Dorothy Wordsworth's diary (1803) of a day by the Tweed below Peebles--_the middle portion_ of the stream--is a pleasanter memory: 'We had a day's journey before us along the banks of the Tweed, a name which has been sweet to my ears almost as far back as I can remember. After the first mile or two our road was seldom far from the river, which flowed in gentleness, though perhaps never silent; the hills on either side high, and sometimes stony, but excellent pasture for sheep.... In one very sweet part of the vale a gate crossed the road, which was opened by an old woman who lived in a cottage close to it. I said to her, "You live in a very pretty place!" "Yes," she replied, "the water of Tweed is a bonny water." The lines of the hills are flowing and beautiful, the reaches of the vale long; in some places appear the remains of a forest, in others you will see as lovely a combination of forms as any traveller who goes in search of the picturesque need desire, and yet perhaps without a single tree; or, at least, if trees there are, they shall be very few.' And writing about the same time the Rev. Richard Warner--afterwards the author of a work on the Waverley Novels--describes _the lower half_ of the river between Berwick and Kelso: 'The country around Berwick, though swelling into hills and sinking into vales, has neither beauty nor variety, the one being uniform and lumpish, the other wide and unwooded. A naked surface everywhere presents itself, unadorned with those indispensable features in agreeable landscape, lofty trees and spreading shrubs. The river Tweed, also, disappointed our expectations of picturesque beauty. Associated as the name of this river had hitherto been in our minds with poetical and pastoral ideas, we were prepared to admire its fringed banks and sacred shades, the haunt of many a water-nymph and sylvan deity; but alas! no solemn woods lifted their lofty heads over these celebrated waters. All was original nakedness.... The scenery is more animated and cheerful in the neighbourhood of Kelso, where wood is more frequent. Tweed's velvet banks were here and there spotted with little clumps of trees, presenting a fairer subject for tender and elegiac poetry than it had before done.'