Chapter VIII: THE ESTUARY.--Drainage and Navigation--Dimensions (4)

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-manoeuvred 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.

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, however, is the golfer's Mecca on this side of the Firth; and bathers, artists, and other seekers after the pleasures of the sea-shore succumb to its attractions in increasing numbers every season. The sands and the links, the sea lapping upon the beach, or chafing round Craigleith and the other rocky islets and points, exercise a potent spell. But North Berwick's great lion, and a conspicuous landmark over sea and country for a score of miles around, is the natural pyramid of the "Law." It rises immediately behind the town, in lines as steep and symmetrical as if built by art, and from its summit, nearly 1,000 feet high, an almost unrivalled view is obtained over the Forth and the Lothians. Though one would hardly guess it, looking at the clean streets and handsome hotels and villas that line the shore, North Berwick is a burgh and port of great antiquity.

That it never throve to any remarkable extent in its earlier history may possibly be in part due to its dangerous proximity to Tantallon Castle, the hold of the Douglases, Earls of Angus. Every visitor to North Berwick, after he has surmounted the Law and wandered his fill by the beach, makes an excursion to Tantallon Castle. The coast eastward is bold and precipitous, and fretted by the waters of the North Sea, for we are now at the very lip of the Firth of Forth; and the Bass Rock, lying opposite the beautiful curve of Canty Bay, looks like a mass of the shore-cliffs washed bodily out to sea. Just where the coast is wildest and least accessible one sees--

"Tantallon's dizzy steep
Hang o'er the margin of the deep."

The eyrie of the Douglas is now a mere shell; but the extent and immense thickness of the walls still proclaim its strength in the days when it was a proverb to "ding doon Tantallon and make a bridge to the Bass." On three sides it was protected by the sea, and

"Above the booming ocean leant
The far-projecting battlement."

On the land side were those gate-works and walls which Marmion cleared, after bidding bold defiance to the "Douglas in his hall," and behind which the turbulent Earls of Angus, for their part, so often bade defiance to their Sovereigns. James V. once brought up against it "Thrawn-mu'd Meg and her Marrow," and other great pieces of mediæval ordnance from Dunbar, where three lords were placed in pawn for their safe return. But he failed to "ding doon Tantallon"; that feat was reserved for the Covenanters.

Now the spirit of Walter Scott seems to haunt the ruins, in company with the ghosts of "Bell-the-Cat," and the other dead Douglases who built or strengthened these storm-battered walls. The Magician of the North has waved his wand over the Forth from Ben Lomond to Tantallon and the Bass!

JOHN GEDDIE.

THE TWEED.