ast century, have given to the Border its modern picturesqueness and
its look of prosperity. Sir Walter Scott himself may be said to be the
father of arboriculture in the South of Scotland. In the creation of
Abbotsford, forestry was his main out-of-doors hobby, and the example
set by one who had studied the subject thoroughly, and who discoursed
pleasantly upon it, was quickly followed by all the neighbouring lairds
and many others besides. Not that the country was altogether treeless
before Scott's day. Here and there "ancestral oaks" clumped themselves
about the great castles and mansions, with perhaps some further attempt
at embellishment. But that was rare enough. It needed a man like Scott
to popularize the notion, and to take the lead in an undertaking
fraught, as this age well sees, with results so beneficent. We do not
forget, of course, that in earlier historic times practically the whole
of the Border Country was covered with wood. Its inhabitants, whose very
names--Gadeni and Ottadini--signified "dwellers in the wood," were found
by the Romans in their dense forests, and the first settlements were
only possible through clearances of growing timber. Across the country,
from Cadzow, in Renfrewshire, to the Ettrick, there stretched the vast
Wood of Caledon (whence Caledonia), known at a later period as the
Forest of Ettrick, or simply as the Forest (_e.g._, the "Flowers of the
Forest"). There is no doubt that it was largely a forest in the ordinary
acceptation, and not a mere deer-forest use of the term. Over and over
again we have the various charters, as to the Abbeys, for instance,
authorising the monks to cut down for building purposes and fuel oaks
"from the forest," both in Selkirk and in Melrose, in Kelso and the
Ettrick. The original religious house of Melrose was entirely of oak. So
were the first churches founded by Kentigern and Cuthbert, and those
even of a later date. The Forest of Ettrick survived to the time of the
Stuarts, who had here their favourite hunting expeditions, James V. and
Queen Mary especially being frequent visitors to the Borderland. The
Forest of Megget, or Rodono (a sub-division of that of Ettrick), yielded
on one occasion no fewer than five hundred head of game, bird and beast
of the chase, and at another time eighteen score of red deer. In the
reign of Mary there was issued a proclamation limiting and prohibiting
the slaughter of deer in the Forest on account of their growing
sc