ONE
An earthly paradise
The scenic route to Roslin Country Park is from the A6094 turn-off on the A7 Dalkeith to Galashiels road, where on winter days fine vistas of Rosslyn Castle on the far side of the glen, with its chapel high on the ridge above, can be glimpsed through the trees. The more direct A701 Edinburgh to Penicuik road is rather less inspiring. Yet there are moments. To the north-east is Arthur’s Seat, flanked by Salisbury Crags. To the south are the Pentland Hills, fading gently into the distant west. At night, the floodlit artificial ski slope at Hillend resembles a stairway to God. Otherwise, the highway is a narrow, drab affair cluttered with directional road signs.
I wonder what the Scandinavian/Scottish Prince William Sinclair, 11th Lord of Rosslyn, 3rd and last St Clair Jarl of Orkney, Knight of the Cockle and Golden Fleece, and builder of Rosslyn Chapel, would have made of Bilston Glen Business Park with its monochrome warehouses, or for that matter, the affront of Ikea in its monstrous blue and yellow roadside mega-box? Of course, the all-purpose home furnishing store Ikea is Swedish owned. He would have been intrigued by that.
Turning onto the B7006, we find yet another wonder of the modern world, the Roslin Institute (or Roslin Bio Centre as it is signed) where in February 1997 I was sent by the Scottish Daily Mail to interview Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell. Genetic engineering is another of the miracles associated with this region. Shampooed and fluffed up for the photo opportunities, Dolly was an attractive beast, but, alas, when all of the curiosity died down, her life was short.
Roslin village in the third millennium consists of a fairly typical grouping of early twentieth-century Scottish agricultural and artisan houses. Their predecessors were purpose-built to serve the no longer functioning carpet, bleach and gunpowder industries upon which, from 1834 until the middle of last century, the local economy depended. However, that world has moved on fast. The bleaching works created by Robert Neilson in 1719, which sat on a level below the castle, are long gone. Neilson was a son of William Neilson, Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1719. He began his career having inherited a great fortune, but then lost it and, as was the custom under such circumstances, travelled abroad. In Holland he was introduced to the art of bleaching linen and, returning to Scotland, soon made a second fortune.1
The gunpowder warehouses of Messrs Hay and Hezekiah John Merricks, which fired the British guns during the Napoleonic Wars, are derelict, the coalmines of Midlothian are closed, and where the Henderson & Widnell carpet factory once stood is a large car park. The original factory here was established by Richard Whytock. The velvet tablecloths and tapestries Roslin produced, supervised by David Paterson, a qualified chemist specialising in colours, were in demand worldwide. In 1977, Midlothian County Council acquired the site to create a country park, passing it on during local government reorganisation to Midlothian Council, which maintains it today.
With the run up to the building of Rosslyn Chapel, a settlement was created here as early as 1446. However, this is far from being the whole story of Roslin village. When the work began, the nearest habitation to the castle was to be found half a mile away at Bilston Burn, and so Prince William St Clair built houses to accommodate his indentured employees, imported from as far afield as Holland, France, Spain and Italy. To his stonemasons he paid an annual salary of 40 pounds Scots, the equivalent of £5,400 today; to smiths and carpenters, 10 pounds, approximately £1,240.2 This might not sound over-generous, but given that housing, fuel, food and clothing were provided free from the estate, it was not a bad living.
In 1456, James II erected Roslin into a Burgh of Barony: a parcel of land granted to a chief tenant in the person of a baron or lord, who held it at the king’s pleasure. With its own market cross, a Saturday market, and an annual fair falling on St Simon and St Jude’s Day (28 October), Roslin was described as ‘the chiefest town in all Lothian except Edinburgh and Haddington’.3 A Royal Charter was granted by James VI in 1622, and a second later confirmed by Charles I, thus making it legal for commercial activities such as trading and manufacturing to take place within its boundaries. On both occasions, the honour was proclaimed with ‘sound of trumpet’ at the Market Cross in Edinburgh.
In comparison to all this, the Roslin of the third millennium has become a quiet Midlothian dormitory village of sturdy buildings and practical shops, within easy commuter distance to Edinburgh. Property prices, on the rare occasions that a house actually comes up for sale, tend to be high. ‘It’s a particularly wonderful place to live during the summer,’ says Peter Turner, who has lived here for all of his life. ‘The city is only twenty minutes away by car or public transport. There is the garden and, if that is not enough, you can set off for a long walk in the woods.’
Roslin Glen, the hidden valley adjoining the village, is the largest surviving tract of ancient woodland in Midlothian. There is evidence that it was occupied during the Bronze Age, but the names of Roslin and Rosslyn date from a later occupation and originate from the Celtic words ros, meaning a rocky promontory, and lynn a waterfall or rushing stream; not, as is often claimed, from the Rose-Croix or Rosy Cross of the Knights Templar. Snaking through the gorge is the River North Esk, a dank and frothy ribbon of water rushing north-east from its source in the southern Pentland Hills above the village of Carlops to its confluence with the River South Esk in Dalkeith Park. The secretive nature of this stream adds to the romance of the surrounding terrain as it spills through deep gorges flanked by private estates which, for the most part, remain out of sight to the casual observer. Today, the more accessible Powdermills section and lower glen are managed by Midlothian Ranger Service.
For no apparent reason, other than curiosity, I have been exploring these wooded riverbanks since I was an adolescent. A sucker for Gothic romance, I find myself irresistibly drawn to waterfalls, ravines and mystical woodland, and the experience of stepping into this glen through the rugged archway below the bridge at Rosslyn Castle is the stuff of childhood dreams. The leafy paths that lead up above the water, not to mention the more hazardous, often muddy tracks on the edge of the eastern riverbank, cry out to be explored. No wonder the poet Robert Burns and his friend the painter Alexander Nasmyth came here to muse and daub. No wonder the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were spellbound when they visited Sir Walter Scott at his nearby Lasswade cottage in 1803. Roslin’s reputation as an outstanding place of Gothic beauty never fails to impress. Generations of artists have been dazzled and inspired by the juxtaposition of castle and river gorge. JMW Turner’s exquisite watercolour hangs in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Mermaid’s Haunt, Julius Caesar Ibbetson’s more eclectic 1804 vision of the glen, with naiads on the riverbanks and Hawthornden Castle towering above, can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Centuries ago, a proportion of the valley of the River North Esk between Roslin and the cliffs of Hawthornden may well have formed a broad loch which skirted the site of the present Rosslyn Castle. The low-lying piece of marshy land to the north-west of the castle is known locally as the Stanks and encloses a small hillock known as the Goose’s Mound. The name Stanks means stagnant pool, or open drain, suggesting that the water of the loch must have drained away through some natural, and perhaps sudden, collapse of ground. It is linked etymologically to the French word étang, meaning pond.
Lochans were plentiful throughout the Lowlands of mediaeval Scotland. From the heights of Edinburgh Castle could be seen no less than seven expanses of inland water, all long since drained. In the case of Roslin Glen, the evidence suggests that a large quantity of water from the hairpin bend beyond today’s car park to the Lynn stretch which circles the castle has over the centuries filtered off through natural erosion. But other influences have also made a significant contribution towards the river’s configuration. From its source high up in the Pentland Hills near Boarstone and Easter Cairnhill, and the boundary line between Midlothian and Tweeddale, the waters of the River North Esk were gathered into a reservoir in 1859 by the engineer Thomas Stevenson, father of the author Robert Louis Stevenson, who had been contracted to supply water and power to the paper mills on the river’s banks.4 Inevitably, this would have affected the flow downstream, but prior to this, during the late seventeenth century, much of the remaining pool of water in Roslin Glen had been diverted to make way for the powder mill, the later carpet factory and the glen cottages. Whatever the exact details of the past, and however the process of change occurred, what is clearly evident today is just how lush and fertile the glen remains.
To the north-west of the footpath beneath the castle is the slope known as the Orchard; further north is the grassy slope of College Hill with the chapel high above. A stone slab on the walkway marks the spot from which General George Monck and his Cromwellian army pounded the castle walls in the autumn of 1650. From nearby, the pathway climbs to skirt the so-called Lovers’ Leap, which juts out high above the river gorge. Low on the rock face here can be seen the crude carving of a face, human or monkey, or, as some insist, a fish. Is this a gypsy homage to the chapel carvings, or the work of a long-ago apprentice mason practising his craft? Nobody appears to know its provenance.
On the far side of the river, cut high into the cliff face, are the caves of the Gorton Estate, the most prominent of which is known as ‘Wallace’s Cave’, implying that the freedom fighter Sir William Wallace took shelter here during Scotland’s Wars of Independence. If this is true, then it would most likely have been before the Battle of Roslin in 1303. Perhaps, however, it was later, since there is no firm evidence to confirm that he took part in this particular skirmish.
Later that same century, however, Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie definitely did make good use of these same caves as a hideout for his freedom fighters. Friend of Robert the Bruce and staunch supporter of Bruce’s son, David II of Scotland, Ramsay quartered up to seventy men in these burrows, and led forays as far south as Northumberland.5 However, anyone planning an excursion here from the Roslin Glen footpath should be forewarned. First you have to cross the river, then climb steeply up the precipitous rock face in which they are to be found.
The Hawthornden Estate above the steep west bank of the North Esk ranks equally with Rosslyn as a place of unique and extraordinary beauty. In early spring the woodland walks are flanked by a carpet of snowdrops and daffodils; when summer comes, the rhododendrons bloom as in their native Himalaya mountains. Looming distant always are the Pentland Hills, pale and undulating on the watery skyline. Nothing much remains of the original fifteenth-century tower house, but in 1638 the celebrated poet William Drummond built himself a fine mansion with gables and a turret on the site. This seventeenth-century building, situated 100 feet above the river, has survived intact.
What has always interested me most, however, is not so much Hawthornden Castle, or its association with the first Scottish poet to write in pure English, but the network of man-made caves which lie immediately below its walls and are said to be of Pictish provenance. These are entered through a locked, low door on the west end of the castle’s exterior façade. A second, lower tier is also accessible, but in all probability highly unsafe. Connected by long, low passages, the cells on the upper level have been recently strengthened and are lit by electricity. This catacomb is equipped with a draw-well of great depth, perhaps as much as 60 feet, and it is easy to imagine how fugitives might hold out here for months without being discovered. My personal observation is that for comfort I think they would have had to have stood less that 5 feet in height.
Whether the caves were created in Pictish times or later, the hypothesis that the valley might have been flooded at the time of their creation, long before the castle was built, makes them even more intriguing as access to them would in all likelihood have been by boat. Under such conditions, the caves of Hawthornden and those of Gorton, mentioned earlier, would have been virtually impossible to find. Certainly Sir Alexander Ramsay found them during the Scottish Wars of Independence, and perhaps it was during his occupation of them that three came to be named the King’s Gallery, the King’s Bedchamber and the King’s Dining Room, although there is no record of any Scottish king having ever visited here, let alone having stayed overnight.6
Similarly, the claim that Prince Charles Edward Stuart and his Jacobite army passed this way on their march south to Derby is unsubstantiated, although Government soldiers certainly searched for him in the neighbourhood following his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The only royal connection that definitely cannot be denied is with Queen Victoria, who visited in 1842 and allegedly dipped her hands into the King’s Wash Basin, a hollow cut into the rock in the King’s Bedchamber.
In 1070, the year of William ‘the Seemly’ St Clair’s charter for Roslin, the lands of Hawthornden were held by the Abernethy family. Not much is known about them, but according to George F Black’s The Surnames of Scotland,7 their ancestors were neither Norman nor Saxon, and therefore native, which perhaps gives credence to the idea that the caves below their castle are of Pictish origin. Etymologically, however, the name Abernethy is purely Celtic. Hawthornden passed from the Abernethys, who also owned lands at Ormiston and Saltoun in East Lothian, in the late fourteenth century, to their nephew Sir William Douglas of Strabrock, whose descendants continued his support of the Royal House of Stewart. In 1513, Sir William Douglas of Hawthornden was among the knights who fought and died with James IV at the Battle of Flodden. During the English invasion of 1545, Hawthornden Castle was fiercely attacked and burned, as was Rosslyn.
It was the poet and historian William Drummond, whose father purchased the estate in 1598, who brought celebrity to Hawthornden, notably when he was visited there in 1619 by his fellow versifier Ben Jonson, Poet Laureate of England. Jonson, contemporary and friend of William Shakespeare, found Drummond seated in front of his house under the Corvine Tree, a large sycamore which stood at the north-east of the castle lawn, and so called by Drummond because of the crows which annually roosted among its high branches. Drummond himself, it appears, was a true Renaissance man, having invented early examples of perpetual motion, military machines and self-navigating boats. After his death in 1649, the house remained with his family, which, in 1760, joined forces with the bloodline of Hawthornden’s original owners when Barbara Drummond of Hawthornden married William Abernethy, Bishop of Edinburgh.8
After their deaths, the estate passed to a niece, whose husband took the Drummond surname, and was thereafter owned by their descendants until 1970, when it was sold to Mrs Drue Heinz, the widow of the American Heinz baked beans magnate. Today it operates as a writers’ retreat and is administered by a private trust. Among those who have sought sanctuary here are crime writer Ian Rankin, and novelists Michael Arditti and Muriel Spark. The poet Drummond would surely have approved.