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embered. The Wordsworths were at Mosspaul in 1803, and Dorothy's description is still fairly correct: "The scene with its single dwelling, was melancholy and wild, but not dreary, though there was no tree nor shrub; the small streamlet glittered, the hills were populous with sheep; but the gentle bending of the valley and the correspondent softness in the forms of the hills were of themselves enough to delight the eye. The whole of the Teviot and the pastoral steeps about Mosspaul pleased us exceedingly." PLATE 19 BERWICK-ON-TWEED FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH PAINTED BY JAMES ORROCK, R.I. (_See pp. 43, 49, 63, 93_) [Illustration] At Teviothead we touch the Teviot proper. The upper basin of the Teviot is mainly a barren vale, flanked by lofty rounded hills. For a greater distance it is a strip of alluvial plain, screened by terraced banks clad with the rankest vegetation, and with long stretches of undulating dale-land, and overhung at from three to eight miles by terminating heights, and in its lower reaches it is a richly variegated champaign country, possessing all the luxuriance without any of the tameness of a fertile plain, and stretching away in resulting loveliness to the picturesque Eildons on the one hand and the dome-like Cheviots on the other. Teviothead, formerly Carlanrigg, is full of traditionary lore. Teviot Stone, extinct now, a landmark for centuries--its position being marked on some of our earliest maps--recalls Scott's favourite lines from the "Lay," imprinted on the Selkirk monument: "By Yarrow's streams, still let me stray, Though none should guide my feeble way; Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break, Although it chill my withered cheek; Still lay my head by Teviot Stone, Though there, forgotten and alone, The Bard may draw his parting groan." Teviothead Churchyard contains the graves of Johnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, and his gallants. James V. (a mere boy-king at the time) never planned a more despicable or more atrocious deed than the betrayal and summary execution of this most picturesque of the freebooters. And posterity has never forgiven him. Nor can it. Scott's "Minstrelsy" ballad commemorating the incident is far and away the most dramatic of its kind, Johnie's scathing answer to the King being specially characteristic: "To seik het water beneith cauld ice, Surely it is a greit follie; I have asked grace at a
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