Even at late as 1792, the Statistical Account of the Parish says: "The roads are almost impassable. The only road that looks like a turnpike is to Selkirk, but even it in many places is so deep as greatly to obstruct travelling. The distance is about sixteen miles, and it requires four hours to ride it. The snow also at times is a great inconvenience; often for many months we can have no intercourse with our neighbours.... Another great disadvantage is the want of bridges. For many hours the traveller is obstructed on his journey when the waters are swelled." Such was the condition of the hill country sixty-years after Boston's death. In his day it must have been even worse; probably the only road that resembled a road in 1792 was a mere track earlier in the century. Close by Ettrick Kirk is Ettrick Hall, where Hogg was born. Though in name suggestive of a lordly mansion, it was in reality but a mean, and rather damp, little cottage, or "butt and ben," of which there are now no remains. I understand that the walls fell down about the year 1830. There is {291}now a monument to "the Shepherd" where the cottage stood; and there is of course the commemorative statue over by St. Mary's, hard by "Tibbie Shiels." Hogg was, as the late Professor Ferrier said: "after Hums (_proximus sed longo intervallo_) the greatest poet that has ever sprung from the bosom of the common people." [Illustration: 0311] But to how many of those who visit his birth place, or look on his monument over in Yarrow, are his works now familiar? How many of us, indeed, have any but the merest nodding acquaintance even with "Kilmeny"? And of his prose waitings, who of the general public, except here and there a one, knows now even the "Brownie of Bodesbeck," a Covenanting story that used to thrill every Scottish boy? CHAPTER XII YARROW |In{282} whatever part you take the vale of Ettrick, there is about it, and about its scenery and its associations, a charm, different perhaps from that of the more widely famed Yarrow, yet almost equally powerful. There is in the summer season a solemnity and a peace brooding over these "round-backed, kindly hills," that act like a charm on the body and mind that are weary. Each vale has its distinctive peculiarities, yet each blends imperceptibly into the other.