The Abbey buildings, however, or part of them, continued to be used long after this date; from 1649 to 1771 the transept, roughly ceiled over, served as the parish church, but it was given up in the year last mentioned owing to a portion of the roof falling in whilst service was being held. The kirk "skailed" that day in something under record time; Thomas the Rhymer's prediction that "the kirk should fall at the fullest" was in the people's mind, and they stood not much upon the order of their going. Kelso was the most southern point reached by Montrose in {077}his efforts to join hands w ith Charles the First after his year of victories. The Border chiefs who had promised aid all deserted him; the Gordons and Colkitto had left him, and he marched north to the junction of Ettrick and Tweed and the fatal day of Philiphaugh. [Illustration: 0097] In 1745, Kelso for two days saw Prince Charlie, in his feint against General Wade; from Kelso he turned to Carlisle, his actual, and by no fault of his, hopeless line of invasion of England. The Prince's own strategy, as he wrote to his father, was "to have a stroke for't," as near the Border and as promptly as possible He therefore wished to cross the Tweed near Kelso, and beat up the quarters of the senile Marshal Wade at Newcastle. If he discussed Wade to the same tune as he had settled Cope, English Jacobites might join him. Holding Newcastle, he could thereby admit French reinforcements, while, if defeated, he was near the sea, and had a better route of retreat than if he were defeated going by Carlisle and the western route, in the heart of England. His council of chiefs, unhappily, forced him to take the western route. Halting at Kelso, he sent the best of the Border {078}cavaliers, Henry Ker of Graden, to make a feint on Wade; he rode as far as Wooler, near Flodden. Next day the Prince marched up Teviot, and up Jed, to Jedburgh, with the flower of the fighting clans; then up Rule water, another of the tributaries of Tweed, to Haggiehaugh on the Liddell, and so into England near Carlisle. Of old he would have picked up the Kers, Elliots, and Scotts; Haggiehaugh, where he slept, is Larriston, the home of the Elliot chief, "the Lion of Liddes-dale." But the tartans waved and the bagpipes shrilled in vain, and the Blue Bonnets did not go over the Border. One of the writers of this book possesses the armchair in which the Prince rested at Haggiehaugh.