Highways and Byways in the Border: IllustratedLang, Andrew
History
Highways and Byways in the Border: Illustrated
Lang, Andrew
Scottish Borders (Scotland) -- Description and travel
Scattered all over the Jedburgh district are many ancient camps--hoary
even in the day when Douglas fortified Lintalee; many old castles and
peel-towers, all, or nearly all, now in ruins, some indeed with very
little left save tradition to indicate where once they stood; and here
and there are found vestiges of chapels or shrines, of which possibly
there may remain hardly more in some instances than the green mounds
which cover their fallen walls. The monks wandered far up this pleasant
vale of Jed, carrying the Gospel of Peace through a land that knew of
little save war, but the history of their resting places is even more
vague than is now the outline of their chapel walls. At Old Jed ward,
however, five miles up stream from Jedburgh, you may still in some
measure trace the line of foundations of that venerable little building
which is said to have been built here away back in the ninth century. Of
camps, the number is legion. That near Monklaw, the writer has not seen,
but it is said to be Roman, and its measurements are something like one
hundred and sixty yards each way. At Scraesburgh there is a circular
camp, with a diameter of about one hundred and eighty feet, and with
ramparts still nearly twenty feet in height,--surely that "Skraysburgh,
the greatest towne in all Teviotdale," which, according to the English
version, seems in 1544 to have fallen almost as fell Jericho of old,
when the enemy shouted and blew their trumpets.
Of castles and peel-towers the most are utterly ruined, but Fernihirst
(to which we come presently), still stands, and, over the hill towards
Teviot, Lanton Tower, the latter now incorporated with a comfortable
modern dwelling. Lanton in the twelfth century was the property of
Richard Inglis, who also owned the adjacent tower of Hunthill. Both
these towers {129}were sacked and burned in 1513, after Flodden, by an
English flying column under Sir Roger Fenwicke, and its existence at the
present day Lanton Tower may owe to the fact that when Evers swept
the country side in 1544, and Hertford brought fire and sword in the
following year, it had possibly neither been repaired nor was inhabited.
It was over near Jedburgh, too, to have escaped the notice of Surrey
in 1523. Hunthill was burned again in 1549, and had Lanton then been
anything but dismantled, it could scarcely have escaped the attentions
of the party sent from Jedburgh by the Earl of Rutland to attack
d'Essé's rear-guard at Ancrum ford. A force coming over the hill from
Jedburgh and making for Ancrum would necessarily pass within easy hail
of Lanton. In any case, however, there it stands, its solid walls of
a tenacity not shared by buildings put together with modern mortar.
Strange are the vicissitudes of places and of people. Over this Forest
of Jedworth, and here at Lanton, where of old too often were heard the
blast of trumpet, shouts and oaths of fiercely striving men, the roar
and crackle of burning houses, you will hear now no sound more startling
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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