The Debatable Land

by Graham Robb

  . . . a set of wild men, who, from the time when the Romans left our island, till the death of Queen Elizabeth, kept the southern part of Scotland and the northern part of England in a perpetual civil war, and seem to have equalled the Caffres in the trade of stealing, and the Hottentots in ignorance and brutality.

  The term ‘Debatable Land’ or ‘Debatable Lands’ referred, both in the film and in the written sources, to the blackest, goriest region of the Borders. For five hundred years, the Debatable Land had been universally perceived as a festering vestige of ancient barbarism in the heart of Great Britain: ‘ane spelunc and hurd of thewis’6 (1537); ‘the sink and receptacle of proscribed wretches’ (1787); ‘a land of contention, rapine, bloodshed, and wretchedness . . . uncultivated and desolate’ (1794); a ‘degraded piece of land’ and ‘scene of butchery’ (1802); ‘the sewer of abandoned men’ (1912); ‘a monument to the intractable character of the natives’ (1975).

  *

  Outside, on the icy streets of Carlisle, the descendants of the Armstrongs, Elliots, Grahams and Nixons were going about their everyday business. None of them was dripping blood or screaming murder. Considering the savage weather and the boarded-up shops, they seemed remarkably high-spirited. In Oxford and London, shoppers would now be staggering under the weight of presents; here, they were relatively unburdened and it was hard to tell that Christmas was approaching.

  In Oxford or London, a pedestrian was primarily a person who might get in the way. Civilized public behaviour consisted of not making eye contact, except to initiate evasive action on a crowded pavement. In Carlisle, groups of people stood around exchanging news and, despite an apparent lack of warm clothing, complaining cheerfully about the cold. Several men were wearing T-shirts. Young and not-so-young women sported bronze or ‘summerglow’ tans. In the south, the high minimum walking speed ensured the general unpopularity of babies, small children and anyone slowed by age or disability: the street was not a place for families. Here, it was common to see four generations of the same family embarked on a leisurely shopping expedition. When someone shouted, it was to hail an acquaintance, sometimes at quite a distance, as though across a field on a windy day. Shop assistants working in dreary jobs smiled at their customers and seemed to be unaware that they were living in a depressed northern city.

  The typical Cumbrian was defined by the novelist George MacDonald Fraser, a native of Carlisle, as ‘suspicious and taciturn’. This might have described a typical traveller on the London Underground, but most of the Cumbrians I met in the early days, as well as later, tended to be voluble and confiding, though they might well have been taciturn and suspicious towards a man who expected to find them so.

  The readiness of locals to talk to strangers can be disconcerting to visitors from the south. Having an hour to spare before the bus left from Devonshire Street, I walked over towards the railway bridge where Victorian buildings frame the mountain panorama to the south. A shabbily dressed man sidled up to me and asked, in a low voice, ‘Are yer lookin’ fer steam?’ Out of habit, I assumed him to be either insane or engaged in criminal activity. Perhaps ‘steam’ was the local name for a street drug. ‘Steam sometimes comes through here,’ he explained, and I realized to my shame that he was trying to alert me to the fact that the Romantic Victorian panorama was sometimes complemented by the billowing plumes of the Flying Scotsman running a special cross-border service.

  There was only one obvious connection between these modern Cumbrians and the ‘wild men’ depicted in the museum: the noticeable homogeneity of the population. It was not hard to imagine them as members of a small number of clans. The telephone directory for Carlisle and North Cumbria shows that the surnames of only fourteen reiving families account for one-sixth of the population. In and around the Debatable Land, the ratio is even higher. Certain types of face and physique were already becoming familiar. I had found George MacDonald Fraser’s comments on the borderers’ ‘racial composition’ better suited to the Victorian settings of his Flashman novels than to the study of medieval history, but, remembering his evocation of the American presidential inauguration of 1969, when three ‘Border types’ lined up on a podium in Washington DC, I had begun to notice Billy Grahams, Lyndon Johnsons and Richard Nixons sitting on benches, sweeping the streets and smoking outside pubs.

  *

  The 127 bus lurched down Lowther Street and swerved onto the Eden Bridge. Momentarily mounting the kerb to overtake a slow car, the driver headed for the black Border fells like a reiver making off with stolen sheep. As I looked through my notes on the reiver exhibition, one question kept recurring: if the ‘Debatable Lands’ were such a hell on earth, why did anyone live there?

  Livestock trucks – locally called ‘wagons’ – thundered past in the darkness. As the Cumbrian removal man had told me, the area has a long tradition of haulage. Several firms were founded by descendants of reivers – Armstrongs, Grahams and Robsons – who carted goods and animals over long distances. Even in the Middle Ages, this was a highly mobile society. Yet generation after generation of border farmers and their wives chose to live in a war zone, knowing that, every year, once the harvest was in, their houses would be burned to the ground and their animals driven off. The same question occurred to the English military commander, Sir Robert Bowes, who surveyed the Anglo-Scottish border in 1550. The land was largely ‘waste’ and unproductive, yet ‘the people of that countrey (specially the men) be lothe to departe forth of the same but had rather live poorely theire as theaves than more wealthyly in another countrey’.

  Forty minutes after leaving Carlisle, but well ahead of schedule, the 127 bus slewed to a halt halfway down a steep hill in the middle of nowhere. Clinging to the thin beam of the torch, I set off for home and the frozen river.

  6

  Mouldywarp

  The question posed by the reiver display was one that we were often asked in the first months of living on the border. A young man whose family would be considered neighbours though they live four miles away came up to Margaret while she was parking her bicycle outside a village hall. ‘Are you the American lady?’ he asked. She confirmed his identification, adding that she came from Chicago via Nashville, Tennessee. ‘So if you wanted to,’ he suggested, ‘you could live anywhere you liked in America? You could live in New York!’ ‘Yes, I suppose I could,’ she agreed. His face creased up with incredulity: ‘Then why did you decide to live here?’

  Later, the question changed. Instead of, ‘Why did you come up here?’, it was, ‘You’re still here, then?’ To people born locally, the decision seemed bizarre because of the scarcity of sun and what they saw as the inconvenience of not owning a car. But they understood a love of the country, and the thought of riding a bicycle in the rain was not as amazing to sheep-farming folk as it had been to some of our friends in the south.

  The same question was asked by quite a different group of people with something more sinister in mind. To many southerners, ‘Cumbria’ means the Lake District – that miniature Scotland-without-Scottish-people, associated with Romantic poetry, happy holidays and relatively inexpensive retirement homes. Liddesdale, which straddles the border, is a long way from the tourist-thronged Lakes and there is no community of wealthy English ‘ex-pats’.

  Friends of friends from southern England warned us about the world we had entered. Those fortress-like farmhouses were the lairs of unreformed reivers. One farmer was said to have ‘accidentally’ and repeatedly severed the electricity cable connected to the house of his new neighbours. Another Liddesdale miscreant had sprayed the outside of his neighbour’s house with slurry. The nearest inn, which could pass for a lonely smugglers’ tavern, was said to be reasonably safe, but only ‘until nine o’clock’.

  This was the Cumbrian ‘breed’ I had read about in books and magazine articles, some of which were written by people who claimed to be, however distantly, Cumbrian. There was certainly evidence of feuds and clannish loyalties, grudges spanning generations, and a good deal
of mischievous gossip. I have lost count of the number of local people reported to have been found drunk in a ditch. Far more complicated webs of enmity are spun through the suburbs of a city. Here, the effect of gossip is less pernicious. Stand on a deserted road away from any dwelling, and there is a good chance that, within half an hour, a small group of people will form. News of illness or accident spreads with astonishing speed. That winter, Margaret fell off her bike on a patch of black ice. She picked herself up and pedalled home unhurt. No house has a view of that stretch of road and no one was about. Over the next three weeks, a dozen different people asked if she was all right and still cycling. The news had spread as far as Longtown, nine miles to the south.

  Was this an example of the rural telegraph which made the march wardens’ work so difficult? Catching a reiver unawares was practically impossible. The sophisticated noblemen who served the state were accustomed to ciphered letters and cleverly concealed post bags. Confused by their enemy, they watched tinkers and horse-dealers cross the border passes and thought of ‘spies and lookers into the privity [secrets] of the country’. They heard the cry of a barn owl or a curlew, spotted marks cut in a smooth patch of turf or in the bark of a tree, saw fires blazing on the tops of pele towers and suspected the existence of a complex communications network. The bedsheets spread on hedges and hillsides by the housewives of Liddesdale, ‘washed wi’ the fairy-well water, and bleached on the bonnie white gowans [daisies]’,7 were believed to be signals to alert the entire valley to a government raid.

  Such subtle devices might have been used but they were not strictly necessary. Where nothing much happens, news travels fast. As one of the English wardens noted in alarm at the shrinking of distances, ‘rumours are swift messengers’. These days, postmen spend the morning driving up and down dead-end lanes, increasingly laden with news as the postbag grows lighter. School buses collect children from remote, deserted crossroads; shepherds lean on walls and gates, scanning large areas of hillside. Within twelve hours of a violent storm, some people are able to provide a comprehensive damage report covering about eighty square miles.

  The effect is magnified by the web of family relations, but the main factor is physical geography and local government. The Cumbrian ‘breed’ is a product of environment, not genetics. Many of the people I thought of as Cumbrian turned out to come from elsewhere. I happen to know that the two local women mentioned in a recent book about the border line, who seemed to exemplify that Cumbrian taciturnity, moved to Cumbria from counties far to the south. The most notorious reivers, who might have sprung from the bogs and bentgrass of the Borders, had migrated from other parts. The Grahams probably originated in Fife and most of their ‘English’ tenants were Scots; no one knows for certain the origins of the Armstrongs, who arrived in the Debatable Land in the early sixteenth century.

  The independent spirit of borderers, which ‘offcomers’ can mistake for effrontery, is inseparable from remoteness and the lack of services. The nearest police and fire stations are more than eight miles distant, but the police station is unstaffed and when the fire trucks arrived recently in Nicholforest to put out a fire large enough to be seen from a village several miles away in Scotland, no working fire hydrant could be found and the water had to be drawn from a stream swiftly dammed with hay bales and sucked up from a fish pond two miles down the road. ‘You could see Rodney’s fish flying into the flames,’ said the man whose property had been destroyed.

  Southerners tend to view the native population in terms of social class, which usually entails a moral judgement. Borderers are more likely to consider people from the point of view of their social function. This can be as confusing to outsiders as the activities of the reivers were to government officials. The need to adapt to difficult conditions, the relative freedom from class constraints and a potent dislike of pomposity can make even the most candid of Cumbrians seem shifty and elusive. A gamekeeper in the wild looks very different from the same man dressed to guide a visiting party of pheasant-shooters, just as a reiver strolling through Carlisle on market day might have been hard to identify as the man who, the night before, had been setting fire to a warden’s house.

  *

  One of the locally famous ‘characters’ of Liddesdale – a man well loved by his neighbours and respected for his professionalism – might have appeared to be an enigmatic, disconcerting specimen of the human fauna of the Borders. Sometimes, he could be seen crawling over a field. At other times, dressed in a dapper moleskin waistcoat and an elegant hat, he would be pushing a bicycle along a street in Newcastleton. I first met him that winter when returning from Carlisle. The 127 bus slowed unexpectedly and stopped at one of the invisible bus stops in open country. A stocky, elderly man clambered aboard, weighed down by his muddy tweeds and a misshapen sack. ‘Only one caught,’ I heard him say to the driver. He tottered down the aisle, the bus remaining motionless until he reached his seat, then sat in front of me, facing away from the driver, and went on, as though the change of interlocutor were immaterial, ‘But only two traps set.’

  Several months later, riding to Newcastleton over the edge of Carby Hill, we saw a hunched figure in a red bandana kneeling in a field near the top of the climb, high above the valley. He appeared to be conducting a small burial. Something resembling a giant clothes peg jutted out of the ground in front of him. I thought of a gypsy performing an obscure rite. As we drew closer, I recognized him as the man from the bus. By then, I knew him to be Wattie Blakey, the master mole-catcher with more than seventy years’ experience of ridding farmers’ fields of the inexorable ‘mouldywarp’ or ‘mowdy’ which damages ploughs, breaks horses’ legs, spoils the silage and spreads disease to sheep.

  Mr Blakey grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne but was evacuated to Cumbria during the Second World War. He does not drive a car. The bus service is inadequate and yet he manages to serve an area stretching from Longtown to the edge of the Kielder Forest. The fruits and proof of his labour can be seen, hooked by the snout onto barbed-wire fences, like sacrifices to a local god.

  We stopped to say hello. Noticing our bikes, he pointed to the junction at the brow of the hill where the road drops down to Newcastleton. ‘I had a bike stolen from there,’ he growled. We expressed our sympathy at this alarming news. Was nowhere safe? . . . He explained that the driver of a recycling truck, spotting a discarded heap of old metal, had heaved it into his truck and carted it off to the dump. This is how we learned about the mole-catcher’s solution to the lack of public transport. Over the years, he had acquired seven old bicycles, which he left in various locations along the sparse bus lines. This greatly expanded his field of operations. He had, in effect, invented his own bike-share scheme long before the idea came into use in cities all over the world.

  7

  Beachcombing

  Just before dawn one morning, a deep shuddering came from outside the house. I rushed out into the dark, half-expecting to see a mechanical digger at work. The river was coming back to life. Within minutes of the first tremor, gigantic slabs of ice were see-sawing downstream, buffeting and mounting one another like stampeding animals. Gaining speed, they scoured the banks, felled trees and smashed some steps which had led down to the river. Hundreds of them stacked up on the inside bend, dwarfing the willow and the alder and creating the perfect illusion of a polar sea.

  Since the big freeze, only moles had been able to pierce the ground. Their hills had frozen instantly into heavy, crumbless cakes of black earth. A few days after the thaw, when the banks were still littered with ice, it became possible to dig the soil, and for the first time, I had a sense of the remoteness of which concerned friends in the south had spoken. But they had been referring to remoteness from mobile-phone masts, railway stations and restaurants. This was remoteness in four dimensions.

  Oxford had been thick with history. A hole dug almost anywhere in the garden would turn up artefacts from several periods of human settlement. The evidence of continuity in the earth conveyed a sen
se of unshakeable comfort, of occupying a place designed and prepared for human beings. In Liddesdale, any remnants of ancient or modern civilization had been carried off by the tide of boulder clay. No burnt flints or Roman roof tiles were filed away in the soil’s archive, only unworked stones transported by glaciers.

  When the river began to perform its cycle of changes, I discovered its power of revelation. Unlike the concrete-jacketed rivers which flood Carlisle, the Liddel is exactly where it wants to be. As a result, it has made a pact with human beings. Invasions are punished with destruction, but in exchange for being left alone, the river brings treasures which can simply be gleaned without the need for excavation.

  In the middle of the night, after several days of rain, a cavernous rumbling would begin, punctuated by a thudding reminiscent of a demolition site. I looked out at sunrise one day to see a brown arm of open sea churning past the house six feet above the usual level of the river. There were crashing waves and a nasty-looking undertow where the river seemed to be swallowing itself. A fallen tree, stripped of its twigs, stood up as the base of its trunk caught against a boulder. A wooden bench weighted with stones was waltzing up towards the house. The shingle beach had disappeared.

  When the flood had subsided, the beach was reconfigured, spread out into a thin strand with a curving headland but with an extra foot of material on top, neatly sorted, as though by a builder’s merchant, into fine sand, coarse sand, grit, gravel, pebbles, stones and boulders. A two-foot-wide embankment of thatch, ripped from the river banks, stretched away into the alder carr and marked the high point of the flood. Rocks which had teetered along the skittering gravel sat in midstream like small islands where nothing had been before.