From my room at the Haven1 I saw from a window facing S.S.E. a magnificent sunrise. It kept fair all day with sunshine in forenoon but with a cold N.W. wind. In the forenoon Jack + Nancy2 walked with me to the village + then I went on to the Head. Saw Solan geese fishing3: picked a few springs of bell heather in flower. Called for the Wilsons4 at [illegible] House. Got back to lunch at 1 + then Jack + I walked along the shore to where a burn comes in at the targets5 + we turned up to the Eyemouth road + home by Coldingham. Miss Cowe6 arrived in the evening + kissed every one of us. I recited to them in the evening ‘Tam & the Leeches’7 + ‘The Pill’8.
1 The property is probably St Abbs Haven, south of St Abbs village and above Coldingham Sands. It is visible on Ordnance Survey six inch Berwickshire Sheet V.NE and VI.NW, published 1908.
2 John ‘Jack’ Roberts junior (1876-1966), mill owner, and Agnes Amelia ‘Nancy’ Roberts née Muir (1878-1948), of Wellwood, Ettrick Terrace, Selkirk.
3 Solan or Solent goose, Morus bassanus, the Northern Gannet, a very large white gannet.
4 The Wilsons are unidentified but the Editor assumes that they are on holiday too.
5 The targets are presumably those shown at Fleur’s Dean E.S.E. of Coldingham village on Ordnance Survey six inch Berwickshire Sheet VI.SW, published 1909. The whole walk may be viewed across this sheet, the one above at footnote 1 and on Ordnance Survey six inch Berwickshire Sheet V.SE, published 1908.
6 Miss Isobel Cowe was the Proprietor of the house, offices and garden named St Abbs Haven, St Abbs, Coldingham [1925 Valuation Roll] but is otherwise unidentified.
7 Tam and the Leeches from ‘The Auld Doctor, and Other Poems and Songs in Scots’ by David Rorie (1867-1946), D.S.O., M.D.C.M., D.P.H., doctor, folklorist and poet. An extract reads “Faith there’s a hantle queer complaints | To cheenge puir sinners into saints | An’ mony divers ways o’ deein’ | That doctors hae a chance o’ seein’ | The Babylonian scartit bricks | To tell his doots o’ Death’s dark tricks.”
8 The Peel (Pill) from ‘Fancies of a Physician, Medical and Otherwise, in Scots and English’ by Dr John F Fergus (1865-1943), Brown Son & Ferguson, Glasgow, 1938. Its penultimate verse reads “Syne it was a hard to name it, but it was waur to heal | But the doctor, couthy body, garr’d the fella rak’ a peel: | An oh, it was an unco peel made up wi’ money a pushion, | There was scammony and jalap in’t, an aloes in profusion, | And calomel and rhubarb – but it cured him a’ the same | O’ the awful’ unco feelin’ that was wummlin’ in his wame.”
[Source: Scottish Borders Archives & Local History Service SBA/657/26, Dr J S Muir of Selkirk, medical practitioner, journal for 1923]
Rumbling Clint's Scottish Notes 