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MELROSE ABBEY, LOWLANDS / BORDERS
In 80 AD the Romans came to shatter the Celtic idyll. Dover was the Dwffyrrha of the ancient Britons, the Dubræ of the Romans, the Dofra or Dofris of the Saxons. Their great military road from Dover to Aberdeen linked a chain of forts of which Trimontium, three kilometres east of Melrose, was the most important in the 150 kilometre road-length between the Rivers Tyne and Forth. The fort was garrisoned for about 100 years until the late second century. At its height the six hectare (15 acres) fort housed 1500 Roman infantry and cavalry. In the 80 hectares (200 acres) of fortified annexes and enclosures around, a similar number of civilians lived and worked: garrison wives and children, tradesmen and artisans in wood, leather, glass, bronze and iron, fishermen, farm workers and stockmen, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. Rotary queues of both Roman and native type attest to rich corn-lands. Water for this great settlement was drawn from wells up to ten metres deep dug into the water-rich clay of the site. Some 200 wells have been located. As the wells went out of use they were filled with rubbish from around, rubbish but archaeological treasure. Even more precious to the archaeologist were gifts to the Gods of the Underworld, broken to release the spirits, deposited before final sealing of the abandoned wells. In the 2nd century AD Alexanderian geographer Ptolemy recorded the names of 17 tribes living north of Hadrians wall.
This ancient Celtic or pre-Celtic Sun-sanctuary would be so powerfully placed that it would in all probability be adopted in turn by the Romano-British peoples of the pre-Christian Roman Empire and then the pagan Angles of emergent Northumbria. After the Romans left Bath, the Saxons invaded Eastern England. In 577 AD they won a battle at Dyrhan. They then captured Bath, Cirencester and Gloucester. In 658 the Saxons captured the Celtic eastern Somerset (Somerton) near Circenster and Dorset. The Ionan monks brought in 635AD to convert the pagan Northumbrians may have lived enclosed at Old Melrose, but would surely have subsumed the ancient Sun-sanctury with a preaching station or a Christian church. So the story comes full circle to Dr Cruden's pre-Cistercian church and a deeper meaning to the shadow text carved on the Abbey church gable.
The Eildon Hills and Melrose Abbey are truly magical while all these sites, including the Eildon Hills, were centres of Bronze or Iron Age populations. The original site of the Abbey was 4 miles down the River Tweed, just below Scott's View. Founded by St. Aidan in about A.D. 660, it's first prior was St. Boisil who was succeeded by St. Cuthbert, the apostle of the Borders, who dwelt there until 664 when he became prior of Lindesfarne. In Wilfrid's minster, though during his exile, there occurred in 685 the consecration of St. Cuthbert as Bishop of Hexham, a scene of the utmost significance in English history. On the one hand stood the saint, completely Celtic in his ascetism and intellectual simplicity; on the other stood the consecrator Archbishop Theodore, the last known student of the Schools of Athens, the embodiment of Mediterranean culture and the new mission of Rome. According to the anecdote first recorded in the anonymous Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, Abbot Eadred of Carlisle received an order from St. Cuthbert in a vision and as a result caused the whole army of Danes to redeem one Guthred, son of Harthacnut, whom the Danes had sold in servitude, and make him king.
Then in 1131, David I, King of Scots, encouraged the Cistercian monks who had been sent by Bernard of Clairvaux from France to found a new abbey on the present site below the Eildon Hills. The Abbey of Melrose, located in in Roxburghshire, founded in 1136 by King David I, was the earliest Cistercian monastery established in Scotland. Its first community came from Rielvaux, the Yorkshire house colonized from Cîteaux. In less than ten years St. Mary's Abbey, Melrose, had been completely built. It was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin on Sunday 28 July 1146. The Cistercian order and St. Bridget of Calder Abbey near Egremont near Carlisle was once one of those in which a former parish and a successive saint were around the same times as Lombardic enscriptions there. 40 feet above the water of Eden, at a short distance from the abbey ruins, are St. Constantine's Cells, said to have been formed by Constantine. The great Roman wall ran through the township of Burtholme with Lanercost Priory.
The name Melrose derives from the ancient Celto-British 'mail-rhos', the cropped moor or meadow. These Celts were working bronze in North Britain by 1500 BC. By about 900 BC the area was sufficiently populated and prosperous to build a ritual city of more than 400 large round-houses, within a great rampart and ditch some 1500 metres long encircling the summit of Hill North of the three magic Eildon Hills. All the great stones forming Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, were brought from Marlborough Downs.
Nothing remains visible on the site but the low swell of the eroded fort ramparts and the hollow of the amphitheatre. Indeed, the site, though mentioned in Roman writings as Trimontium, was entirely lost until the railway building of the 19th Century cut through it. The Romans maintained a keen interest in the political stability of the Lothians and the Tweed Valley even after they withdrew to Hadrians Wall in about 180 AD. They marked this interest by gifts of silver and luxuries to the tribal princes, and occasional savage military intrusions into the old Antonine Wall line and the "badlands", north of the River Forth. Eildon Hill North, and the Bronze Age city thereon, was apparently re-occupied by the native Britons in this sub-Roman period up to the abandonment of the whole province of Britannia in 410 AD. The Western Empire was under attack from Celtic and Teutonic tribes from north of the Rhine, and they in turn were under lethal pressure from Attila's Huns driving them to the sea. Roman recruitment of these tribesmen from beyond the Rhine and from the North Sea coast as army and navy auxiliaries had familiarised many with the riches of Britannia and the lowlands of Alba, Scotland to be. With the Roman withdrawal, raiders and setters flooded in: Angles, Jutes and Saxons into the southern and eastern lowlands, and the Irish, the Scots into the western islands and the mountains of Alba, there to found the kingdom of Dalriada that was to grow into Scotland. Locally, in the Tweed Valley, the Angles who came with their families to found the kingdom of Bernicia, the heartland of Northumbria to be.