The Debatable Land

by Graham Robb

  The sign at the hotel entrance suggested that, in some respects, it was a popular venue: ‘Anti-Social Behaviour Will Not Be Tolerated’. The hotel appeared to have been partially renovated in the 1960s and its prices were correspondingly reasonable. An hour later, we were sitting in a vast bedroom overlooking the spartan ‘leisure zone’ of Botchergate. In the days when the long journey from London forced businessmen and dignitaries to spend the night in Carlisle, it must have been considered palatial. One of the removal men, a native of North Cumbria, had told us that the small town we would pass through next day on our way to the house was known locally as ‘Dodge City’. With its decor of red velours and tasselled armchairs, the room reminded me of a brothel above a Wild West saloon. From the street below came bellowings in an unfamiliar dialect.

  After dinner, I went for a stroll and passed between the two squat towers of the nineteenth-century Citadel which replicates the old southern defences of the city. A plaque on the wall commemorated ‘the last public execution in Carlisle, 15th March 1862’. An engine driver called Charlton had murdered an old widow at a nearby railway crossing with a pick axe and a hedge slasher and robbed her of the money she had saved up for her funeral. Beyond the Citadel lay the main shopping area: English Street, then Scotch Street. I walked as far as the bridge over the river Eden until I could see the road leading north to the Border fells and Scotland.

  A cold wind was blowing from the north. This would mean an extra-early start in the morning. It was not yet ten o’clock and a restaurant was already closing its doors. I reflected that, from now on, this would be our nearest centre of civilization. The shop windows hinted at a lack of disposable income and the city was as dimly lit as it must have been in the age of gas-lamps. The narrow vennels on either side were impenetrable to the eye, but there was no sign of any anti-social behaviour, which was not surprising, since the place was almost deserted.

  I turned to go back to the hotel, trying to interpret the feeling of dread as the thrill of adventure. Something in particular made it impossible to forget that we were a long way from the south of England: the few people who passed in the street looked me in the eye and wished me good evening, as though, as far as they were concerned, I already belonged to their world.

  *

  At dawn the following morning, we cycled across the Eden and pedalled up to the ridge on which the Romans had built the fort of Uxellodunum. Green mountains appeared to the north and suddenly I felt an air of childhood holidays. The wind must have changed since the bicycle seemed full of eagerness despite the weight, and I felt only the excitement of going to live – very nearly – in Scotland.

  Though we had settled on the place more by accident than design, it seemed appropriate in an anecdotal sort of way. I liked the idea of a ‘debatable land’ in the middle of Britain which was once neither Scottish nor English. My sister and I are the first in the history of our family to be born in England. I grew up understanding the Scots language but never speaking it except to tease my father. One of my uncles was an Aberdonian farmer who appeared to be able to speak nothing but Buchan (or Doric). Since the dialect was incomprehensible to me, I took it to be a foreign language. In a spirit of compromise but, according to school friends, with typical Scottish wilfulness, I supported the Scottish national football team and, because of my place of birth, Manchester United, whose manager, right half and inside right were all Scots.

  Living in England, my parents often had to brush off silly remarks about funny accents, atrocious weather, sporrans, kilts and haggis. At primary school, my sister and I were sometimes corrected for ‘mispronouncing’ certain words, such as ‘iron’ with an ‘r’, but once we had lost the accent of home, we almost never experienced anti-Scottish ridicule. Instead, our parents made fun of our English accents. I once (only once) referred to my little finger as my ‘pinkie’, and I tried to keep my middle name a secret. ‘Macdonald’ had been a tongue-in-cheek homage to my mother’s father, a sports reporter in Glasgow, who had discovered, in the usual way of genealogical research, that an ancestor had been present at – and presumably escaped from – the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692, when the Campbells, in league with the English, had exterminated the Macdonalds, that tribe of cattle-rustling Highlanders whose chiefs, nonetheless, had sent their sons to the Sorbonne. But there was nothing I could do to disguise my surname. The Aberdonian ancestors had sailed from the Norse Lands, settling on the farms they had destroyed, which is why the name ‘Robbe’, with a terminal ‘e’, is also found in Normandy. They were, undeniably, robbers or, as they used to say in the borderlands, ‘reivers’.

  Thanks to an annual migration, otherwise known as a summer holiday, I saw a great deal of Scotland. A day after crossing the border, the Ford Anglia would still be heading north, which proved that my mother was right to suspect the television weather map of foreshortening Scotland. In spite of her endless battle against English meteorological prejudice, it nearly always rained. Once, probably near Gretna Green, my father took a photograph of his son and daughter standing on the national frontier. At that moment, I discovered the demystificatory magic of borders. One of my legs was English and the other Scottish, but the vegetation was the same and the rain fell equally on both sides.

  Much later, in France, I sometimes made a point of claiming to be Scottish. In Paris, at the age of eighteen, I became friends with an Algerian Highlander, and we decided that one of the reasons we liked each other was that we had a common heritage of heroic resistance, even if mine was purely ancestral. Later still, in la France profonde, Scottishness – combined with arriving on a bicycle – practically guaranteed a warm welcome. To the inevitable question, ‘Vous êtes anglais?’, I used to reply, ‘Non, britannique, et ma femme est américaine,’ or, after learning of Samuel Beckett’s answer to the same question, ‘Au contraire.’

  On one occasion, in a remote and unheated hostelry in the Aveyron, the question was asked by the proprietress in a faintly sinister tone. As usual, I declared my Scottish ancestry. ‘Ah! Écossais!’ she said – relieved that I was neither English, Dutch nor Parisian – and called to her husband: ‘Monsieur est écossais!’ Flushed with excitement, she went on, ‘We didn’t realize till a few days ago that the English did to you what the Parisians did to us!’ I must have looked mystified since she explained, ‘Oui! Nous avons vu le film, Braveheart!’ Mel Gibson’s biopic of William Wallace, who trounced the English in 1297 before terrorizing and laying waste to Cumbria and Northumberland, must be one of the most brazenly inaccurate and tendentiously nationalistic films of the last fifty years. I heard a voice from within, speaking in a distinct Scottish accent, ‘Serves ye right fer tryin’ tae cash in oan yir ancestors!’

  *

  Following the left-right-right-left itinerary of National Cycle Network Route 7, we cycled out of Carlisle through an urban planner’s labyrinth of cul-de-sacs and driveways. At a roundabout on the outer edge of Carlisle, north-bound touring cyclists can often be seen trying to solve what seems to be the Cycle Network’s challenge: reach Scotland without ever heading north. As the Solway Plain opened up on all sides, human habitation disappeared and, still on this major artery of the national network, we found ourselves on the narrowest cycle path I have ever seen. It runs on the old track bed of the Waverley Line and is not much wider than the wobble of a wheel. Tall weeds lashed the panniers and rabbits sprang from the brambles. It is easy to picture carts and chariots rattling along the former Roman road a few yards to the east, but it takes a strenuous effort of the imagination to visualize a heavy locomotive pulling a passenger train at fifty miles an hour between the rabbity hedges.

  On the main street of Longtown, a local minibus was taking children to school. The name of the place was painted on the side of the bus in two languages: ‘Longtown’ and ‘Langtoon’ – the latter being indistinguishably Cumbrian or Scots. Near the end of the long row of low white houses, before the bridge which carries the A7 over the Esk, two thinly dressed men were sunning themselve
s on the pavement in front of a hardware store: perhaps the chilliness of the morning existed only in the minds of outsiders.

  After Longtown, the road climbed gradually until the few arable fields gave way to rough pasture. Hardly a car went by. In the middle distance, there were small farmhouses on hilltops surrounded by enormous barns and cattle sheds like the outbuildings of castle keeps, as though, at night, the farmer withdrew into his fastness, leaving the fields to owls and interlopers. In the Solway Plain, the land had been vague and indecisive. Now, it proclaimed its ancient identities. Just before the summit of the road, where the pasture turned into moorland bog, the view encompassed four hill ranges: the mountains of the Lake District behind, the last buttresses of the North Pennines on the right, the hills of Langholm and Eskdale to the left, and, up ahead, Liddesdale stretching away towards the Cheviots, where the border follows the watershed line.

  On a parallel road to the east, a line of white cottages might have been the outpost of a straggling suburb, but there was no settlement beyond. We dropped down into a wood-darkened valley where the road became a track and then wandered off into a field of cows. At a distance of a mile, when the trees are bare, a corner of the house and a chimney can sometimes be glimpsed from a particular spot, but even then, the bewildering topography makes it almost impossible to locate. In 2005, the house had nearly burned to the ground while fire engines from Longtown and Langholm roamed the lanes, searching for a means of access.

  At the Bodleian Library, I had discovered a book, published in 1946, in which the wife of a Methodist minister whose nom de plume was ‘Romany’ recounted their first journey out to the border from Carlisle. ‘Romany’ was an early natural history broadcaster on the BBC. He and his wife had known the house by the river around the time of the First World War when the tenant, Elizabeth Mitchell, sublet two of her rooms to anglers. They had arrived by train on the Waverley Line and set off in search of their lodging:

  Down a steep bank we slid, across a trickle of a stream and up the other side we clambered, until finally we caught sight of a lonely, whitewashed house, almost surrounded by the river. I suppose at one time there must have been some sort of a road down to it, or the house could not have been built, but I never saw any signs of one.

  No trace remained of the path through the woods. Instead, a thin track cut into the steep hillside ran alongside a crashing burn. Some branches of the leaning trees had been smashed by the removal van, which we expected to see, at each bend of the track, wedged into the narrowing tunnel of vegetation.

  Five months before, on our prospective visit, everything had seemed cosier and less expansive, and the warmth of the owners had dispelled the intimidation. The babbling brook was now a torrent. Almost at once, it plunged into a ravine, leaving the track suspended high above. In its rush to reach the river, it tumbled over crags and rockfalls, some of which had trapped large pieces of rubbish – an old coat bleached by the torrent and, curiously immobile, an object resembling a large plastic football. We reached a part of the bank where the hazel and willow had been toppled by a landslip to reveal the chasm below. Looking down, I realized that the coat was a fleece and the football a distended bladder. The ‘rubbish’ consisted entirely of dead sheep – the farther downstream, the greater the decomposition, until what had once been a fleece was no larger than a facecloth. They looked like a grisly guard of honour which had died waiting for the new owners to arrive.

  The track turned sharply to the right. A sloping, overgrown garden fleetingly reminiscent of an untended Fellows’ garden in an Oxford college appeared on the edge of a large meadow. Given its complete invisibility from any other point in the landscape, the existence of the meadow seemed almost miraculous – as did the presence of the removal van in front of the house. But the overwhelming impression was the noise of the river, amplified by an amphitheatre of hanging woodland. An endless downpour of sound filled the whole space. These were the cataracts of the river Liddel, whose name means ‘loud dale’, and in that world of natural destruction, the birds sang as loudly as they sing in the middle of a city, to be heard above the roar of the traffic.

  *

  As we cycled up to the house, one of the removal men was returning from the riverbank with crayfish in a jar and some lugubrious news: ‘There’s a dead swan in your river!’ He pointed to the opposite bank and we saw a large puff-ball the colour of yellowing meringue. It was rotating slowly in a deep pool formed by fallen boulders. The ‘swan’, I later discovered, was the froth created by a chemical reaction of the peat which the Liddel washes out of the deep bogs or ‘mosses’ near its source.

  Twenty-five miles to the north-east – five miles less as the crow flies – beyond the northern edge of the Kielder Forest, which is the largest wooded area in England, the Liddel rises among the wild fells of the border. Because of its meandering course, it can be hard to tell which country is which. From where we stood in England, Scotland lay to the south. On the borderline itself, halfway across the river, there were little islands each with its own micro-habitat of stunted trees and grasses thrashed by the flood.

  While the removal men drank their tea, we joked about smuggling cheap whisky from a future independent Scotland. But I knew that the woods and reedy pastures on the opposite bank had once belonged to neither nation. The Debatable Land was doubly foreign – Scottish now and something quite different in the past. The land across the river looked entirely peaceful. It would serve, I thought, as the undistracting backdrop of a writer’s study.

  Unwilling to witness the process by which thousands of books slotted into boxes and unloaded in another place liberate themselves from the tyranny of the alphabet, I watched the river’s dazzling performance. It danced around the rocks, frothing and cascading happily at the obstacles, sometimes flowing against itself, as if each of its tributaries had retained its own characteristics in the common stream. Something concealed by the overhanging branches moved across the vertical cliff on the Scottish side: it might have been a badger or a fox. Downstream, near a shingle bar, a heron stood watching the water. That evening, after the removal men had driven off, snapping the threads which tied us to Oxford, I walked down some stone steps to a grassy riverside platform barely four feet wide. From beneath the bank, an otter padded up and we stared at each other for a quarter of a minute. It seemed to conduct an assessment of the new inhabitant, saw no danger or nothing of interest, and slithered nonchalantly away.

  In the mausoleum-like entrance hall which had been created by an earlier occupant, there was not just a dead swan but a whole mortuary-menagerie of hunted fish, fowl and fur carved out of limestone. The sculpted walls of the mausoleum captured the voice of the river and sent it swirling round the elliptical space. That night, in the bedroom above the hall, I listened to the river’s incessant whisper. It seemed to have risen and was singing now in a higher key, accompanied by an occasional rumble and thud.

  Four hundred years ago, at the downstream bend, two horsemen employed by the English government reached the end of their nightly watch. When the river was low, the flat slabs known as tombstone limestone served as a ford. Their task was to intercept the cattle-rustling reivers who maintained the entire border region in a perpetual state of anarchy. The reivers drove their stolen herds out of the Debatable Land to stark stone towers which were like the miniature castles of tiny principalities. The upstream watch was kept by four horsemen because, from that point on, there were, and still are, even fewer farms and settlements. All along that quiet stretch of the Liddel, the wild reivers of the borderlands had passed from one country to the next as freely as the otter.

  3

  Panic Button

  The first knock at the door came at half-past ten the next morning. A postman stood there holding a letter. Oddly, there was no sign of a post van. Handing me the letter, he nodded in the direction of the gate and said, with a smile, ‘Looks like yer’ve got a chainsaw job up there . . .’

  We walked the three hundred yards up
to the gate. A giant birch tree had fallen from the muddy slope and neatly barricaded the lonning.1 ‘Welcome to North Cumbria!’ said the postman before climbing into his van and disappearing in reverse. It was only as I set to work on the knobbly trunk with a bow saw that I was struck by the obvious fact: since the only other means of access was the river, with its powerful currents and slippery stones, we could quite easily be cut off from the outside world, or at least from any assistance requiring a motorized vehicle.

  In the months that followed, I came to recognize the site as a typical reiver’s lair. It had long views in two directions along the valley and yet was practically invisible. It stood on the brink of a geological fault monopolized by a violent river, and it could be rendered unapproachable with little more labour than it would take to raise a drawbridge.

  Twenty years before, army frogmen had stood in the river, watching the house. The Prime Minister was paying a secret visit to one of her closest friends, who had recently completed the limestone carvings for his new entrance hall. Nicholas Ridley, who is remembered with affection in the area by people who met him, was at that time one of the most unpopular politicians in Britain. He had helped to introduce the inequitable poll tax, which was first ‘tried out’ in Scotland in 1989, three years after he had purchased the whitewashed house by the Liddel as a rural retreat.