The mouldering old tower here at Cockburnspath belonged to the Earls of Home. Beautifully situated for preying upon occasional travellers, the glen and the foaming torrent below have no doubt received the bodies of many a one who in the old days was rash enough to pass within sight of the old tower. The comparatively modern bridge that takes a flying leap across the ravine is the successor of an ancient one of narrower span that still, covered with moss and ferns, arches over the water, deep down in the hollow, and is popularly supposed to be the oldest bridge in Scotland. A dense tangle of red-berried rowan-trees, firs, and oaks overhangs the gorge. Altogether a place that calls insistently to be sketched and painted, but a place, from the military point of view, to be wary of; being a position, as Cromwell in one of his despatches says, “where one man to hinder is better than twelve to make way.” It was at the “strait pass at Copperspath,” as he calls it, that the great general, writing after the battle of Dunbar, found plenty to hinder. If ever general profited more by the mistakes of the enemy than by his own tactical ability, it was Cromwell at this juncture. The Scots under Leslie had cooped him up at Dunbar, and, surrounded by the enemy, who occupied the heights and closed every defile that led to a possible line of retreat, he must, diseased and famishing as were his forces, have capitulated, for the sea was at his back, and no help possible from that direction. It was then that Leslie made his disastrous move from the hills, and came down upon the English in the levels of Broxburn, to the south of Dunbar town, where Cromwell had his headquarters; and it was then that Cromwell, seizing the moment when the enemy, coming down in a dense mass upon a circumscribed space by Broxburn Glen, retrieved the situation, and, directing a cavalry movement upon Leslie’s forces, had the supreme relief of seeing them broken up and stamped into the earth by the furious charge of his horsemen. The fragments of the Scottish army, routed with a slaughter of three thousand, and ten thousand prisoners, fled, and Cromwell’s contemplated retreat to Berwick was no longer a necessity. Indeed, the whole of the Lowlands of Scotland now lay open before him, and he entered Edinburgh with little opposition. [Picture: Cockburnspath Tower]