by Graham Robb
The location of Camlann is well established. Souvenirs of Hadrian’s Wall manufactured in a pseudo-Celtic style were sold to Roman veterans of northern Britannia. Three items of cookware have been found on which the names of Wall forts are inscribed in the correct sequence. They show that Camlann or Camboglanna was the fort which stood between Carlisle and Birdoswald. Its modern name is Castlesteads.
This is one of the key strategic positions on the western Wall. Roads presumed to be Roman lead north-west towards Netherby and east to the valley of the South Tyne and the fort at Whitley Castle. The area was often occupied by invaders. Nearby, at Lanercost Priory, the ailing King Edward I spent five months in bed on his way to fight the Scots; in 1311, Robert the Bruce made the priory his army’s headquarters. In the second century, the British army might have been heading for Carlisle to re-join the western invasion route or to secure a link between the west coast and the east. Beyond Carlisle, ships would be waiting on the Solway to ferry the warriors back to Caledonia. The whole expedition would have followed the circular route of an epic cattle raid.
When the translator of William Camden’s Britannia visited Castlesteads fort in the late eighteenth century, he saw the ‘foundations of walls and streets’, a profusion of iron nails stuck in mouldering lumps, and ‘good stone of all sizes for building, most of them black as if the whole building had been burnt’. There were ‘several foundations of houses still standing there pretty high but hard to come at for the bushes’.
War damage can be repaired, but it takes an enormous, continual effort to prevent natural destruction. A few years after the Caledonian invasion, a sandstone altar was erected at Camboglanna to commemorate the restoration of a temple to the Mother Goddesses of Every Nation which had ‘fallen in through age’. The site of the fort is now a secret, subtle place compared to the more famous forts to the east. Even on a bank holiday, the Hadrian’s Wall tourist traffic barely touches Castlesteads, and it ceases altogether when the lanes head off across the treacherous expanse of Walton Moss.
At the top of a farm track, an undulating path leads through an oak wood glowing with bluebells in spring to a sudden drop: a mere filament on the map, the Cam Beck cuts like a ploughshare through the clay and has devoured large portions of the hillside. Much of the fort has been lost to the river. The blight of landscaping which destroyed the Roman ‘citie’ at Netherby continued to eat away at the remains of Camboglanna. The site of Arthur’s last battle is now marked by the towering sandstone wall of a private garden.
*
According to the Welsh Annals, the general known as Arthur died at Camlann, but the leader of a British uprising would not have been buried at a Roman fort. When the rebel army reached Camboglanna, it was heading west along the great Wall towards Carlisle and the Irish Sea, and towards the other fabled site of Arthur’s death.
The names of five of these battles reappear in a slightly garbled form in a fantastic twelfth-century compilation, the Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’). Its author, Geoffrey of Monmouth, borrowed, corrupted and mislocated but did not invent ex nihilo the place names of his Arthurian tales.54 One of those names – the Insula Avallonis or Isle of Avalon – might have fitted the rhyme scheme of the battle poem, and some scholars believe that it belonged to an unknown version of the battles of Arthur. It was there, supposedly, that Arthur died or had his wounds tended after the battle of Camlann. The Celtic name comes from ‘avallo’ or ‘abalo’, meaning ‘apple orchard’. Celtic ‘apple’ place names are common in Continental Europe but there is only one in Britain – the fort of Aballava or Avalana. The name is found on two of the Hadrian’s Wall souvenirs next to Uxellodunum and Camboglanna.
Aballava stood at Burgh by Sands near the western end of the Wall and the Solway coast. The fort had been built about twenty years before the invasion, when the turf of Hadrian’s Wall was being replaced with stone. As the site of a hero’s death, it might satisfy a film director or a nationalist – the bloodied warrior gazing out, like Edward I, over the ever-changing sand banks and river channels at the hills of what would one day be Scotland. But even this aquatic frontier is an illusion: Ptolemy’s map shows that both sides of the Solway lay in the territory of the same Celtic tribe. Neither Scotland nor England could claim this particular Arthur as their own.
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With the defeat of the British kings, the first official purge of the borderlands began. The most extensive reprisals were led by the Emperor, Septimius Severus. Like the wardens of the Marches, he found the northern tribes intractable and elusive. Advancing into the bogs and hidden valleys, he witnessed a tactic which was later used by the people of Tynedale in the days of the reivers. As Cassius Dio reported:
. . . he fought no battle and beheld no enemy in battle array. The enemy purposely put sheep and cattle in front of the soldiers for them to seize, in order that they might be lured on still further until they were worn out.
This is the earliest record of the skilful herding of livestock in the British Isles. Even in the second and third centuries, a walker in the fells might have thrilled to the sight of a distant flock spinning itself out over a hillside at the chivvying of a shepherd and his dog.
That stubborn pastoral society, which was considered a cause of trouble and anarchy by the Roman Empire and by the governments of Scotland and England, was also the source of some of the oldest British literature. Preserved by the lattice of its rhymes, the battle list traced the limits of a distinct linguistic zone – the area in which the Cumbric dialect of Brittonic was spoken. From ‘Glan’ to ‘Camglann’, through ‘Dubglas’ and ‘Bassas’, to ‘Celidon’, ‘Guinnion’, ‘Legion’ and ‘Bregion’, the battles of Arthur, like the legends of the tribes of Gaul, might have framed an epic which celebrated a cultural identity. For the descendants of the Damnonii, the Selgovae, the Votadini and the Brigantes, it might have recounted the birth of a new British kingdom.
The setting of these battles corresponds to the Dark Age kingdom of Strathclyde-Cumbria at its greatest extent, or the greatest extent of its territorial claims. Intriguingly, it also reflects the distribution of ‘Arthur’ place names in the north of Britain. Some of those Arthurian sites would have seen the invaders heading south in the 180s: Arthur’s Craigs above the Clyde; Arthur’s Seat and Arthur’s Fountain at the head of the Annan; Arthur’s Cross near Carwinley; Arthur’s Bower at Carlisle; King Arthur’s Well and Arthur’s Chair on Hadrian’s Wall.
Some time after the invasion, a Cumbric bard coaxed a simple narrative from the years of war in the bloody borderlands, fitting a period of history to a single human life. When a new enemy had emerged, and the Romans had been replaced by Saxons, the rhymes still told an epic tale of national resistance which served the purposes of other kingdoms and confederations. The battles could always be stitched into a colourful and coherent campaign, just as a certain form of nationalism unfurls rhetorical tapestries on which the heroes and martyrs of Scottish history run seamlessly through the centuries from Mons Graupius to Bannockburn and from Flodden Field to Culloden.
The region whose boundaries are traced by those ancient battles is now almost equally divided between Scotland and England. The frontiers have changed, but attempts are still being made to claim ‘Arthur’ for one administrative area or another. National pride is not the most resilient of emotions. Threatened by the arbitrariness of borders, the ambitions of political leaders and the size and diversity of its domain, it must attach itself to something stable. Perhaps only legend can defend it from change and allow its believers to call a halt to the infidelities of history and to say that, here, the frontier stood and should stand again.
28
Polling Stations
Less than a fortnight before the day of voting, an opinion poll showed for the first time a majority in favour of Scottish independence. The southern English seemed to discover at the last minute that the land of tartan and haggis was not a picturesque appendage but a nation with a will
of its own.
Ambassadors had been sent north from Westminster to offer blandishments and to explain the economic arguments for remaining a part of the United Kingdom. They seemed to believe that this was above all a matter of public finance. Some of the English emissaries struggled to adapt to the foreign form of debate. On local radio, an angry discussion took place on the subject of agricultural subsidies. The Scottish representative of farming interests brought it to an abrupt end: ‘Well, I don’t care about arguments anyway. I’m a nationalist, and that’s that!’ Perhaps this was the spirit in which the twenty-four Scottish knights had stymied the twenty-four English knights when they walked along the borderline in 1245.
In and around the Debatable Land, there was a feeling of horror at the ineptitude of the ‘No’ campaign. Its leader, nominally a Scot, always looked like a man who had just stepped out of a taxi in Whitehall. English politicians seemed to be ventriloquized by Scottish satirists: they acquired a snooty, patronizing tone and mispronounced Scottish place names. English commentators referring to the independence debate endlessly repeated the words ‘dour’ and ‘canny’, as though the only two words of Scots in their vocabulary happened to be an adequate description of that wily, tight-fisted race of surly foreigners.
One day, some men arrived to cut the high branches under the electricity wires which run through the woodland. One of the men was Northern Irish, the others came from either side of the border. As usual, we stood for a moment looking over into Scotland. In previous years, there had been banter about customs posts and whisky smuggling. Now, the mood was more sombre. The question was simply, ‘What do you think about it?’ I observed that if a dis-United Kingdom left the European Union and an independent Scotland re-joined it, retaining the free movement of labour, then these remote stretches of the Liddel, where the reivers used to come and go, would be an ideal crossing point for illegal migrants. This was no longer considered a subject for mirth.
On a Friday morning, we walked to the unmarked bus stop. A mile to the north, the 127 bus ran along the southern slopes of the Debatable Land and, after picking up its last Scottish passengers, dropped down towards the border. On the bus, there was something I had never experienced before but which I imagine must be the mood that follows a declaration of war. A storm cloud had risen from the muddled history of the Borders and was solidifying into something permanent and unreal. The future of the United Kingdom was about to be decided by one-twelfth of its population, and the Debatable Land might be partitioned once again. No one knew exactly what the consequences would be, and although mass deportations were unlikely, the people of the Anglo-Scottish borders, like their sixteenth-century ancestors, felt the state’s impending weight, its enormous power of interference.
This borderless community was unrecognized and, faced with the dictatorship of a popular vote in place of a parliamentary democracy, unrepresented. The ‘No’ camp had come to be associated with reason and the ‘Yes’ camp with passion. But passion itself had been redefined as loudness and intransigence. There was as much passion in the Borders, but it took a different form: this was fear at its most contagious, a collective fear which could see no source of guidance or solace.
*
On the day of the vote (18 September 2014), we cycled to every polling station in or on the edge of the Debatable Land. It was a thirty-three-mile round trip. The polling stations were far apart and, for some people who live in remote areas without the use of a car, inaccessible. I saw voters entering and leaving the village halls – a witness, I thought, of a historical event but in reality a ghost which lived in a house on the border, whose family was Scottish but whose Scottish name was nowhere in the register of voters.
The first voters we saw were two women standing outside Canonbie Public Hall. They were discussing local news while an English Springer spaniel waited patiently on a leash. Both women spoke in southern English accents. In cities to the north, they might have been more guarded, but there was never any doubt that in the Borders a majority would vote ‘No’ to secession. Even the referendum debate had failed to generate any noticeable Anglo-Scottish antagonism.
On the mile-long main street of Newcastleton, there were ‘No’ posters in many of the windows. We cycled on to Hermitage Castle and turned up the single-track road which leads to the pass between Liddesdale and Ewesdale. A mile up the valley, at the point where Mary Queen of Scots rode down to Hermitage Water, a farmer had festooned the front of his house with a two-storey-high Union Jack which seemed to mirror the vast arch of the castle.
This was the spirit of defiance which had come to be associated with the ‘Yes’ campaign. We saw it again in Langholm, where voting was taking place at the Buccleuch Hall. On the edge of town, road signs announce Langholm as the ‘Birthplace of Hugh MacDiarmid’, the Communist poet who twice stood as a candidate for the Scottish National Party, but on 18 September, travellers entering Langholm on the A7 were greeted by a gigantic municipal banner bearing the single word, ‘No!’
Apart from the banner and an elderly man distributing nationalist leaflets in Buccleuch Square, it would have been hard to tell that a chapter of Border history was being written. In the north, statues had been decked with patriotic flags and scarves; in Rowanburn, the effigy of ‘Lang Sandy’ the reiver was unadorned and the only hint of nationalist fervour was a Welsh flag fluttering outside a cottage across the road. At Gilnockie Hall, voting took place under the painting of Johnnie Armstrong riding his horse across the Esk. On the edge of a wood in an almost uninhabited part of the Debatable Land, the Gilnockie polling station was as quiet as the nearby abandoned railway. A farmer was driving away; a face appeared at one of the windows, saw the bicycles and shrank out of sight. No one else came. After fifteen minutes, we headed back to Canonbie, crossed the river into England and, along with the rest of the country, waited for the result.
*
In an age when elections are so minutely tracked and recorded that they might almost be held for the benefit of statisticians, there is no way of knowing how the people of the borderlands voted. Information from a particular polling station is never available (the ballot papers are mixed before counting), and, on this occasion, there were no exit polls. The figures for each electoral ward usually provide a comprehensive view of voting patterns, but the referendum was organized by region, not by ward.
The two regions adjacent to England are vast: Scottish Borders (1,831 square miles), which extends to within eight miles of Edinburgh, and Dumfries and Galloway (2,481 square miles), parts of which lie more than eighty miles from the border. Within those two regions, for every person who voted for independence, two voted against. Throughout Scotland, the ‘No’ vote was 55.3% and the ‘Yes’ vote 44.7%. The only other area with a lower ‘Yes’ vote was Orkney (32.8%). In the borderlands themselves, to judge by anecdotal evidence and a clear split over the whole country between urban and rural voters, the ‘No’ vote was certainly much higher.
In Liddesdale and the Debatable Land, there was little talk of the referendum in the months that followed. Few people wanted to discuss it: they were glad that it was over. But instead of evaporating, the fear became foreboding. The ‘Hands Across the Border’ cairn at Gretna was vandalized more than once and there was a feeling that, sooner or later, despite the vote, the two countries would be severed.
* * *
More than a year later, not long after Christmas, a friend from Newcastleton came to repair some storm damage to the house. He pointed at the oil tank (oil is our main source of heating after firewood) and said, ‘I hope you’ve ordered some more: it’s half what it cost a year ago!’ Oil prices had plummeted and were still falling. Since revenue from North Sea oil had been a mainstay of the nationalists’ economic plan, this was hailed as a retrospective victory for the ‘No’ campaign, confirmation that an independent Scotland would have foundered in debt. In the event, it proved only that economics had not been the main concern for nationalists. Opinion polls showed practically no
difference in support for Scottish independence.
The house has a third potential source of heating apart from oil and wood. The river occasionally delivers small lumps of coal to the shingle beach. Along a curved line below the hanging woodland, moles push up pebble-sized pieces of coal from a depth of about two feet. These black nuggets burn quite well in the wood stoves and could conceivably be mined. In the 1820s, adits were dug into the riverbank cliffs and there was a proposal to lay rails so that horses could take the coal up to the level ground where the railway was later built.
The seams of carboniferous limestone form part of the vast Canonbie coalfield which underlies much of the former Debatable Land on both sides of the border. Shallow pits were once worked all over the area, from Carwinley Burn to Peter’s Crook and Liddelbank. Industrial mining began in the late eighteenth century. There were two pitheads – one at Rowanburn and one at Blinkbonny, joined by an inclined plane. The workable seams were exhausted by 1922, but mining companies have been hovering over the area ever since.
One day, some people who live on the edge of Canonbie noticed a piece of white paper nailed to a tree. The Buccleuch Estates had given permission to a multi-national mining company to extract coalbed methane from the coalfield. Nineteen drilling sites were marked on the printed map. There might eventually be as many as a hundred, and there would certainly be pollution, noise, heavy traffic and lasting eyesores. The fragile tourist trade would be wrecked.
There was near-unanimous resistance and a protest group was formed, but many farmers and householders are tenants of the Buccleuch Estates and were afraid to voice their opposition. The modern descendants of the reivers are generally law-abiding, social-minded folk. The response of the Buccleuch Estates was a reminder that the image of the borderer as a troublemaker was largely a creation of the landed gentry and the representatives of state interests. The CEO replied to the ‘vociferous minority’ in the Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser. There was no hint of compromise or compassion, merely the wish to silence ‘those vociferous voices who don’t want to see any economic development in the area’: ‘I have little sympathy for that because it behoves us all to try to create economic development.’
