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NASEBY CHURCH AND VILLAGE.

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Royalists and others. A committee was appointed by Parliament to open and report upon them; and their contents, no less than the issue of the battle, went to ruin his cause. He was never again able to take the field at the head of an army; but, in the words of Sir Philip Warwick, "was like a hunted partridge, flitting from one castle to another." The local relics and traditions of this famous battle are but scanty. The Sulby Hedges, once lined by Okey's dragoons, may still be traced, and are perhaps much the same as in 1645, when the rest of the field was unenclosed. The Parliamentary officers who fell were, it is said, buried under the tower of Naseby Church, where some bones have been found. The bodies of the slain were, for the most part, buried in pits on the battlefield, marked at present by the sinking of the earth, and the fringe of brambles which surrounds them. Bullets are frequently turned up in ploughing. The table at which the Royalist horse were carousing when they were overtaken (the night before the battle) by Ireton's troopers, is still preserved in the house of Naseby Woolleys.

Close to the village of Naseby are the springs of the Avon and the Nen, and the slender stream of Shakespeare's river is seen flowing downward from the high ground to the green meadows through which it lapses quietly. The church, restored in 1860, is without interest except for the scenes which its walls and tower have overlooked. It may be noticed that two of the bells bear the inscriptions "God save the King," and Auspice Regno," round the royal arms. On two others the device is King Charles on horseback, with an inscription, and the date 1633. Before the restoration of 1860, there was a fissure in the tower-wall caused by a settlement; and when the bells were rung, the vibration caused this fissure to open and close, so that the bell-ringers cracked their nuts in it while they worked at the ropes. The church stands on a high knoll, and is seen far over the country. It is surrounded by fine horse-chestnut trees.

There are six distinct springs in the village, which are caught by artificial heads, and form ponds for watering cattle.

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The Sources of the Clyde and the Tweed-Romance of the Upper Clyde-Drochil Castle-Wild Scenery-The First Tributary, the Daer Water-Reminiscences of Wallace-Biggar Water and the "Cadger's Brig "-Bothwell Castle and its Relics-Glasgow and its Industries-Alcluyd-Wallace's Sword--Dumbarton Rock and Castle-The Firth of Clyde.

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MONG the hills of that district which is known as the "Southern Uplands," and near the march which divides the counties of Peebles and Lanark, the two most famous rivers in Scotland, the Clyde and the Tweed, steal from their sources. Both flow northward for a short distance and then turn, one to the western, the other to the eastern sea. The Tweed is in an especial manner the river of the Border; and its own beautiful valley, besides that of every "water" that joins it in its course, is rich in the song and story which have been made familiar to the world by the great minstrel in whose ears" the ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles" was the sweetest and dearest of all natural sounds. The history of the

Clyde has been very different. In its upper course it is hardly a less romantic stream than the Tweed; but the traditions which belong to it, instead of Border forays and "warnings of the water," Kinmont Willie and Wat o' Harden, are connected with the great war of Scottish independence, and especially with Wallace, his hiding-places and his gatherings :

"Wight Wallace stood on Dechmont Head,

He blew his bugle round,

Till the wild bull in Cadzow wood

Has started at the sound."

THE UPPER AND LOWER CLYDE.

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The Upper Ward of Clydesdale abounds in traces of a stormy period to which that of Wallace is almost as yesterday. Earthworks and boundary lines tell of a time when Celt and Angle were contending here on the marches of Strath Clyde. But if any memories of this old struggle were preserved in song or tradition, they have disappeared altogether. Bothwell Brig alone contests the supremacy of Wallace; and the days of the Covenanters are as well remembered in certain portions of Clydesdale as the fights of Stirling and Falkirk.

Thus the valleys of both Tweed and Clyde are favourite haunts of Scottish romance and tradition, though each has its distinct character. The outfall of the two rivers. separates them more positively. The Tweed, entering the sea at Berwick, has no deep firth for the protection of a great mercantile city. In earlier days Berwick was of extreme importance as a frontier fortress; but as a place of commerce it was of no very great account. The position was too open, and too much exposed to the hostile attacks of both Scotch and English. But Glasgow lies sheltered above the point where the Clyde enters its long, winding firth, and the position is in every way favourable for the development of a great commercial centre. The river at high water is navigable for the largest class of merchant vessels quite to the heart of the city. Accordingly, although Glasgow in earlier days remained true to its origin, and was more an ecclesiastical than a commercial city, it has, and especially in the course of the last century, increased to an enormous extent, and is now the commercial capital of Scotland. "In point of value of exports," writes Mr. Smiles, "Glasgow ranks fourth among the ports of the United Kingdom, and Greenock now takes precedence of Bristol."

The tall chimneys, the smoke, the crowded dwellings, the stir, and the modern air of Glasgow no doubt take something from the romance of the Lower Clyde. But, on the other hand, they have raised the river-which is only the third in the kingdom in point of magnitude-to a position of the first importance. For the present, however, we have little to do with the reek and the stir of great cities. We pass back to the solitude of the springs of Clyde, where the river is the "cradled nursling of the mountain : "

"Not seldom, when with heat the valleys faint,
Thy handmaid Frost with spangled tissue quaint
Thy cradle decks;-to chant thy birth, thou hast
No meaner poet than the whistling blast."

This is, perhaps, the most remote and loneliest district of the pastoral Lowlands. A high ridge, below which rise from among trees the mouldering relics of Drochil Castle, a monument of Douglas ambition, separates the valley of the Tweed from that of the Clyde. The "bourg" of Douglas itself, with its castle (visited by Sir Walter Scott not long before his departure for Italy), lies on the Douglas Burn, one of the tributaries of the Clyde; but all this region was under the control and in the hands of that great house; and the "Nether Drochil," as it was called, a house "of mighty bulk," was "founded, and more than half built, but never finished," by the famous Regent, James Douglas, Earl of Morton-the "dark Morton" of Sir Walter's Cadzow ballad. "This mighty earl," continues Pennicuik, "for the pleasure of the place and salubrity of the air, designed here a

noble recess and retirement from worldly business, but was prevented by his unfortunate and inexorable death three years after, Anno 1581."

We may climb the ridge under which the castle rises, and for the scene which there meets us we borrow the words of one to whom all this country is familiarly known, and who thus describes, not this immediate height, but the general prospect from the range of hills which traverses all this part of Scotland :—

"Once on the summit of the height, we find immediately around us a vast level plain, with short and scanty herbage, chiefly hill-mosses and lichens. All trace and feeling of man, of planting, ploughing, building, have disappeared. We are absolutely alone-alone with earth and sky, save for the occasional cry of a startled sheep, and the summer hum of insects on the hill-top

'That undefined and mingled hum,

Voice of the desert, never dumb.'

Here and there a very tiny yellow-faced tormentilla, a very slender blue-eyed harebell, or a modest hill violet, peeps timorously out on the barrenness, like an orphan that has strayed on the wild. But we look around us from this great height, and what strikes the eye? On all sides, but particularly to the east of us, innumerable rounded broad hill-tops run in series of parallel flowing ridges, chiefly from the south-west to the north-east; and between the ridges we note that there is enclosed in each a scooped-out glen, in which we know that a burn or water flows. These hill-tops follow each other in wavy outline. One rises, flows, falls, passes softly into another. This again rises, flows, and passes into another beyond itself; and thus the eye reposes on the long soft lines of a sea of hills, whose tops move and yet do not move, for they carry our vision along their undulating flow, themselves motionless, lying like an earth-ocean in the deep, quiet calm of their statuesque beauty. Near us are the heads of the burns and the heads of the glens. Here, at one burn-head, we have deep, peaty bogs, out of which ooze black trickling rills; there, at another, we have a well-eye, fringed with bright mosses, and forget-me-not of purer hue and more slender form than any that the valley can show. The burn gathers strength and makes its way down through a deep red scaur, and amid grey, bleached boulder stones; then, overshadowed by the boughs of a solitary rock-rooted birch, leaps through a sunny fall to a strong, deep, eddying pool. At length it reaches the hollow of the glen, where it winds round and round, amid links of soft green pasture, amid sheen of bracken and glow of heather, passes a solitary herd's house-the only symbol of human life there now breaks against a dark grey opposing rock, then spreads itself out before the sunlight in soft music amid its stones."

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Of this character is the infant stream of the Clyde, after it has been formed by the union of many rills from several scattered sources. The mossy ground where these springs break forth is about 1,400 feet above the sea-level, and far and wide we have the same wide prospect of softly flowing hill-tops. The Clyde itself, as it gathers strength, and passes northward toward Biggar, hardly as yet makes good its claim to be

"The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border," by John Veitch, LL.D., Professor of Logic and Rhetoric in the University of Glasgow.

143

EARLY TRIBUTARIES.

the "far-heard" or the "powerful; " both of which meanings have been assigned to the Celtic name of the river. If either of these be indeed

the true signification of "Clyde," it is justified in the later course of the stream, where the great falls give it a character of its own, and distinguish it in a marked. manner from the gentler waters of the Tweed. The river has its cousin, at least so far as nomenclature is concerned, among the hills of North Wales, where the "Clwyd" flows through the valley of Denbigh, and washes the walls of the quiet old cathedral town of St. Asaph and the venerable ruins of Rhuddlan Castle. The name thus undoubtedly belongs to the Cymric division of the Celtic tongue; and indeed we know that the Britons of Strath-Clyde-the far-stretching kingdom named from its principal "strath" or valley, and which held out so long against the advancing Angles-were in immediate and close connection with the Cymry of Wales.

The Clyde, from its sources to Renfrew, below Glasgow, runs through the county of Lanark, which is sub-divided into the Upper, Middle, and Lower Wards of Clydesdale. From its sources to Dumbarton the river traverses a course of seventy-three miles, the direct distance being only fifty-two. The first tributary of the Clyde is the Daer Water, whose name is remembered chiefly because it gives a second title to the Earldom of Selkirk, and recalls the lines of Burns after his "interview with Lord Daer:".

"I watched the symptoms of the great,
The gentle pride, the lordly state,

The arrogant assuming;

The fient a pride-nae pride had he,
Nor sauce, nor state that I could see,
Mair than an honest ploughman."

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At the junction the Daer is a more considerable stream than the Clyde. Many others soon join them; and flowing onward through a somewhat broad vale, the main river reaches the old castle of Crawford, or Tower Lindsay, near which a Roman road that penetrated this hilly country crossed the Clyde. The course of this road is marked by numerous camps, which are especially frequent in the parish of Lamington, of which parish the Clyde forms the northern boundary. Here we encounter Wallace for the first time. It

THE COURSE OF THE CLYDE, FROM ITS SOURCE TO DUMBARTON.

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