The Rivers of Great Britain, Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial: Rivers of the East Coast. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
and a doo-cot.” Little better than a ruined dove-cote—or “a corbie’s nest,” as the Merry Monarch called Dreel Castle, the old tower of the Anstruthers—shows many a crumbled seat of the long-pedigreed Fife gentry. But they were the nurseries of famous men—witness the Leslies, Alexander and David, and a host besides—who found not only their native shire but their native country too narrow a field for their talents and their ambition. In this, as in other respects, the shores of Fife offer an epitome of Scottish history, and the quintessence of Scottish character.
Turn now towards the Southern shore. The spell even of the coasts of Fife cannot long detain us, when Edinburgh, seated on her hills, and queening it over the waters, with the couchant lion of Arthur’s Seat beside her, is in view. As Stirling presides over the “Links of Forth,” and the upper courses of the river, Edinburgh Rock with its Castle appears the Guardian Genius of the Firth. Round the base of this “Bass Rock upon land,” the masses of buildings seem to swirl and surge like a tide-race of human life, and to climb, in broken wave upon wave, crested by the spires and roofs of the Old Town, and overhung by the murky spray of its proverbial “reek,” all up the steep slope to the battlements of the Castle. Stirling itself is scarcely its peer for dignity of situation or for renown. From the highest platform of the Rock, where hooped and battered Mons Meg guards the old chapel of Canmore and Margaret, to the profoundest depths of the shadows cast by the tall and beetling houses of the Grassmarket, the West Port, and the Cowgate, it is haunted by traditions; and its history, like its aspect, is most sombre and most striking.
Looking from the windows of the rooms which Mary occupied, and whence the infant James was let down in a basket to the bottom of the rock, one glances across the “plainstanes” of the Grassmarket, the scene of Jock Porteous’s slaughter, to the Old Greyfriars Churchyard and its graves of martyrs and of persecutors, to the dome and towers of the old and new University buildings, and to the piled and crowded buildings, thinning out and becoming newer as they descend the warm slopes of Morningside and Newington towards the bluffs of Craiglockhart, the whinny slopes of the Braids, and Craigmillar Castle, behind which are the finely pencilled lines of the Pentlands, the Moorfoots, and the Lammermoors. Or the eye can follow the impending walls of the many-storeyed houses of the Lawnmarket and the High Street, as far as the “Crown” of St. Giles and the Parliament House—each of them part and parcel of the national life—and so on by the Canongate and its memorable old “lands” and closes, towards the spot where the Palace and the ruined Abbey of Holyrood, shouldered by breweries and canopied by the smoke of gasworks, shelter under the Salisbury Crags. Or looking away from the grim Old Town, one may travel far before seeing anything to compare with the stately front of Prince’s Street, facing its gardens and the sun, and turned away from the cold blasts of the north; the Calton Hill and its monuments; the serried lines of the New Town streets and squares, broken by frequent spires and towers, and sweeping away in one direction towards the wooded sides of Corstorphine, and in the other joining Leith and its shipping; while beyond, if the day be fine, the glorious view is bounded by the Firth and its islands and the hills of Fife, melting in a distance where land, sea, and sky are indistinguishable.
Too often, viewing it from the “clouded Forth,” the grey city, its castle, and its subject hills are swallowed up in the “gloom that saddens heaven and earth” during the dismal Edinburgh winter and spring, and the uncertain summer and autumn. Sometimes they show huge and imposing, like ghosts in the mist, or rise like islands over the strata of smoke and haze in which Leith lies buried. But there are gloriously fine days at all seasons of the year, even in this much-abused climate, and then the long pier, the shipping in the roadstead, the tangle of masts and rigging in the spacious docks, and the warehouses, churches, and close-built houses of the port of Leith make a brave show in the low foreground of a lovely picture. To the west, the wide arms of the Granton breakwaters enclose a harbour, built at the cost of the Duke of Buccleuch. Nearer to Leith is the white pier-head of Newhaven, with stalwart fishermen, and comely fishwives in white “mutches” and short petticoats, grouped about its quays. Leith itself is an old as well as a brisk seat of trade and shipping. The large business it continues to conduct with the ports of the Baltic and the North Sea it has carried on for many centuries, and in these days it has extended its commercial relations to nearly all parts of the world. Many of the most famous episodes in the national annals began and ended in Leith. But royal embassies no longer land or embark there; it is happily exempt from hostile invasions and bloody civil and religious feuds.
THE BASS ROCK, FROM NORTH BERWICK.
Eastward from Leith, sewage meadows and brick-and tile-works suddenly give place to the mile-long front of the Portobello Esplanade, with its pier and bathing coaches and strip of sand, dear to Edinburgh holiday-makers, and with the outline of Arthur’s Seat as a noble background to the masses of handsome villas and lodging-houses. Beyond comes a string of little seaside watering-places, fishing and shipping ports—Fisherrow, Musselburgh, Morrisonhaven, Prestonpans, Cockenzie—which, with the country behind them, vie in picturesqueness of aspect with the Fife towns opposite. A high ridge, the last heave of the Lammermoors, marks the limits of this belt of coast country—the old approach of hostile armies from the South—which might dispute with the district around Stirling the title of the “Battlefield of Scotland.” Carberry Hill, where Mary fell into the hands of the Lords of the Covenant, overlooks the woods of Dalkeith Palace and the Esk, not far above where, between Fisherrow harbour and Musselburgh, that classic stream enters the sea. A continuation of Carberry are the Fawside braes, and right underneath the ruined castle on the sky-line, and between it and Inveresk Church, was fought the battle of Pinkie, so disastrous for the Scots, when the little burn trickling through Pinkie Woods “ran red with blood.” It was on this ground, too, that Cromwell was out-manœuvred by Leslie, and compelled to fall back, “to make the better spring” upon Dunbar; and by the venerable bridge across the Esk, the Young Pretender led his troops from Edinburgh, on hearing that the Royalist forces were advancing by the coast upon the capital. The site of the battle of Prestonpans is in the fields beyond the tumbledown old town of that name, which boasts—and looks as if it boasted truly—of being the first place in Scotland where coal was worked and salt manufactured from sea-water. In the more thriving looking village of Cockenzie, they point out the house in which “Johnnie Cope” was soundly sleeping when the Highlanders, making a circuit of the high ground behind Tranent, and crossing the marsh at Seton, “sprang upon him out of the mist” of a September morning.
TANTALLON CASTLE, LOOKING EAST.
Seton, with its woods and wild-flowers, its lovely sweep of sands, the remains of its ancient church, and the Castle standing on the site of the Palace of the Earls of Winton, is redolent of memories of the “high jinks” of Queen Mary and of other members of the unfortunate House of Stuart, in whose mischances the loyal Setons faithfully shared. The parks of Gosford, their trees strangely bent and twisted by the east wind, line the coast for miles, and the great white front of Lord Wemyss’s mansion is a shining landmark. Then comes Aberlady Bay, an expanse of sand and mud at low water, but at high tide a broad arm of the Firth, running up close under the walls of the venerable Parish Church and pretty village of Aberlady, and skirting the favourite golfing links of Luffness and Gullane.
From here all the way round to North Berwick, the sea-margin, with its long stretches of grassy turf, interspersed with bent hillocks, whins, sand “bunkers,” and other hazards dear to the devotees of cleek and driving-club, may be said to be sacred to the Royal Game of Golf. Four or five spacious golfing courses interpose between; and ardent pursuers of the flying gutta ball have been known to play across the whole distance of seven or eight miles. Numbers of them take up their quarters at Aberlady or at Gullane, placed idyllically upon the edge of the common and the ploughed land, with views extending across the green links and the sea to Fife, and landward over the rich fields of East Lothian to the Lammermoors, with the nearer Garleton Hills, Traprain, and North Berwick Law; a few also at the beautiful old village of Dirleton, beside the ivied ruins of its Castle.
North Berwick,