Notes on the Gatrail. By Miss Russell. 91 



all ; and also having no appearance of having been everywhere 

 continuous. The conclusion of one of the writers is, that it 

 might have been a boundary-line between two friendly tribes. 

 And it was on seeing this, that I saw for the first time that Mr 

 Skene and the late Mr E. W. Eobertson were right in regarding 

 Teviotdale as having been inhabited by a Welsh or Cymric 

 population, as well as Selkirkshire. Mr Skene's reason for 

 thinking so is that at the battle of the Standard, long after the 

 final conquest of Cumbria, the Tevidalenses and Cumbrenses 

 formed one body in the Scotch army ; besides that in the sixth 

 century, which is the period we are more especially concerned 

 with, Kelso seems to have been a Welsh possession, under the 

 name of Calchvynyd or Chalkhill, nearly the equivalent of 

 Chalkheugh or Calchow. The " mey and tey " dialect of Teviot- 

 dale has a very much more Celtic character than the accent of 

 the country to the westward ; it seems always to have been re- 

 garded as a very strange sound in Galashiels. 



Towards the English border it appears as if the works of the 

 OatraH must assume the character of fortifications again ; I have 

 not the reference, but the Statistical Account says in one place it 

 was twenty-five feet high. Mr Skene points out, in the first 

 volume of his history, " Celtic Scotland," that it occurs at Daw- 

 ston, which he identifies with Degsastane, the scene of a great 

 historical battle, the result of which was the crushing of a com- 

 bined effort, on a large scale, of the Cumbrian Britons and Scots 

 of the West Highlands, to drive back the Saxons of North- 

 umbria. Mr Skene regards the stones on the Ninestane Eig, 

 and others in the neighbourhood, as connected with the battle 

 and pursuit ; and such memorials certainly seem in many cases 

 to have been records of violent death, in battle or otherwise. 

 But he does not mention there, that he had already placed the 

 battle of Degsastane at Dawston, on philological grounds, rather 

 than at Dalston in Cumberland, in a work published in 1867, 

 the least known of his publications, but one treating mainly of 

 Scottish Cumbria. It is an edition of the much-disputed poems 

 of the Welsh bards of the sixth century, and apparently the 

 first there has ever been in which they were really printed ex- 

 actly as they stand in the oldest manuscripts. (The oldest ex- 

 isting collection seems to have been made in the half-century 

 after Geoffrey of Monmouth's fictitious history appeared, and 

 has quite the air of an attempt to preserve the real antiquities 



