Ordnance gazetteer of Scotland > Volume 2

DTJNSCRIBEN
Robert Burns's home from 17S8 to 1791,asCnAiGENPUT-
toch was Thomas Carlyle's from 182S to 1S34, so that
Dunseore has memories such as few parishes in Scotland
have. John "Welsh himself (1570-1623), John Knox's
son-in-law, has been claimed as a native. Friars Cause
and Stroquhan House are the principal mansions ; and 4
proprietors hold each an annual value of £500 and up-
wards, 33 of between £100 and £500, 11 of from £50 to
£100, and 10 of from £20 to £50. Dunseore is in the pres-
bytery and synod of Dumfries ; the living is worth £230.
The present parish church, at the village, is a Gothic
edifice of 1823, with a handsome W tower and 850 sittings.
There are also Free churches of Dunseore and Craig and
aU.P. church; whilst four public schools — Burnhead,
Dunseore, Dunseore infant and female, and Glenessland
— with respective accommodation for 96, 88, 58, and 60
children, had (18S0) an average attendance of 63, 85, 33,
and 55, and grants of £51, 16s., £60, 13s., £25, 12s.,
and £58, 12s. Valuation (1S60) £9881, (18S2) £13,917,
Is. 2d. Pop. (1801) 1174, (1831) 1488, (1861) 1554,
(1871) 1504, (1881) 1405.— Ord. Sur., sh. 9, 1S63.
Dunscriben, a small vitrified fort in Urquhart and
Glenmoriston parish, Inverness-shire, on the brow of a
hill fronting Loch Ness, 1J mile SSW of Bunloit ham-
let.
Dunscuddeburgh, a ruined fort in Kihnuir parish,
Isle of Skye, Inverness-shire.
Duns Dish. See Dun.
Dunse or Down Law, a hill (665 feet) at the south-
western extremity of Roxburgh parish, Roxburghshire,
conjoint with Peniel Heugh in Crailing parish, and 2
miles NE of Ancrum village.
Dunse or Duns (the spelling till 1740, revived in
18S2), a town and a parish of central Berwickshire.
Standing, 420 feet above sea-level, on a plain at the
southern base of Dunse Law, the town by road is 44
miles ESE of Edinburgh, 15| "W of Berwick-on-Tweed,
and 3 furlongs N by W of Dunse station on a loop-
line of the North British, this being 8J miles SW
of Reston Junction, 55J ESE of Edinburgh, and 22 NE
of St Boswells. The original town, which by charter of
1489 was made a burgh of barony, was built on the dun
or Law, but, overthrown and burned by the English in
1545, was thereafter abandoned to utter decay and ex-
tinction. This Law is a round, smooth, turf-clad hill,
rising gradually from a base of 2^ miles in circumference
to a tabular summit 700 feet high and nearly 30 acres
in area, and itself consists of trap or greenstone rock,
through which obtrudes a block of the Old Red sand-
stone, highly metamorphosed by the action of heat, —
the 'Covenanters' Stone.' Here in the spring of 1639
Leslie encamped with an army, numbered variously at
from 12,000 to 30,000 men. Charles was at Berwick,
whence through a telescope he saw the hillside stirring
with pikemen and musqueteers, stout ploughmen and
Swedish veterans, and Argyll's supple Highlanders with
their targes and plaids anddorlachs; before every captain's
tent a standard bearing the legend, in golden letters,
'For Christ's Crown and Covenant.' ' Our hill,' writes
Principal Baillie, ' was garnished on the top towards S
and E with mounted cannon, well-nigh to the number
of 40, great and small. Our regiments lay on the sides
of the hill almost round about. The place was not a
mile in circle — a pretty round rising in a declivity with-
out steepness to the height of a bowshot. On the top
somewhat plain, about a quarter of a mile in length, and
as much in breadth, as I remember, capable of tents for
40,000 men. The crouners lay in canvas lodgings high
and wide ; their captains about them in lesser ones ; the
soldiers about them all in huts of timber covered with
divot or straw. ' Ministers also there were to superfluity,
who encouraged the soldiers by ' their good sermons and
prayers, morning and even, under the roof of heaven, to
which drums did call them for bells. ' So the host lay,
barring the royalists' progress, till a ' humble supplica-
tion ' on the part of the Scots and a ' gracious proclama-
tion ' on that of his Majesty led to the hollow Pacification
of Berwick, 18 June 1639. The Stone, an oblong, mea-
suring originally 5 by 2| feet, had been chipped away
DUNSE
by relic-mongers almost to nothing, when, in 1878, it
was enclosed and cleared of the surrounding turf, so
that now once more it stands 2J feet above the ground.
The present town, the 'Dunse that dings a',' was
founded about 1588, and at first was defended on three
sides by a deep morass, long since drained and obli-
terated. In 1670 it was constituted a burgh of barony
under Sir James Cockburn of Cockburn, who had bought
the estate of Dunse from Hume of Ayton ; and down
to 1696 it claimed to be one of Berwickshire's county-
towns, a rank that it once more shares with Greenlaw
under an act of 1853. The single episode in its history,
apart from the prayerful encampment, is that of the
'Dunse demoniac' in 1630, a poor woman whom the
Earl of Lauderdale believed to be possessed by an evil
spirit, and who spoke better Latin even than the minister
(Chambers's Bom. Ann., ii. 43); but Dunse has produced
some very worthy sons. Foremost among them, doubt-
fully, the 'Angelic Doctor,' Duns Scotus (1265-1308),
author of Realism and greatest of schoolmen. After-
wards, certainly, the Rev. Thomas Boston (1676-1732),
author of The Fourfold State, whose birthplace. in New-
town Street is marked by a tablet ; Cadwallader Golden ,
M.D. (168S-1776), botanist and lieutenant-governor of
New York ; James Grainger, M.D. (1724-67), a minor
poet; Thomas M'Crie, D.D. (1772-1835), biographer of
Knox and Melville ; James Cleghorn (1778-1838), an
accomplished actuary; John Black (17S3-1855), for
twenty-three years editor of the Morning Chronicle;
and Robert Hogg (b. ISIS), botanist. The Rev. Adam
Dickson, too, an able writer upon agriculture, was
minister from 1750 till his death in 1776. Lighted by
gas since 1S25, and well supplied with water by a com-
pany founded in 1858, the town has a modern and well-
to-do aspect, with its square or market-place, its spacious
streets, and its pretty suburbs, studded with tasteful
villas. The Town-Hall, in the centre of the market-
place, a Gothic structure with elegant spire, is of modern
erection, as likewise are the County Buildings and the
Corn Exchange, the latter opened in 1S56. A mechanics'
institute dates from 1840 ; and in 1875 a public library
hall was built at a cost of £670. Dunse has besides a
post office, with money order, savings' bank, insurance,
and railway telegraph departments, branches of the Bank
of Scotland (1833), the British Linen Co. (1784), and
the Royal Bank (1856), 20 insurance agencies, 3 hotels,
2 masonic lodges, a horticultural society (1842), a volun-
teer corps, and a Tuesday paper — the Berwickshire News
(1869). An important corn market is held on every
Tuesday, and hiring fairs are held on the first Tuesday
of March, May, and November ; sheep, cattle, and horse
fairs on the first Thursday of June, the second Thursday
of July, 26 August (or the Tuesday after if the 26th falls
on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday), the third Tuesday of
September, and 17 November or the Tuesday after.
There is also an auction mart, with fortnightly sales of
sheep and cattle, at which a large business is done. The
parish church, a very plain building of 1790, that super-
seded an ancient Norman edifice, was almost destroyed
by fire in 1879. As reopened on 16 Jan. 1881 after
restoration at a cost of nearly £4000, it contains 920
sittings, of pitch-pine, stained and varnished ; is beauti-
fied with several stained-glass windows ; and has a fine
new organ, its congregation having been the second in
the Church of Scotland to employ instrumental music.
Boston Free church, repaired in 18S1 at a cost of nearly
£700, contains 650 sittings ; and three U.P. churches —
East, South, and West — contain respectively 650, 640,
and 900. There are also a Roman Catholic chapel (1882)
and an Episcopal, Christ Church (1854 ; 200 sittings), in
simple Norman style. A new combined public school,
erected at a cost of £5760, was opened on 9 Feb. 1880.
Dunse now is governed by 9 police commissioners,
having adopted the General Police and Improvement
Act in 1873, when the burgh bounds were extended.
In 1882 its municipal constituency numbered 400, and
its burgh valuation amounted to £8400. Pop. (1834)
2656, (1861) 2556, (1871) 2618, (1SS1) 2438.
The parish is bounded NE by the detached section of
447