all the more ruthless in the latter period of the national wars, when Englishmen had begun to lose respect for church property, which had formerly been held sacred even in the most ferocious inroads. After Henry VIII. had let the Southern nobles taste the blood of the church, as it were, the noble Abbey of Jedburgh began to suffer in the forays until it was entirely reduced to dilapidation in 1545. It is still, however, a fine monument of ecclesiastical art. There are a great number of old fortresses and other antiquities in the neighbourhood of Jedburgh; and at Hundalee, Lintlee, and Mossburnford, the rocky sides of the Jed are excavated so as to form hiding-places, probably for women, children, and other valuables, in times of trouble. The burghers of Jedburgh, however, were always ready to give as good as they got; their peculiarly inverted method of carrying out criminal law has passed into a proverb; and at the last great border battle, the Raid of the Reidswire, they came in pretty effectually, and turned the day in favour of the Scotch. The town in its modern character is a "pleasant habitation," and is the best place from which to fish the Teviot and its lower tributaries. Besides the Rule, the Jed, and the Ale, it gives command of the Oxnam, and allows of a stretch to the Kale. The Oxnam enters the Teviot from the same side, about two miles below the confluence of the Jed. It is a small stream, and is not, we believe, much distinguished amongst the anglers of the district. Not so the Kale, however, the next and last tributary which the Teviot receives. Its trout are numerous, of fair size, and of excellent quality. The upper part of it may be most conveniently fished from Hounam, where the angler will find accommodation at the village inn. The lower part may be reached readily from either the Old Ormiston or the Nisbet station on the Jedburgh line, -and the angler will find it a pretty hard day's work to fish thence up to Hounam, missing all the woody places, there being plenty of water with grassy banks. The head of the Bowmont is within reach of Hounam. Below Mounteviot, when salmon were more plentiful than they are now, there were several casts in the Teviot where a number of fish were got with the rod every year. A favourable autumn flood always brings a few grilses into the pools of the Teviot, but they are thinly distributed, and the angler must seldom be sanguine of success with his salmon-rod. Great numbers of kelts have, however, hitherto been killed in this river, in the spring, with the rod; and, before they took a thought and mended, the kelt-killing gentry of Roxburghshire to whom we have formerly alluded used to commit deadly ravages in it with the leister. In the spring of 1857 a feat in kelt-fishing was performed in the lower part of the Teviot by Mr. Purves of Kelso. We have mislaid the paragraph from the Kelso papers which chronicled the deed; but it was, we think, from Heaton-mill cauld, near Roxburgh, that in a few hours one afternoon he took eight fish, weighing altogether 126 lbs. Two of them, kelts though they were, weighed 26 lbs. each, two others were 16 lbs., and the rest smaller. It was on a frosty day, and Mr. Purves was angling with minnow. In the same piece of water Mr. Stoddart has accomplished some of his most remarkable victories. We have incidentally alluded to his eel, which took a gorge-bait with which he was trolling for pike, swallowed it, ran off in extraordinary style, and finally, finding no other way of escape, bolted the whole nine inches of brass wire, and bit through the line. Much amazed, Mr. Stoddart threw in six set-lines, each with a trout and wire-armed hook at the end, and went on his way trouting. When he returned, and proceeded to draw his lines, he found the first five docked of their bait and hook, the whole having been swallowed and the cords bit through by some monster, as had happened to his trolling-line; but at the end of the sixth, dead and motionless, was a huge eel with the whole of the lost gorge-hooks, brass-wire and all, in its maw, having been choked in its attempt to swallow the seventh! Mr. Stoddart most unluckily did not weigh his prize, but estimated it at 20 lbs. We have searched for, but have been unable to find, this singular circumstance recorded in the last edition of The Angler's Companion; we are certain, however, that it was in the first. In the last edition of that book-which is really the most complete and interesting, as it is about the bestwritten, of angling-works-we find set forth, however, a very remarkable mode of grilse-fishing in Heatonmill cauld, in which, with a worm and float, in the mode of school-boys bobbing for perch, on a bright day, with the water low, clear, and calm, Mr. Stoddart killed a "noble grilse" out of a shoal of about a dozen which were visible sailing about in the pool. In April and May the Teviot swarms with smolts, both of the salar and of the eriox, so that the angler must be careful. He cannot possibly avoid hooking one occasionally; and if he finds, when he has hooked one, that a sharp twitch will not suffice to disengage the hook from its mouth, he ought to pull the smolt out as quickly as he likes, but not with a jerk that may involve the risk of killing or seriously injuring it, should it fall on a stone. "Take it up tenderly, Lift it with care, Young and so fair;" and return it gently to the water, hoping that it may be your luck in the future, if not to kill it, at least to pay your "devours" to it as a grilse or salmon at some friendly board or Tweedside "kettle." The lower part of the Teviot, from the mouth of the Jed downwards to near Roxburgh, is decidedly the best part of the river for trouting. The trout are larger than in the upper streams, and, although capricious, by the use of the finest gut and lightly-made flies of the more sober hues, or of well-scoured worms in summer, bountiful returns for skill and labour may often be obtained. Roxburgh station receives the angler exactly at the part of the river where it is most desirable to begin-and, according to the arrangement of the trains, about seven hours fishing may be obtained in the Teviot by any one leaving Edinburgh in the morning and returning to it at night. In all the still pools below Mounteviot-from ponds at which they are said originally to have come-there are considerable numbers of pike; which, unlike these fish in most lochs or other rivers, take readily in early spring, and probably throughout almost the whole year. They are of good quality as compared with most river-pike, and were at one time increasing so rapidly that their depredations caused considerable fears for the future of the lower part of the Teviot as a troutingstream. A lucky flood, however, carried numbers of them off, and cleared out some of their holds and haunts; and it seems certain that the floods from the Roxburghshire hills are far too frequent and heavy to allow them ever to become so abundant, or their weedy refuges to become so secure, as to give the esox the ascendancy over the salmo in this famous river. Pike are frequently carried, even by ordinary floods, down the Tweed from the Teviot, the Leet, and the Till, probably even to the sea; for they have been caught in the salmon-nets within the tide-way. In no part of the main river, however, have they fixed their habitation. At Coldstream, a few years ago, a pike was caught in the Tweed by a worm-fisher, in a streamcircumstance, so far as we know, altogether singular in the history of pike-fishing. Heaton-mill cauld is also about the best cast for pike in the Teviot. -a There are perch in the Teviot, and we believe they are sometimes taken of a very large size, even up to three and four pounds. The minnow, either spun in the ordinary way, or angled with alive, is a more tempting bait for large perch in rivers than in ponds. But little attention, however, is paid to this kind of fishing by border anglers. |