The Debatable Land

by Graham Robb

  After each flood, the shingle beach offered a fresh selection of archaeological evidence, culled from twenty miles of river. The artefacts had been smoothed, smashed and smoothed again. ‘Price 1/3 . . . PREPARED . . . LINCOLN &’ was all that remained of a pot of Clarke’s Miraculous Salve (c. 1910), probably from the same period as the broken neck of a blue ink bottle and a similarly softened shard of a Wilson’s Tonic Beer flask.

  As a general rule, the heavier the object, the longer its trip down river and thus through time. A wrought-iron bootscraper and a tie plate (used to attach a rail to a railway sleeper) belonged to the mid-nineteenth century, as did some pipe fencing of a variety I later discovered, falling apart but still in situ, upstream at Kershopefoot. This rule is not absolute. Some weighty objects are naturally well equipped for a river journey. A post-war tennis umpire’s chair, corroded but still usable, had cartwheeled downstream for nine miles to be followed a few decades later – but arriving at about the same time – by a tennis ball, a shuttlecock and a nylon sock embroidered with the word ‘Sport’.

  These items indicated human habitation to the north, though few pre-dated the twentieth century: brackets and hinges, corrugated asbestos roofing, a Bakelite vent and a piece of vinyl flooring, pathetically uncamouflaged by its shingle-beach print. A pink rubber hand-grip from a child’s bicycle still enclosed the rusty conglomerate of its handlebar. Agriculture was represented by the metal wing of a tractor, endless twisted ribbons of black plastic used for wrapping hay bales, an assortment of sheep bones and a small cow, bloated and flayed, which lingered for less than an hour before rolling on to the sea. A year later, another flood cast up a large yellow tag marked ‘109’ which, given its size, must have been clamped to a cow’s ear. The only sign of deliberate animal activity was the corpse of a salmon skilfully filleted by an otter. Human predators were represented by a gun cartridge and a waterproof pouch for freshly killed game.

  None of this river-borne rubbish is particularly noticeable, and the Liddel is probably as clean as it was three centuries ago, when the poet-physician Dr John Armstrong said of its ‘sacred flood’ in his inexplicably popular poem, The Art of Preserving Health (1744), ‘not a purer stream . . . rolls toward the western main’.

  May still thy hospitable swains be blest

  In rural innocence; thy mountains still

  Teem with the fleecy race; thy tuneful woods

  For ever flourish. . . .

  The rubbish described above must have been generated by a very small number of people, and it would not be surprising if a local reader of this book remembered learning to ride on the pink-handlebar bicycle or came to claim the umpire’s chair. The ‘swains’ and artisans of Liddesdale occasionally use the river as an industrial conveyor belt but they are not unusually prone to dropping litter. The largest settlement upstream is Newcastleton (home to eight hundred and fifty people), and the total population within jettisoning distance of the Liddel’s banks is certainly less than one thousand. If this equation of detritus and population density is reliable, the amount of garbage transported by the Tyne, the Trent or the Thames must be truly colossal.

  In one respect only, the Liddel is an archaeological treat. After three years of sporadic beachcombing, I had assembled a small museum of bricks which I embedded in river sand to form a pavement. Each brick was stamped with the name of the brickworks and sometimes its place of origin. They had come from all over northern England and southern Scotland. There were astoundingly heavy bricks from Accrington in Lancashire, marked ‘NORI’ (‘Iron, whichever way you put it’), noted for their use in the foundations of the Blackpool Tower and the Empire State Building. There were bricks from the Pentland Hills and the Cumbrian coast. Many of them had probably tumbled into the river when the Waverley Line was demolished after its closure in 1969.

  The oldest bricks, from the 1870s and 80s, were those produced in Corbridge on the Roman Wall and at the Buccleuch Terra Cotta works in Sanquhar. The name ‘Sanquhar’, imprinted on the bricks, comes from the Celtic ‘sean caer’, referring to the ‘old fort’ above the town. These were the only river-borne reminders of Roman or Celtic civilization. Everything older than the mid-nineteenth century had long since been atomized or ferried off to the Solway Firth, and perhaps those bricks and bottles will turn out to be the last pre-war items to make the journey this far down the Liddel. Eventually, all evidence of human life will have been evacuated from the catchment area, and only the scratched and rounded stones brought by ancient glaciers will remain.

  I relished that sense of emptiness, unaware that more substantial treasures would come to light in other ways. The historical coordinates of the place were plotting themselves on a mental map, and soon, that silent fourth dimension would seem more populous and busy than the present.

  *

  A few weeks after the melting of the ice, the roads were clear of snow and floodwater no longer filled the ditches. Winter seemed to have exhausted itself for the time being. Before it could recover or change its mind, we decided to set off towards the river’s source, up the valley of the Liddel and into the heartland of the reivers.

  Food was prepared and information collected: I had assembled various scraps on the history of Liddesdale, its inhabitants and early explorers. The idea was simply to provide mental sustenance on the journey, and perhaps to recreate a past discovery of that world within a world. I had learned about the expeditions of Mary Queen of Scots in 1566 and Walter Scott in the late eighteenth century: they seemed to be the only historical personages to have ventured into that valley with something other than destruction on their minds. Their itineraries would give the ride a goal; the rest would be left to chance and the weather.

  We checked the roadworthiness of the bikes and watched the changing sky. Ideally, we would have hired a pair of ponies, but the whispering and ticking of the chains on the sprockets suggested the precision of a time machine, and the light shower which fell from a gleaming sky as we left the house guaranteed a certain authenticity.

  PART TWO

  8

  Blind Roads

  In the late summer of 1792, a young lawyer from Edinburgh who was practising at the circuit court in Jedburgh entered Liddesdale from the north. A few days before, he had been exploring the ‘savagely romantic’ country to the east, gazing in wonderment at Latin inscriptions on stones built into walls and used as gateposts: ‘These have been all dug up from the neighbouring Roman wall, which is still in many places very entire, and gives a stupendous idea of the perseverance of its founders.’

  Walter Scott had then returned to Jedburgh, but since the weather was holding good and he had recently made the acquaintance of a reliable guide, he set off again, this time into the ‘wild and inaccessible district of Liddesdale, particularly with a view to examine the ruins of the famous castle of Hermitage’ – ‘that grim and remote fastness’ – ‘and to pick up some of the ancient riding ballads, said to be still preserved among the descendants of the moss-troopers’.

  There was not a single inn and only one permanent bridge in all of Liddesdale. A reluctant visitor who had been commissioned to write a ‘statistical account’ of the parish, noted that ‘for about 16 miles along the Liddal, the road lay rather in the river than upon its banks, the only path being in what is called the Watergate, and the unhappy traveller must cross it at least 24 times in that extent’. The alternative was to take to the bogs and mosses, and to scan that smiling landscape of sinkholes and quagmires for the ‘blind roads’. This peculiar variety of upland way was defined by Scott as

  a tract so slightly marked by the passengers’ footsteps, that it can but be traced by a slight shade of verdure from the darker heath around it, and, being only visible to the eye when at some distance, ceases to be distinguished while the foot is actually treading it.

  Few people came into Liddesdale from Carlisle and the south. Drovers and tinkers usually passed farther west, by way of Gretna. The northern route was reputed impassable, though,
by then, road-builders had started work. It was Walter Scott who, in a sense, declared the road open by appearing in Liddesdale in an open carriage. His little gig was the first wheeled vehicle ever seen in the valley, and ‘the people stared with no small wonder at a sight which many of them had never witnessed in their lives before’.

  Until Scott published the ballads he collected in the isolated farmsteads and placed that remote valley on the map of European Romanticism – from which it has long since disappeared – Liddesdale was still recognizable as the bastard realm of reivers to whom ‘England and Scotland is all one’ and who, as an English warden had noted, ‘fear no officers of either side’, being ‘so well provided with stolen horses, and the strengths they lie in so fortified with bog and wood’. The young lawyer found his sheep-farming and smuggling hosts warm and generous with their devilled ducks and whisky-punch. He gamely subjected himself to the ‘hideous and unearthly’ sounds of ‘riding music’ with which the natives of Liddesdale recounted the deeds of their dubious ancestors. According to Scott’s guide, he ‘suited himsel’ to everybody’; he ‘never made himsel’ the great man, or took ony airs in the company’.

  The twenty-one-year-old barrister from Edinburgh who had the motley horde of sheepdogs eating out of his hand was probably the first officer of the law ever to be made welcome in Liddesdale. His private descriptions of what had been, almost within living memory, ‘the bloodiest valley in Britain’ are written with the indomitable cheerfulness which served him as a suit of armour, but his novels and ballads express the fear that was felt by every visitor and which was only partly inspired by the inhabitants and their history.

  *

  In summer, along the upper reaches of the Liddel twinkling over the tree-shaded shingle of its gentle bends, the empty land can appear so green and fertile that it seems to have suffered some inexplicable depopulation. I first saw it through the windows of the X95 bus to Edinburgh. The X95 is the kind of bus normally found only in a city. It has no seat belts and, despite the length of the journey, no toilet. An illuminated panel indicates the next stop and the final destination with figures calibrated to an urban time scale: ‘Next stop: Albert Street. Terminating at Edinburgh bus station in 217 minutes.’ Once out in open country, it looks like a runaway bus and the printed banner above the windows sounds a sardonic warning: ‘X95 – Make Each Journey An Adventure.’

  That morning, thrown off course by a landslip, the X95 headed up the Liddel, following the line of the old railway towards the col of Whitrope Hass, known locally as ‘the Edge’. This had been, according to an 1883 article on ‘English Express Trains’, ‘undoubtedly the hardest of all the routes in the kingdom along which any train runs at express speed’. The driver hustled his unwieldy bus up the narrowing valley, twisting it over humpbacked bridges, until the hills seemed to crowd in with a menacing, beggarly appearance. The moors stretching away on either side still deserve the epithets used by William Camden in 1600: ‘leane, hungry, and a wast’.

  The next bus stop lay twenty miles to the north in the town of Hawick. We descended into a gloomy valley which, despite unfolding views of deserted heath, gave a curious sense of claustrophobia. ‘The Edge’ itself is the northern limit of Liddesdale. It stands on a watershed line, which, though both sides are in Scotland, forms a more substantial boundary than the political division of the two nations. I later heard a bus driver complaining about the traffic in Carlisle: ‘It’s better on the other side of the world’ – by which he meant, not the Antipodes, but the land which lies ‘ower the Edge’.

  The man at the wheel of the diverted X95 that day was a skilful and experienced driver, but he was visibly unsettled by the lack of progress and the bleakness of the hills, and when at last we re-entered the modern world, he tottered out of the cab with an ashen face, held out his arms to the colleague who was to take the bus on to Edinburgh, and said, ‘Look at this – ma hands’re shakin’! Twenty miles o’ single-track road!’

  *

  On the day we cycled up into Liddesdale, I was hoping in particular to find the route by which medieval travellers from the outside world had entered that ‘den of thieves’. The sparsely populated Liddesdale route had been used by invading armies from Scotland – Áedán of Dál Riata in 603, William Wallace in 1297 – but their exact itineraries are unknown, and this might have remained a ‘blind road’ of British history without the evidence of a journey undertaken into that dark dale during the blackest days of the reivers.

  The twenty-three-year-old Queen of Scotland rode out from Jedburgh early on the morning of 16 October 1566 with her maids in waiting and a detachment of soldiers. After presiding over the circuit court in Jedburgh, Mary Stuart had decided to obtain a firsthand report from her lieutenant on the border, the Earl of Bothwell, who, in Mary’s words, ‘[employed] his persoun to suppres the insolence of the rebellious subjectis inhabiting the cuntreis lying ewest [adjoining] the Marches of Ingland’. The Earl had been unable to travel, having suffered a near-fatal sword wound at the hands of a Liddesdale reiver called Little Jock Elliot. He was recovering in bed inside the charmless fortress of the Hermitage, which guarded the valley and which he had recently been forced to reconquer from a jeering gang of Elliots.

  It was a round trip of fifty miles, to be completed in a day: the Hermitage was no place for a young queen to spend the night. This was the height of the reiving season and Liddesdale was ‘the most offensive’ of all the border regions. Fortunately, quite a few Armstrongs and Elliots had just been massacred by Bothwell’s troops, and it was twelve days yet to the full moon, when reivers were at their most active.

  The Queen’s route can be pieced together from several accounts and a trail of clues on the Ordnance Survey map: Queen’s Mire, Lady’s Knowe, Lady’s Sike and Lady’s Well. These names are said to mark the stages of her journey, though another Queen’s Mire on an entirely different route through Eskdale suggests that the name is the Scots word ‘quean’, meaning ‘young woman’. More tangible evidence was provided by the archaeologist’s favourite animal: two and a half centuries after Mary’s epic ride, a shepherd spotted an incongruous object protruding from a molehill on the boggy moor of the Queen’s Mire above Hermitage Castle: a small, silk-lined case containing a sixteenth-century French pocket watch. In such an inaccessible place, it was assumed, this glinting token of civilization could only have fallen from the baggage of the Queen.

  *

  We cycled along the English side of the Liddel to cross the border at Kershopefoot. Below the road to the west, sheep grazed peacefully on the disused railway line. They covered the distant hillsides like giant daisies. A farmer and his dog came rushing towards us on a quad bike and squealed to a halt. ‘ ’Ave yer sin any sheep?’ he asked – meaning, of course, had we seen any sheep which were not where they should have been.

  There was no sign of any fleecy renegades and nothing to show that Liddesdale had ever been a war zone. Of the pele towers which once dotted the valley, only a few piles of rubble now remain. The handsome stone mansion of Stonegarthside Hall (pronounced ‘Stingerside’), a mile from Kershopefoot, is associated with the reivers, but it was built for the Forsters in 1682, and its large windows and conveniently crow-stepped gables would have left it entirely defenceless.

  The only intact monument from reiving days is a stone cross on the Scottish side of the Liddel. It stands on the outskirts of the village of Newcastleton. The Milnholm Cross is thought to commemorate an Armstrong laird who was foully murdered at Hermitage Castle in about 1320, but the monument which dominates the scene, higher up the hillside in the cemetery of the defunct parish of Ettleton, is an obelisk erected in 1852. Here, on the edge of what I assumed to have been a defiant bastion of Scottishness a few miles from England, was another clue to that cross-border community:

  IN

  AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE

  THIS MONUMENT

  IS ERECTED

  BY A NUMEROUS BODY

  OF FRIENDS

 
; ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BORDER

  The deeply etched letters tell the tale of William Armstrong, a popular local man known as ‘Sorbytrees’ from the name of his farm below Carby Hill across the valley. Returning late one evening from Brampton market in April 1851 with his friend, Mr Elliot, Sorbytrees, in a gay mood, had tapped at a window of the vicarage on the edge of Walton Moss near the Roman Wall, hoping to speak with an old servant of his family. The vicar, precisely identified on the monument as ‘the Revd Joseph Smith, incumbent of Walton, Cumberland’, possessing the valour of a mouse and a six-barrelled revolver recently purchased in Carlisle, took aim at the darkness and, ‘to the great grief of the neighbourhood’, shot William Sorbytrees ‘without challenge or warning’. The English judge acquitted ‘the reverend gentleman’ and scolded the deceased for frightening honest people ‘by making noises at untimely hours’. The case was widely reported, even – under the heading ‘ “Killing No Matter” in English Courts’ – in the New York Times, whose readers included a fair number of emigrant Armstrongs and Elliots.

  The flexed arm of the Armstrong family crest on the Milnholm Cross suggests the threatening gesture of a ruffian. The obelisk, too, is a giant finger raised in anger and defiance by friends ‘on both sides of the border’. The enemies of the Armstrongs and the Elliots were not men from a rival country: they were the unfeeling agents of a power seated in a distant city who owed their authority to nothing but paper and ink.

  Beyond the mile-long main street of Newcastleton, at the confluence of Liddel Water and Hermitage Water, the road turns off towards Jedburgh and then, growing ever narrower, along a hedge-lined vale, until a strangely hideous spectacle appears.

  *

  Walter Scott is sometimes accused of having exaggerated the horribleness of Hermitage Castle, presumably by people who have seen it only in photographs or driven to it on a sunny day and heard the hypocritical tinkle of its little burn. Under the usual glowering skies, with the torrent raging and the great bulge of bare moorland behind, its blank walls and the maw of its arch are the emotionless face of a torturer or an executioner. In that desolate spot, in the months when the castle is open to the public, a young woman sits in the shack which houses Historic Scotland’s ticket office like an Andromeda chained to a rock in the ocean.