Up the Wheel Causeway, a little distance beyond the spot where the Catrail disappears, and between the Wormscleuch and Peel burns, there stood at one time an ancient ecclesiastical building, the Wheel Chapel, of whose walls faint traces still remain. It was in this building that Edward I of England passed the night of 24th May 1296, during his Bolder Progress; in the record of his expedition the chapel is spoken of as the "Wyel." When the Statistical Account of 1798 was written, probably a considerable part of the ruin yet stood, for the writer of that account speaks of it as being of "excellent workmanship," and "pretty large." And he remarks on the great number of grave-stones in the churchyard, from which he con eludes that the surrounding population must at one rime have been very considerable. Over all this district, indeed, that seems to have been the case. Chapels were numerous among these hills; in this part of Liddesdale there were no fewer than five, and the Wheel Chapel itself is not more than six miles or {380}so, as the crow flies, from Southdean, where it is certain that about the date of the battle of Otterburne the population was much more dense than it is at the present day. What changes little more than one hundred years have wrought in this countryside. Six years before the Statistical Account of 1798 was penned, there were neither roads nor bridges in Liddesdale; "through these deep and broken bogs and mosses we must _crawl_, to the great fatigue of ourselves but the much greater injury of our horses," pathetically says the reverend writer of the account. Every article of merchandise had to be carried on horseback. Sir Walter Scott himself--in August 1800--was the first who ever drove a wheeled vehicle among the Liddesdale hills, and we know from "Guy Mannering," and from Lockhart's "Life," pretty well what a wild country it then was. There was not an inn or a public house in the whole valley, says Lockhart; "the travellers passed from the shepherd's hut to the minister's manse, and again from the cheerful hospitality of the manse to the rough and jolly welcome of the homestead." Inns, to be sure, even now are not to be found, and are not needed, by every roadside, but at least there are excellent main roads down both Liddel and Hermitage, and a main line of railway runs through the valley; the moors are well drained, and the necessity no longer exists to "crawl" through broken bogs and mosses. Yet still the hills in appearance are as they were in Scott's day, still they retain features which render them distinct from any other of the Border hills; they are "greener and more abrupt.... sinking their sides at once upon the river."