by Graham Robb
At that point, we had crossed the Debatable Land only once, on a shopping expedition to the town of Langholm. On that eighteen-mile round trip, there had been so much climbing and descending that the food carried back in the paniers was barely enough to supply the calories expended. In two hours of cycling, we saw not a soul, only wooded ravines cut by the torrents of Archer Beck and Tarras Water, a half-felled pine forest which looked like a battlefield after the battle, a few farms on the edge of high moorland, the deep gorge of the Esk and a hamlet with a telephone box and the remains of a Roman camp. The terrain was so varied and the road so treacherously pot-holed that it left the impression of a journey ten times as long. Now that the spring was shyly venturing forth, it was time to explore the land across the river and to find out what remained of the last unconquered part of Great Britain.
*
At 6.30 a.m., the radio emitted the faint crackle of a switch being thrown. Then came silence, as though the Glasgow studios of Radio Scotland were being taken over by a band of rebels. This was the usual introduction to five minutes of local news from Dumfries and Galloway. On this northern edge of England, the Scottish forecast is often more pertinent than its Cumbrian equivalent and less likely to make a fuss about gale-force winds and torrential rain. ‘A fine day is in store, with only occasional showers, some of them heavy, and a strengthening wind towards evening.’
After news of protests at job losses and wind farms, the non-reopening of a long-abandoned railway station and the wide-scale disruption to traffic caused by a fallen tree in Ayrshire, came the cheery-sepulchral tones of the weather woman. She delivered the familiar litany in the clear, strong voice of a kindly nurse administering a painful remedy. At certain times of the year, the weather is so dependable that a listener can guess the forecast with a fair chance of being in perfect unison with the forecaster: ‘It will be a chilly start, with icy patches on untreated roads . . .’
A perusal of maps and guidebooks had suggested that two or three bike rides would be enough to cover the entire Debatable Land. In the event, even with icy patches, it took less than a day. The usefully signposted ‘Reiver Trail’ created by the Clan Armstrong Trust includes only four sites in the Debatable Land:
1. GILNOCKIE HALL. A metal-clad shed in near-total isolation, this village hall without a village boasts a large painting by a retired local art teacher which shows the reiver Johnnie Armstrong splashing across the Esk on a horse to reach his riverside tower (see no. 3).
2. ‘LANG SANDY’. In the long linear village of Rowanburn, the statue of a reiver stands on a raised flower-bed near the bus stop. ‘Lang Sandy’ was one of the nastiest and, as his name implies, tallest of the reiving Armstrongs. This giant chess-piece of a figure is a sandstone copy of the original sycamore log which was carved by members of the local Smith family. I have heard it said that it bears a striking resemblance to Mr Smith Sr.
3. HOLLOWS TOWER. Commonly but incorrectly named Gilnockie Tower, Hollows Tower (pronounced ‘Hollus’) rises behind a hedgerow on a section of the old A7 which used to carry the heavy traffic from Carlisle to Edinburgh. The pele tower of Johnnie Armstrong is one of the architectural gems of the Borders. The almost complete absence of windows other than gun loops shows that this is a genuine relic of reiving days. The roof-top walk, but not the parapet, has survived, and so has the beacon lantern. At the time of writing, a notice pinned to the oak door informs the public that guided visits have been curtailed ‘due to a bereavement’.
4. CANONBIE KIRKYARD. Above the Esk, an army of massive red gravestones – typical of the region – introduces the main surnames or clans: Elliots and Grahams are the best represented, followed by Armstrongs, Bells, Carruthers, Davisons, Dixons, Forsters, Jardines, Littles and Nichols. None of the departed were reivers. The oldest stones date only from the late eighteenth century. Many were removed by their owners. In the 1920s, a woman of the village was seen entering the churchyard accompanied by a carter. Asked her business, she explained ‘that the front door-step of her cottage having been worn down, to remedy the defect, she had come to take away her grannie’s tombstone’.
There is only one other obvious guidebook sight in the Debatable Land: a pele tower in an elbow of the Esk near the church of Kirkandrews. It was built by the Graham family, which explains its absence from the Reiver Trail devoted to the Grahams’ rivals, the Armstrongs. This is probably the older of the two towers: a map of 1552 shows it as a sturdy stronghold, while the site of Johnnie Armstrong’s tower is occupied only by a pair of crooked cottages. Purists can be sniffy about the later additions to Kirkandrews Tower, but many original features are preserved, including the remains of its barmkin. With the mansion of Netherby across the river and the Georgian church, it forms ‘a wonderful group’, as Pevsner’s guide to the buildings of Cumbria observes. ‘The Grahams’ private railway station’, mentioned in the 2010 revised edition of the guide, unfortunately closed more than half a century ago.
This initial reconnaissance of the Debatable Land produced the unsurprising information that there was very little to see. The pickings were bound to be poor in an area where no permanent settlement had been allowed and which had been regularly ravaged by the troops of two nations. Apart from the two pele towers, the main attraction is the village of Canonbie (population: 390). Canonbie grew up around a priory which was founded in about 1153, but it was probably never a part of the Debatable Land. In 1531, it was said to share a border with England but not with Scotland since it was ‘three parts surrounded by the Debatable ground’. It stood on a ‘holm’ or peninsula between the Liddel and the Esk and formed a separate, religious enclave, neither Scottish nor English nor even ‘debatable’.
The Debatable Land itself seemed at first to be an empty chapter in Border history, but now, without the distraction of notable ‘sites’, certain corners of the landscape began to insist on their own significance, and it was in this emptiness that the ancient territory came to life. Nothing suggested, however, that its exploration would take years rather than a single day.
*
We returned home that afternoon along the old turnpike road which runs parallel to Liddel Water but too far inland for the river to be visible. Looking over towards Scotland and the hills around Langholm on the Debatable Land’s northern edge, I happened to notice, at the far end of a narrow strip of neglected woodland, the grey gable of a small house. A few days later, I saw it again through the steamed-up windows of the 127 bus, but on the next journey, it seemed to have vanished, and even once I had seen it, I was never sure of its location. It was a strange place for a house in any case: there was no sign of any path that might have led to it, and the sky behind suggested that the land must drop steeply down to the Liddel.
A local man had pointed out the strip of trees to me as the charmingly named Skurrlywarble Wood. ‘Skurrlywarble’ is occasionally mentioned as a ‘funny’ name but it has never been explained. ‘Skurr’ is the Old Norse word for ‘shed’ or ‘shieling’; ‘warble’ comes from ‘Warb Law’ – sometimes ‘Warbla’, ‘Warblowe’ or ‘Wurble’ – meaning ‘look-out mountain’ or a hill from which a watch is kept. (A ‘watch’ was kept by night, a ‘ward’ by day.)
A month later, I squelched for nearly half a mile through the marshy wood, stumbling over its clogged-up drainage ditches, until I reached the gable end of what turned out to be a ruin. The sandstone cottage, according to the 1871 census, had been the home of a gamekeeper on the Netherby Estate. The old cast-iron fire surround was still in place and even the huge roof slates. In a more accessible location, they would long since have been removed or stolen. Among the rubble of the two tiny rooms was a trace of weaponry from the ancient war of humans and animals – a tub labelled ‘Mole Mines’ (mole-activated phosphorus bombs). But the real revelation was the view.
From that wind-blown edge, I saw a great stretch of the Liddel valley and the fields and fir plantations on the other side. There were the low white houses of Rowanburn and Canonbie, and be
yond them the Langholm hills, one of the highest of which, Warb Law, looks over to its namesake at Skurrlywarble. From that magnificent, unsuspected belvedere, it was easy to picture the Debatable Land as a country in its own right. Its entire northern half was encompassable at a glance, with its woods and grassland and all the natural resources of a nation in miniature. It was striking how clearly, at a range of several miles, the dots of sheep and cattle showed which pastures and hillsides were being grazed. As daylight waned, it would have been obvious if a crime of encroachment was being committed or if the land after sunset was still, as it had been for centuries, as quiet as a shrine.
13
Exploratores
After that first, unfruitful foray into the Debatable Land, I decided instead to trace its boundaries, since these are its incontrovertible historical treasure. They were so minutely recorded that they seem to rise from the darkness of Border history like gold leaf on a medieval parchment.
Until the mid-fifteenth century, knowledge of the boundaries was passed from generation to generation and no one seems to have felt the need to record them in writing. In 1517, the warden-general Thomas Dacre noted that there was complete agreement on both sides: the boundaries, which had ‘always’ been there, were disputed by no one and were ‘wele knowne by the subjects of bothe the realmes’. Within the Debatable Land, almost nothing seems to have been named in any legal document until the seventeenth century (here).
Surveys were conducted in 1494 and 1510, but the first surviving description of the boundaries dates from 1550, when Sir Robert Bowes published the results of a survey of the Anglo-Scottish border in A Book of the State of the Frontiers and Marches Betwixt England and Scotland. The surveyors had ridden the entire length of the border, along the ridge of the Cheviots, noting all the boundary stones and earthen dykes, the ‘rakes’ and other tracks, listening to tales of ancient times and recent disputes. Not to miss the opportunity, they ‘wasted and destroyed in our passage’ the crops which had been illegally ‘sown by the Scots within the ground of England’.
Following the watercourses down towards the Solway Firth, logging every crossing point of the border, they came at last to the Debatable Land, whose boundaries, though intricate and different in nature from those of the national border, were etched in local memory as though on a map. Sir Robert’s informants were well aware of the limits within which livestock could be pastured, which is probably why his report uses the older, more accurate term, ‘Batable Land’:
The said bounds and meares [marches or boundaries] begin at the foot of the White Seyrke where it runs into the Sea, and so up the Water of Seyrke until it comes to a place called Pyngilburnefoot which runs into the Seyrke, then up the Pyngilburne till it comes to Pyngilburne Know and from Pyngilknow to the Righeades, and from the Righeades to Monke Rilande Burn, and thence down Hurvenburne until it falls into the Eske. Then across the Eske to the foot of Terras and so up Terras to the foot of Reygill, and up the Reygill to the Tophous, and so to the Standinge Stone and to the Mearburne head, and down the Meareburne till it falls into Ledalle at the Rutterford, and down Ledalle till it falls into the Eske, and down the Eske till it falls into the Sea.14
The only doubtful section is the westernmost quarter of the northern boundary: ‘Righeades’ and ‘Monke Rilande Burn’ can no longer be identified for certain, but the gap is filled by two other documents. The magnificent 1552 map of the Debatable Land (here) shows the boundary crossing ‘Cocclay rigge’, now called Cockplay and distinguishable by a sheepfold and a small plantation. A delineation of the ‘Bateable grounds’ in 1597 describes this section as a ‘dry march’ – a boundary marked by something other than a watercourse. This must be the old straight highway from Annandale. The road is now a rubbly track below Cockplay ridge, but it is still raised above the moorland on its agger and oriented directly on the ‘Standinge Stone’ below Tinnis Hill.
These and other documents prove that the term ‘Debatable Land’ had a precise geographical sense. Today, the term is routinely misapplied to all of Liddesdale and the West Marches, and even to any area in which reivers were active. The misconception existed five hundred years ago. When King James VI marvelled that his ‘favourite cow’, after becoming separated from the royal party en route to London, made its own way back to Edinburgh via the Debatable Land without being stolen, he seems to have been thinking of the borderlands in general. Recently, the English parish of Kirkandrews on Esk appended the words ‘Debatable Land’ to its official signs, though the parish covers only one-third of the territory and the part which includes the village of Moat never belonged to the Debatable Land at all.
Tracing every inch of these boundaries exactly would have meant keeping to the middle of three rivers. As I knew from a battered and slightly hysterical party of would-be canoe instructors who were forced to abandon their canoes and leave by the lonning, this would have been, at best, a waste of time. Twice, when the river was low, I have seen people in the Liddel, usually in or beside a two-person kayak, bumping into hidden boulders or even trying to stagger along the river bed and slipping on the stones, so painfully engrossed in the business of staying upright and alive that the house and anyone standing on the riverbank were effectively invisible to them.
Fortunately, most of the Liddel, the Esk and the Sark can be followed at a short distance on a road or a path. The smaller streams can also be followed quite easily, except when they wander off into the bogs and mosses, where there is only a slight risk of being sucked from the light of day but a real danger of having to walk home in bare feet. Pieced together in this way, the whole journey is just under fifty miles. The Debatable Land itself might appear to be almost devoid of antiquarian interest, but its margins are wonderfully rich in historical events, both notorious and obscure, as though, for two thousand years, that empty space had acted as the black hole of border history.
* * *
The eastern edge of the Debatable Land is still an important boundary. The stream called Muir Burn or Mere Burn, whose name means ‘boundary’, flows into the Liddel at a place once known as Rutterford or ‘cattle crossing’. It can be reached by a private estate track running down from the old North British railway to a clutch of huts at the upstream end of a fishing beat. On one side of the ford is Cumbria, on the other, the boundary of Roxburghshire and Dumfriesshire or, since 1975, of the two oversized divisions of southern Scotland: Dumfries and Galloway and the confusingly named Scottish Borders.
No cow will now be seen attempting to cross the Liddel at this point, and there is little to show that it was once a significant boundary. Ancient territorial divisions often have no apparent raison d’être. Perhaps it marked the mid-way point between two tribal centres. The only material clue is the grass-covered walling of a medieval chapel which stands in total isolation about one mile upstream in a bend of the burn, as close as possible to the Debatable Land without being in it.
Between this ruined chapel and the Liddel, the Mere Burn passes through a culvert under the B road from Newcastleton. This is the route of the 127 bus, which, on Tuesdays and Fridays, offers the most convenient clockwise tour of the Debatable Land’s southern perimeter as far as Longtown. It passes the site of Hector of Harelaw’s tower (here), gives a fleeting view of the Lake District, then drops down to the border. On the English side of the Liddel, it passes Skurrlywarble Wood and the tiny village of Moat. Just beyond the milestone marked ‘Carlisle – 12 miles’, the road descends into a ravine which is currently patrolled by an untethered Alsatian, a friend neither to walkers nor to cyclists. At the top of the rise on the other side is the unnoticeable hamlet of Carwinley.
Carwinley, which now consists of three houses, was the site of one of the very few battles of the Dark Age which can be located with some confidence. According to several early medieval sources, in AD 573, a thousand years before the reivers, a great battle was fought between two of the British kingdoms which rose from the ruins of the Roman Empire. One of the kings was Gwenddoleu,
whose ‘caer’ or fortress gave its name to Carwendelowe (Carwinley). The battle is stated in the Chronicles of the Scottish People (late 1300s) to have taken place ‘in campo inter Lidel et Carwanolow’. This ‘field’ or ‘plain’ between the Liddel and Carwinley is the site of the castle mound called Liddel Strength or Liddel Moat (here).
The name of the great struggle which opposed pagan and Christian armies is the Battle of Arfderydd. ‘Arfderydd’ is plausibly identified with Arthuret, the parish to which Longtown and Carwinley belong. ‘Arthuret’ in turn is identified less plausibly with King Arthur. As a result, Arthurian pilgrims are occasionally seen in Longtown. Perched on a cliff below two wooded knolls within sight of a Roman road, the church of Arthuret does seem to occupy a typical Iron Age or Dark Age site, but its name, locally pronounced ‘Arthrut’, probably has no etymological connection with ‘Arthur’, whatever the nearby Camelot Caravan Park might suggest. For historians who find the wilful credulity of Arthurmaniacs exasperating, it must be an irritating coincidence that the early medieval sources identify the bard of King Gwenddoleu, who went mad and fled from the Battle of Arfderydd, as Myrddin, the prototype of the Arthurian Merlin.
*
After Carwinley, a stately mansion appears across some cow-grazed parkland on the right. This is Netherby Hall, which was built and rebuilt between 1639 and 1833 around the original stone tower of the reiving Graham family. It used to be famous as the setting of a poem by Walter Scott, in which the dashing knight Lochinvar crosses the Esk on his horse and gatecrashes a wedding feast to steal away his beloved. I once recited the relevant section to the horse-riding driver of the 127 as we passed Netherby, but she had never heard of the poem.
