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Quote by Stuart Kelly

“Just between Melrose and Bemersyde is a lovely panorama, taking in an oxbow of the Tweed and a fine aspect of the Eildon Hills, which has become known as 'Scott's View', supposedly because the horses stopped there during the funeral cortege. As we have seen, after his death, Scott is over-written onto the places he described. Scott-land is a palimpsest of Scotland and Scott's works.”

Quote by Stuart Kelly

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Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation

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Stuart Kelly

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“As we descended the vale of the Gala, he began to gaze about him, and by degrees it was obvious that he was recognising the features of that familiar landscape. Presently he murmered a name or two - 'Gala Water surely - Buckholm - Torwoodlee'. As we rounded the hill at Ladhope, and the outline of the Eildons burst upon him, he became greatly excited, and when turning himself on the couch his eye caught caught at length his own towers, at the distance of a mile, he sprang up with a cry of delight.”

“My chief passion in those years was for the Border countryside, and my object in all my prentice writings was to reproduce its delicate charm, to catch the aroma of its gracious landscape and turbulent history and the idiom of its people. When I was absent from it, I was homesick, my memory was full of it, my happiest days were associated with it, and some effluence from its ageless hills and waters laid a spell upon me which has never been broken. I found in its people what I most admired in human nature – realism coloured by poetry, a stalwart independence sweetened by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom. I asked for nothing better than to spend my life by the Tweed.”

“The Queen of Elfland in the Ballad of Thomas is a huntress, a spirit of the wild, and a queen. were the Romans to have encountered such a figure, worshiped by th pre-Christian Celts who inhabited the Eildons, the proces of interpretatio romana would inevitably have led to her being identified with Diana. If we are to look for evidence in the archaeological record supporting a pre-Christian origin for the Queen of Elfland, we do not have to look far to find it: the spot at which this inscribed Roman stone was uncovered lies less than one kilometre from the Rhymer's Stone, where the Eildon Tree once grew.”