The geography of Gretna and the Border is, so far as roads are concerned, somewhat involved, and requires careful explanation. Up to 1830, when the wide-spreading sands of the Esk were bridged, the way for coaches and all road-traffic lay circuitously through Longtown to the right of where the fork of the roads now occurs; but in that year the New Road, or the “English Road,” as it was commonly called, was opened, causing much interference with what the inhabitants of Springfield had almost come to regard as their “vested rights.” For, as the accompanying plan will show, Springfield lay directly on the route into Scotland; and Gretna Green merely to one side of it. But here again it behoves the historian to be careful and not rashly to assume that the early marriages were made at Springfield, and should therefore have been named after it. As a curious matter of fact, this village did not come into existence until 1791, when it was built by the then landowner, Sir William Maxwell, who named it from a farm standing there. It was then, and for long after, the home of people professing to be weavers, but really, almost without exception, a set of drunken Border blackguards who, when not helplessly intoxicated, were smugglers and poachers and wastrels generally, and, living in the marches of the two countries, respected the laws of neither. Springfield, immediately after its rise, took away most of the marrying business of Gretna, being nearer the magical dividing-line. [Illustration: MAP OF OLD AND NEW ROADS FROM CARLISLE TO GRETNA GREEN.] [Sidenote: _THE LONGTOWN ROAD_] Blackford, on the Longtown road, is of the one unvarying pattern here, and is followed by the hamlet of West Linton, by the river Lyne, where a cottage or so, a farm, and the whitewashed “Graham’s Arms,” with its motto, “N’Oublie,” stand stodged in the mud. Fir-trees and a laurel-bordered road then lead to the by-way where Arthuret church, standing solitary, serves for churchless Longtown, half a mile distant.