THE TWEED 9 



slaughter on hand. When more peaceful times supervened, special 

 legislation was brought into existence, dealing first with "the mouth" 

 of the river in 1771, and afterwards to give both sides a general 

 interest in protecting the fisheries, and now, for sixty years, the 

 special legislation still in force has held sway. 



From time to time loud outcries have been raised against those 

 Tweed Acts, and at intervals efforts have been made to end them. 

 Without doubt we are now nearer the realisation of those efforts. 

 No section of the community on Tweedside seems particularly 

 anxious to maintain the Acts. 



The river forms the boundary between England and Scotland for 

 some fourteen miles, from Carham down to a point between four and 

 five miles out of Berwick. For the remainder of its course the river 

 is wholly in England, as also is the whole of the Till, an important 

 tributary. In other respects the Tweed is purely Scottish, and since 

 this means 75 miles out of 97 miles of its main channel, and a drain- 

 age area of nearly 1000 square miles out of 1500 square miles, there 

 is every reason for the generally accepted view that if the Tweed 

 Acts are to be repealed, Scotland rather than England may be fairly 

 expected to accept the responsibility. 



The basin of the Tweed is well defined, and extends from the 

 extreme south-west of the county of Peebles, where the river takes 

 its rise 1500 feet above sea-level, by the line of the Moorfoot Hills 

 and Lammermuirs on the north, and the Cheviots on the south. 

 The mouth is, as everyone knows, at Berwick-upon-Tweed, a town 

 not only famed in history, but specially identified with the salmon, 

 where annually at least I hope the custom is still kept up the 

 Mayor and Magistrates open the season in a practical and gastronomic 

 fashion by having an al fresco feast, the chief dish at which is salmon 

 a la Berwick-upon-Tweed. There is no method of preparing salmon 

 equal to the Berwick method, and I am glad it is practised in 

 Scotland as well as in Berwick. 



In the highest part of its course the river flows in a northerly 

 direction, as the Clyde, which is across the hill to the west, also does. 

 At Tweedsmuir the Talla enters, or one may say what is left of 

 Talla water enters, for the city of Edinburgh has tapped this 

 beautiful little stream and has constructed a large reservoir on what 

 was previously a marshy meadow. A certain number of spawning 

 fish used to enter Talla, and the loss of spawning ground, and loss of 

 water, was the subject of arbitration between the Tweed Com- 

 missioners and Edinburgh. Fish are seen up in this neighbourhood 



