by Graham Robb
The fortress has tales to match its demeanour. It once belonged to the Douglas family. In 1342, Sir William Douglas (a.k.a. the Black Knight of Liddesdale) endungeoned his former friend and brother-in-arms, Sir Alexander Ramsay, and left him to die. Immediately above the dungeon was the granary from which, now and then, a grain would drop through a crack in the floor, enabling the prisoner to prolong his miserable life for another few days.
A short distance west of the Hermitage, at Braidlie Farm, a track leads off towards the Queen’s Mire. It stumbles over the stony braes of a narrow glen to a ruined farmhouse, where, needlessly, we hid the bicycles. From there, it heads coaxingly up the hillside in the direction from which the Queen arrived, before disappearing into a sea of tussocks on a bed of black, peaty mud.
Only the drystone sheepfolds broke the monotony of the moor. For every foot gained in altitude, there were several feet to climb – onto and down from each tussock. On the skyline, the cols of Windy Swire and Moss Patrick Swire were as clear as beacons, but the process of negotiating the mire was so engrossing that, whenever we stopped to look up, the twin cols seemed to have shifted their position. The sun was sinking and it began to look as though we would have to turn back if we were to reach home before dark, when suddenly we found ourselves on a firm and grassy surface running like the wake of a ship through the mire.
The track had been invisible from a distance, and although we lost all trace of it for about fifty yards, we picked it up again closer to the top of the ridge. Certain types of boulder clay, compacted by rollers or, in this case, by hooves, become solid enough to form a road embankment or even an airstrip – unless the clay dries out completely, which is unlikely to have happened on the Queen’s Mire. This must have been the old way over the hills to Teviotdale and the towns of Hawick and Jedburgh.
There was only one obvious discrepancy with the tale of Queen Mary’s journey: for miles around, not a single molehill was to be seen. The flint-packed soil was no more than ankle deep and, where subsidence had exposed a cross-section, quite wormless. Even assuming that a watch case might have been excavated by an animal which rarely turns up anything larger than a walnut, what would a mole have been doing fifteen hundred feet above sea level on a tussocky morass when its relatives were hard at work in lower Liddesdale, clearing out their tunnels to the despair of Mr Blakey’s clients?
Some months later, in the Mary Queen of Scots House museum in Jedburgh, where furry toy moles peep out from every corner, I learned that, apart from the watch, the Queen or one of her maids had also dropped an enamelled thimble case on the mire. The same display cabinet contained a stirrup of iron and leather ‘found on the route taken by Mary to Hermitage Castle and attributed to the royal party’. Other relics of the same journey were preserved in private collections: a silver spur, several bronze spurs and a gold signet ring. Over the ridge at Priesthaugh, a hoard of gold coins was unearthed, six of which bore the image of the Queen. They came into the possession of a Mr Elliot in 1795 and were ‘supposed to have been deposited by some of the attendants of Queen Mary, when she visited Bothwell at Hermitage Castle’. I found no relics to add to this impressive total, but I did notice several half-buried fragments of old sheep trough. On that stony avenue, it clearly took a long time for objects to disappear.
Perhaps Liddesdale had not been such a backwater after all. Unless the Queen’s attendants were extraordinarily bad at packing, the route over the reputedly impassable mire must have been extremely well travelled. Walter Scott himself observed that this ‘pass of danger [exhibited], in many places, the bones of the horses which have been entangled in it’. The route to the Hermitage had been a highway, which would explain how Mary and her party, with only twelve hours of autumn daylight, managed to cover fifty miles on horseback, leaving enough time for refreshments and a meeting with Bothwell at the Hermitage.
Having only occasionally sat on, rather than actually ridden, a horse, I had overestimated the difficulty of journeying through the medieval borderlands. I later met two horsewomen who regularly ride across the bogs and mosses of Liddesdale and the fells to the north of Hadrian’s Wall. One of them, a former lecturer in equine studies, finds the principal inconvenience to be the lowness of the gates, which, being designed for bog-trotting ponies, require most modern horse riders to dismount. The other woman, who sometimes drives the 127 bus, has often ridden her retired racehorse across the Bewcastle Waste and Walton Moss, where many a reiver escaped from a warden’s posse. The horse, which is devoted to its mistress, will happily traverse the boggy terrain, even if the black water comes up to its fetlocks. If allowed, it will find its own way through the mire.
This is the kind of horse riding that the Catholic Bishop of Ross, John Lesley, described in the authoritative account of Border life included in his Historie of Scotland (1578). Reivers fleeing from government troops would ‘entice their pursuers into some of the most intricate parts of the marshes’,
. . . which, though to appearance they are green meadows, and as solid as the ground, are nevertheless seen, upon a person’s entering upon them, to give way, and in a moment to swallow him up into the deep abyss. Not only do the robbers themselves pass over these gulfs with wonderful agility and lightness of foot, but even they accustom their horses to cross many places with their knees bent, and to get over where our footmen could scarcely dare to follow; and, chiefly on this account, they seldom shoe their horses.
*
The more I saw of the wilds where the reivers had lurked and plotted mischief, the more implausible the hellishness of the border badlands appeared. Indoors, in an urban setting, pictures of dark skies and rain can make the imagination quail. Even for a borderer, it goes against the grain to leave a warmish house and ride out into a rainstorm. But if the downpour comes gradually, introducing itself with sporadic drizzle before the incessant chatter of rain and hail, the mind and body can adjust to the inescapable companionship of the elements.
Adaptation is more a question of habit than equipment. In 2013, I witnessed the Scottish stage of the Tour of Britain. The peloton, coming from the direction of Newcastleton, was to pass along the southern edge of the Debatable Land above the Liddel. About fifteen local people had gathered at an exposed crossroads to see the riders whizz by. Many of the spectators were estate workers and sheep farmers. There was also a man in a wheelchair. A powerful gale was blowing up the valley, in precisely the wrong direction for the riders. The heavens opened and torrents began to rocket off the hillside. No one moved: they stood waiting patiently, all without umbrellas and some without hats. Twenty-five minutes later, it was still raining and there was still no sign of the riders. At last, the wretched peloton came into view down the road, moving more slowly than I have ever seen professional riders move. For once, it was possible to make out every grimacing face – the streaming stubble of Wiggins, the gleaming mask of Quintana. The sopping spectators waited for a few more moments then slowly dispersed, apparently quite happy to have seen the race pass through.
Even two centuries ago, this mental weather-proofing was an impressive sight to an outsider. The author of the ‘statistical account’, who found Liddesdale ‘an extremely wet district’, was shocked to meet a farmer riding over the hills from Teviotdale without a greatcoat on his back. ‘I ken very weel,’ the farmer explained, ‘though I were to tak twae, they wad be wat through, and it’s needless to burden baith mysel and the beast wi’ wat claith.’8
Changing perceptions of simple physical realities can have a significant distorting effect on the writing of history. Both Bishop Lesley in the late 1500s and Walter Scott in the late 1700s noticed this ‘odd prejudice . . . in favour of riding’. ‘Every farmer rides well,’ said Scott, ‘and rides the whole day.’ ‘The truth is undeniable; they like to be on horseback, and can be with difficulty convinced that any one chooses walking from other motives than those of convenience or necessity.’ According to Lesley, it was even considered ‘a great disgrace’ to go on foot. ‘If .
. . they be possessed of nimble horses, and have sufficient wherewith to ornament their own persons and those of their wives, they are by no means anxious about other pieces of household furniture.’
Scott’s claim to have been the first to enter Liddesdale in a wheeled vehicle evokes a world of barbaric inconvenience, but that incongruous contraption manufactured in a city was no more a sign of the region’s backwardness than the Ferrari which a prospective buyer of our house had apparently tried to drive down the lonning only to have it towed back to the tarmacked road by a very large and muddy tractor.
9
Harrowed
I had planned the trip to the Queen’s Mire out of simple curiosity, having no thought of writing a book about the region in which we happened to have found a home. One of its attractions was its emptiness, in time as well as space. Queen Mary’s expedition to the Hermitage seemed to be the only connection with the highways of British history. It was a reminder that the great events which would form the modern nation had all taken place elsewhere – the political and dynastic struggles, the English and Scottish Reformations, the first developments of an empire.
But in that emptiness lay an invitation or a challenge. Beyond a ridge that was no more distant than the horizon of a child’s world, I had seen an unsuspected realm within the borderlands. Beneath the bog, there had been a road which joined towns in the north to the valley which slopes down to the Irish Sea. The few texts I had read for the trip suggested that the historical irrelevance of border society was an illusion, just as the moorland had seemed devoid of life until a plover or a curlew shot up from its nest.
In the writings of Bishop Lesley and Walter Scott, I had the first inklings of a world with a history of its own. Though it was too exceptional in many ways to serve the purposes of general historians, it belonged to the history of Britain. It might even call into question the coherence and completeness of that history. The borderers had been considered important only in so far as they could be conscripted as footnotes into the national narrative. Serious misconceptions had resulted: the notion that a borderer must have been, at heart, either English or Scottish and that the Debatable Land was the unviable remnant of an otherwise extinct world. But it was the other great divide in British society – between Catholic and Protestant – which first opened a door into that world and showed how much persistence and luck it would take to recover it.
In apparent contradiction of the ghastly facts, Bishop Lesley had asserted in 1578 that a reiver never wilfully shed the blood of his opponents,
. . . for they have a persuasion that all property is common by the law of nature, and is therefore liable to be appropriated by them in their necessity, but that murder and other injuries are prohibited by the Divine law. . . . They think the art of plundering so very lawful, that they never say their prayers more fervently, or have more devout recurrence to the beads of their rosaries, than when they have made an expedition, as they frequently do, of forty or fifty miles, for the sake of booty.
The Roman Catholic bishop’s unexpected portrait of devout and principled reivers has often been dismissed as a deliberate lie. George MacDonald Fraser, understandably incensed by romantic portrayals of those homicidal ‘merry men’, found the bishop’s account suspect in the extreme and wondered whether Lesley himself had taken part in a raid . . . One of Lesley’s main sources was his friend, Mary Queen of Scots, whom Fraser considered equally suspect, both as a woman and as a Catholic: ‘In our time, she would probably have been a highly successful fashion model and jet setter’, but ‘her perception and handling of affairs was on a par with her taste in men, which was deplorable’.
The bishop’s error was one of interpretation rather than fact. Assuming that adherence to a moral precept must inevitably be religious, he misconstrued the reivers’ code of honour as an expression of Christian faith. Walter Scott’s informed opinion was that, if the borderers ‘remained attached to the Roman Catholic faith rather longer than the rest of Scotland’, this was probably the result of ‘total indifference upon the subject’. The reivers were neither Catholic nor Protestant nor even, in an orthodox sense, religious. For a reiver, the greatest disgrace was not excommunication but ostracism: if a man failed to keep his word, one of his gloves or a picture of his face was stuck on the end of a spear or a sword and paraded about at public meetings. This ‘bauchling’ was considered a punishment worse than death.
The Great Monition of Cursing (here), which was written to be recited from pulpits throughout the Borders, would have fallen on deaf ears if it fell on any ears at all. Reivers occasionally burned churches along with barns and cow sheds, while priests and curates, or people claiming to be such, took part in raids. The only sign that reivers attended religious ceremonies is an unconfirmed report that the right hand of a male child was held during baptism so that, untouched by holy water, it would be able to ‘deal the more deadly or “unhallowed” blows to its enemies’.
As everywhere else, there was a belief in fairies, witches and ghosts, and in the efficacy of magic wells and potions. There was either no concern about the fate of the soul after death, or no understanding of a minister’s purpose. One of the few men who tried to convert the heathen northerners, in the 1560s and 70s, might just as well have been a missionary in a foreign land:
[Bernard] Gilpin did preach at a church in Redesdale where there was neither minister, nor bell, nor book, but one old book which was set forth in King Edward’s time, and an old psalter torn to pieces, and he sent the clerk to give warning he would preach. In the meantime there came a man riding to the church style [the churchyard gate] having a dead child laid before him over his saddle crutch, and cried to Mr. Gilpin, not knowing him, ‘Come, parson, and do the cure’, and laid down the corpse and went his way.
The borderers’ beliefs seem on the whole to have tended to the practical. Several local people have told me that, in the days of the reivers, only the women were buried in consecrated ground. The existence of female-only graveyards is considered plausible because a man is always more likely to be seen tippling in a pub than kneeling in a church. This shows the unreliability of what is loosely termed ‘oral history’. Most local people have read at least one book on the reivers, and several books recount the traditional tale of a visitor to Bewcastle who, remarking on a curious (but unattested) dearth of men’s names on the gravestones, was told by an old woman, ‘Oh, Sir, they’re a’ buried at that weary Caerl’ – meaning that all the men had ended up on the gallows in that confounded (‘weary’) city of Carlisle.
*
A stone slab inside the entrance of the Armstrongs’ pele tower at Hollows (here), known as ‘the dead stone’, is said to cover the tomb of several Armstrongs, though the thresholds of other towers are believed to conceal the remains of enemies, placed there so that they would be trampled on every day. I despaired of finding any real evidence of this pagan practice until, one afternoon, I was cycling along a quiet back road near a boundary of the Debatable Land.
For some distance ahead, the entire width of the road was filled by a flock of sheep. The flock had divided itself into two contingents: the able-bodied had clip-clopped on ahead while the sick and the lame, some of whose relatives were already rotting in the hedgerow, hobbled along so slowly that the sheepdog was able to perform two functions at once, spraying every gatepost and returning in time to chivvy the invalids.
The owner of the sheep apologized for the delay. As we waited for the animals to progress, we talked about the weather and the landscape. He pointed to a farm in the middle distance:
‘That’s mine,’ he said.
It was the first time I had seen the place, though its name was familiar from a sixteenth-century map which shows it as the site of a stone house or a pele tower, and so I asked, ‘Wasn’t there a tower there once upon a time?’
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘there used to be a water tower in that field, but it wasn’t needed any more.’
‘Before that, I mean. Wasn’t th
ere a pele tower or something?’
His eyes lit up. ‘The reivers! Aye, there was – and it’s us that found it! We was puttin’ in a new door, but the wall was that thick you couldn’t drill through it . . . They had to be careful in them days, didn’t they? People comin’ to steal the sheep and a’ that.’
He paused, then continued in a conspiratorial tone, talking to a stranger on a bicycle who was probably a tourist passing through the region: ‘We found somethin’ else as well . . . ’
‘What was that?’
‘Bodies! All lined up one aside t’other.’
‘Human bodies?’
‘Aye, but not exactly bodies. Skellingtons, y’know, from back then. Naught but banes.’
A few years before, the ploughman had turned up a burial where no chapel had ever stood and stopped the tractor to show the farmer. He pointed out the place to me: ‘Up yonder, in front o’ the house.’
‘And is that known?’ I asked. ‘I mean, did you report it?’
He had the gleeful, slightly guilty expression of someone who has got the better of the authorities.
‘Well, y’know ’ow the police can be aboot such things . . . ’
‘Mm, yes,’ I lied. ‘So what did you do?’
He looked around at the empty fields as though a constable might be concealed in a ditch or watching from a bush, and then, with raised eyebrows and teeth bared in a grin, said, in a surprisingly loud voice, ‘I harrowed them under!’
