—an immense bird, measuring six feet from tip to tip of the wings, and which is almost peculiar to this rock and Ailsa Craig, on the Ayrshire coast. Of these birds there are many thousands, which may be seen, in the months of June and July, hatching their young on the bare shelves of the rock. Hence, in Drummond of Hawthornden's famous Macaronic poem, the Polemo-middinia, the island is characterised as the Solangoosifera Bassa.