The View from Castle Rock

Romans pushed farther, and built a line of fortification between the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth, but that was not so lasting.

    The land between the two walls has been occupied for a long time by a mix of people-Celtic people, some of whom came from Ireland and were called Scots, also Anglo-Saxons from the south, Norse from across the North Sea, and possibly some leftover Picts as well.
    The high stony farm where my family lived for some time in the Ettrick Valley was called Far-Hope. The word
hope,
as used in the local geography, is an old word, a Norse word-Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Gaelic words being all mixed up together in that part of the country, as you would expect, with some old Brythonic thrown in to indicate an early Welsh presence.
Hope
means a bay, not a bay filled with water but with land, partly enclosed by hills, which in this case are the high bare hills, the near mountains of the Southern Uplands. The Black Knowe, Bodesbeck Law, Ettrick Pen-there you have the three big hills, with the word
hill
in three languages. Some of these hills are now being reforested, with plantations of Sitka spruce, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they would have been bare, or mostly bare-the great Forest of Ettrick, the hunting grounds of the Kings of Scotland, having been cut down and turned into pasture or waste heath a century or two before.
    The height of land above Far-Hope, which stands right at the end of the valley, is the spine of Scotland, marking the division of the waters that flow to the west into the Solway Firth and the Atlantic Ocean, from those that flow east into the North Sea. Within ten miles to the north is the country’s most famous waterfall, the Grey Mare’s Tail. Five miles from Moffat, which would be the market town to those living at the valley head, is the Devil’s Beef Tub, a great cleft in the hills believed
to
be the hiding place for stolen cattle-English cattle, that is, taken by the reivers in the lawless sixteenth century. In the lower Ettrick Valley was Aikwood, the home of Michael Scott, the philosopher and wizard of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who appears in Dante’s
Inferno.
And if that were not enough, William Wallace, the guerrilla hero of the Scots, is said to have hidden out here from the English, and there is a story of Merlin-
Merlin
-being hunted down and murdered, in the old forest, by Ettrick shepherds.
    (As far as I know, my ancestors, generation after generation, were Ettrick shepherds. It may sound odd to have shepherds employed in a forest, but it seems that hunting forests were in many places open glades.)
    Nevertheless the valley disappointed me the first time I saw it. Places are apt to do that when you’ve set them up in your imagination. The time of year was very early spring, and the hills were brown, or a kind of lilac brown, reminding me of the hills around Calgary. Ettrick Water was running fast and clear, but it was hardly as wide as the Maitland River, which flows past the farm where I grew up, in Ontario. The circles of stones which I had at first taken to be interesting remnants of Celtic worship were too numerous and well kept up to be anything but handy sheep pens.
    I was travelling by myself, and I had come from Selkirk on the twice-a-week Shoppers’ Bus, which took me no farther than Ettrick Bridge. There I wandered around, waiting for the postman. I’d been told that he would take me up the valley. The chief thing to be seen in Ettrick Bridge was a sign on a closed shop, advertising Silk Cut. I couldn’t figure out what that might be. It turned out to be a well-known brand of cigarette.
    After a while the postman came along and I rode with him to Ettrick Church. By that time it had begun to rain, hard. The church was locked. It disappointed me, too. Having been built in 1824, it did not compare, in historic appearance, or grim character, to the churches I had already seen in Scotland. I felt conspicuous, out of place, and cold. I huddled by the wall till the rain let up for a bit, and then I explored the churchyard, with the long wet grass soaking my legs.
    There I found, first, the gravestone of William Laidlaw, my direct ancestor, born at the end of the seventeenth century, and known as Will O’Phaup. This was a man who took on, at least locally, something of the radiance of myth, and he managed that at the very last time in history-that is, in the history of the people of the British Isles-when a man could