At the town of

It is a land dedicated to the achievements of Douglases and Scotts, but that resounds also with the deeds of Elliots and Armstrongs, and  of minor and broken clans, Turnbulls and Rutherfords, Cranstouns and Olivers. It has its rich endowment of beauty as well as of history. Around the keep of Branxholm, which from the deep bank overhanging the stream has often defied its enemies, have gathered buildings of more recent date 22 and a screen of ancient trees. Below it is the Tower of Goldilands, where a marauding Scott was hanged at his own gate, and here comes in from the left the Borthwick Water.

At the town of Hawick, Teviot meets &ltSlitrig, coming from the wild bounds of Liddisdale. All roads in Teviotdale seem to lead to Hawick, the capital of its trade as well as a centre of its history. Proud as its citizens are of the leading position of the burgh in the tweed and hosiery manufacture of the South of

Scotland, and of the undiminished importance of its great lamb and sheep fairs, they are prouder still of the prowess of its sons in the dark days that followed Flodden, and in other scenes of Border strife. Scott was familiar with its story, as with the streets and with the steep hills that surround this stirring little metropolis of industrial and pastoral life; and allusion 23 has already been made to the literary and legendary memories attached to the site of the Tower in which the Douglases of Drumlanrig entertained their guests and protected their rights. From the parish church of St. Mary, since often rebuilt, the heroic Ramsay of Dalhousie was carried away by the Knight of Liddisdale, to be immured and to suffer a lingering death in the Douglas hold of Hermitage


An older memorial of the past of 
 Hawick is the Motehill, on which justice was dispensed, and an outlook kept for enemies, in times beyond the range even of tradition. The great “Hawick Tradition” of the capture of the standard of the English marauders at Hornshole is kept green by the annual ceremony of the “Common Riding”, when Hawick is to be seen in its gayest and most jubilant mood. The words and tune of its slogan of “Teribus ye Teriodin” are supposed to have descended to it from heathen times, and to have originally been an invocation to the gods of the early Saxons and Norsemen—Thor and Odin. The defiant spirit of these warriors of old seems still to ring in the chaunt sung by the Cornet and his men as they ride round the marches in the beginning of June: