J* THE EASTERN BORDERS. 



thence up the romantic dean in front of Twizell House to the 

 moors in which it has taken its origin. Descending from these 

 heath-clad heights westerly, we reach the Till at its junction 

 with the Uoddam, — a burn which conducts us through corn and 

 pasture lands partly, but chiefly through a deep and extensive 

 ravine, into the recesses of the Cheviot hills. These constitute 

 our extreme western boundary. They lead, in a beautiful series 

 of rounded summits, to the hills above Yetholm in Roxburgh- 

 shire. Thence the eye leaps easily from hill to hill until arrested 

 by the peaked Eildons, which, in the distance, lapse almost in- 

 sensibly into the Lammermuir range of less elevated heights, 

 that continue our boundary-line to the sea in the parish of Cock- 

 burnspath. The sea bounds the whole district on the east*. 



From the circularity and elevation of the boundary, the 

 district, when viewed from a height, has the appearance of a basin 

 painted within with designs of the most cultured beauty. Spread 

 out beneath us, the bottom presents a seemingly extensive plain 

 intersected by living hedges, partitioned into lozenge-shaped 

 fields of every shade of green and yellow and brown, well-wooded 

 in every part, and mellowed with the moving shadows of living 

 trees, and bearing on its fruitful bosom all sorts of grain and 

 herbage for man and beast. But a narrower survey, while it 

 certifies that this is truly a land flowing with milk and honey, 

 undeceives us as to the evenness of the surface. It is in fact a 

 succession of elevated ridges and intermediate valleys, or, as Mr. 

 Lowe expresses it, " the surface is waved into rising and falling 

 ground.^-" The ridges and valleys lie almost parallel to each other, 

 and run from near N.W. to S.E. ; but here and there hills rise up 

 above them either from the plain itself, or pushed so far from 

 the boundary as to appear almost separate from it. Such are 

 Sunnyside Hill, the Kyloe Crags, and Rawse Castle ; Halidon, 

 Chirnside, and Hume Castle ; Dunse and Cockburn Laws, the 

 Dirriugtons, and the hills at St. Abb's and above Cockburnspath. 

 And while the surface is in general under cultivation, and full 



* The district is almost coequal with the ancient bishopric of Lindis- 

 farne, the limits of which are thus defined by Leland : — " The boundary of 

 Lindisferne bishopric extended from the Tweed (Tueda) to Warnmouth 

 (Warnamuth), thence upward to the place where the Warn (aqua Waruea) 

 has its rise near the Hibburdun hill, and from that hill to the river which 

 is called Bruuk, up to its source. Also that land beyond the Tweed, from 

 the place where the Whitadder (tinmen Edrse) rises on the north, to the 

 place where it falls into the Tweed ; the whole land which hes between the 

 Whitadder, and another river which is called Leader (Leder) on the west ; 

 the whole laud which lies east of the river called Leder, to that place where 

 it falls into the Tweed on the south, and the land which pertains unto the 

 monastery of St. Baldred (S. Balther), which is called Tiningham, from 

 Lammermoor (Lambermore) to Estmouth (Eskmouth)." — See Carr's Hist, 

 of Coldingham, p. 23. Hist. Berw. Nat. Club, iii. p. 17. 



