simple and sequestered beauty of its scenery. It hangs upon the lower declivity of a steep rocky hill, called Stairroch, on the southern bank of the Bowmont, or as Leyden, in the elegant poem above quoted, has named it—the Yeta. This is a fine trouting stream, which issues, a few miles above, from the west side of Cheviot; and after winding through a narrow pastoral valley, unsheltered with wood, but bounded everywhere by smooth steep hills of the most beautiful verdure, flows down between the two villages of Kirk and Town Yetholm. The Bowmont is here joined by a large brook from the bottom of a picturesque recess among the neighbouring hills, which pours into it the superfluous waters of the little lake of Loch-Tower or Lochside, A short way below this it enters England, and afterwards falls into the Till near Flodden Field.
Between the two villages is stretched a broad and level haugh, which the Bowmont occasionally overflows. At Fasten's Even this always forms the theatre for the toughest foot-ball match now played in the south of Scotland. Town-Yetholm lies rather low, and exhibits nothing remarkable either in the character of its inhabitants or its internal appearance; but a small conical hill, whose rocky summit retains the vestiges of some ancient entrenchments, rises between it and Loch-Tower, and presents a very pleasing view on approaching from the north. It is cultivated on all sides quite to the top,—and the small village-tenants, by whom it is chiefly occupied, have parcelled out its sloping declivities into parks, or little enclosures, of almost Chinese variety,—each of which annually exhibits, on a small scale, the diversified operations and variegated vegetation of Scottish husbandry.
The aspect of the opposite village, to which the gypsey population is entirely confined, is of a different character:—a mill and a church-yard rising from the brink of the water—the church itself low and covered with thatch—beyond which appear the straggled houses of the village, built in the old Scottish style, many of them with their gable-ends, backs, or corners, turned to the street or toun-gate—and still farther up, the Tinkler-Row, with its low, unequal, straw-covered roofs, and chimneys bound with rushes and hay-ropes—men and women loitering at their doors, or lazily busied among their carts and panniers—and ragged children scrambling on the midden-steads (which rise before every cottage) in intimate and equal fellowship with pigs, poultry, dogs, and cuddies.
This description, though brief and general, may perhaps appear to some readers more minute than the occasion requires; but some little indulgence, we trust, will be allowed,—if not on account of our own early partialities, at least for the sake of the now-classical scenery of gypsey heroism—the native haunts of Jean Gordon, alias Meg Merrilies.
The general aspect of the surrounding country, however, cannot be said to bear any striking analogy to the more dark and savage features of the gypsey character. Though the mountains of Cheviot can never fail to awaken in the breast of a Scotsman a thousand elevating emotions, there is little in their natural scenery that deserves the epithets of terrible or sublime. It is wild, indeed, but without ruggedness—and interesting rather than picturesque. Its chief characteristic is pastoral simplicity—with something of that homely and affecting bareness peculiar to Scottish landscape:—like the Border scenery in general, the green banks of Bowmont seem more calculated to soothe the fancy and soften the heart, than to exasperate the passions by exciting the imagination. To sources very different from the influences of external nature must be traced the strange peculiarities of these wild and wayward tribes. In the same Arcadian vallies, reside at the present moment a peasantry distinguished for superior intelligence, morality, and delicacy of feeling—whose moss-trooping ancestors, little more than a hundred years ago, were nevertheless sufficiently familiar with 'stouthe reif and pykarie,' with feudal rancour and bloody revenge—but the moral causes, which have happily changed the Border reivers into a religious and industrious people, have scarcely yet begun to dawn upon the despised and degraded Gypsies.
Tradition affords no intelligence respecting the time when the first Gypsey colony fixed their residence at Kirk-Yetholm. The clan of Faas are generally supposed to have established
