The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  When we moved from the city to our farm twenty years ago, our attitudes to the weather altered. Instead of wondering whether or not we would need an umbrella or a warm coat, we now study the forecast each morning, using more than one website, and plan for the conditions to come. It can be tough to be outside in severe weather but at least we know we can get dry.

  6 March

  It has rained continuously for thirty hours. The burn behind the stable yard is threatening to burst its banks and I spent a difficult hour trying to clear the tangle of dead rushes that were damming it where it flows under our western boundary fence. Using a savagely bladed pruning saw, I hacked at the dieback and pulled out a great deal from the silted bed of the burn. But it made only a marginal difference. The tracks around the farm are awash and the loch in the Tile Field looks like it might be reforming. According to all the forecasts, we will have at least some rain every day for the next week. My drains around the houses and the yard are coping, but only just, and breaks in the downpour are needed to let the volume of water wash down into the valley’s streams and from there into the Ettrick to the west.

  I met Walter Elliot today, and to my delight he gave me three more very beautiful flints that had been picked up near the farm by the Mason brothers. Two are edges that were used as knives. Still razor-sharp, they will have been hafted in a wooden handle so that pressure could be exerted when cutting. The third flint is a work of art, an object of accidental beauty. An arrowhead, it is about three-quarters of an inch long, with an elegantly tapered, needle-like point. I pricked my palm with it and felt that the slightest pressure would have broken the skin. ‘Aye, you would feel that if it hit you on the end of an arrow,’ said Walter with a smile. It is such a delicately lethal object that I want to see if it can be safely set in a pendant as a gift for Lindsay. That would mean it being passed on down the generations, its story remembered and not forgotten in a box in the attic.

  Waiting for the skies to clear, the makers of these flints had little option but to stay next to their warming hearths. When forced outside by calls of nature or a need for more wood, they probably wore brogues. Derived from the Gaelic word brogan for shoes, their modern design remembers what our ancestors’ foot-wear looked like. On their leather uppers, brogues have a pattern of half-recessed holes tooled on them. These were once real holes because ancient shoes were not made to keep feet dry but to protect against cuts from sharp stones or thorns. The holes were cut to let out water as they squelched along on days like this.

  Angus is a harbinger of spring. During the winter he works indoors at a smoked salmon processing plant, but when the days begin to lengthen he leaves the seasonal job at the factory to become a busy jobbing gardener. He came last weekend and set about trimming our overgrown hedges. Little more than rows of hundreds of small trees, they urgently needed attention while still dormant. Yesterday’s downpour drove Angus to seek his own warming hearth, but this morning I noticed that his trimming had revealed something else of a delicate beauty. Woven from shiny blackthorn twigs of a similar thickness, a perfectly round bird’s nest was cradled in a hornbeam. It was as though the small tree was holding this little basket of fertility in its cupped hands.

  7 March

  Two swans flew low over the ponds on the Tile Field and suddenly, tilting their necks and wide wings upwards while thrusting out their feet, they splashed down on the largest patch of rainwater, making a momentary bow wave like a speedboat. The downpour had paused and all sorts of birds had begun feasting on its watery bounty. The swans were dunking below the surface of the pond for saturated grass, drowned worms and whatever else had been washed upwards. Keeping a respectful distance on the edge were a dozen or so ducks, quacking loudly in what sounded like glee. Overhead, its wingbeats languid, its bearing aristocratic, a heron flew slowly over the Tile Field, ignoring the vulgar cacophony below.

  As often after rain, the morning was fresh, and away from the excitement on the ponds it was quiet, recovering. The tracks still flowed with run-off but the woods and fields were slowly drying, releasing the earthy scent of the land into the still air. On Greenhill Heights low clouds clung to the trees like smoke.

  A consolation of the wet winter weather for the people of the roundhouses was that little or no military activity tramped across the landscape, certainly no campaigning. Packhorses and mules plodded, and carts trundled up and down the road from York to the Forth. This later became known as Dere Street. It supplied the twenty-six forts on the new Antonine Wall, though even that traffic was sporadic. At the earlier fort at Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian’s Wall, several large caches of notes, lists and letters were found and in one of them a Roman officer wrote that he would not travel unless he had to because viae malae sunt, the roads are bad.

  When Maidie and I reached Windy Gates, I realised that I had left my watch on the night table. It reminded me of holidays we used to enjoy at a big house in the Western Highlands. On the southern shore of Loch Sunart, Laudale was a magnificently isolated place and I got into the habit of making it even more detached from the hurly-burly by asking our friends to give me their watches when we arrived. I hid them in a drawer and, since there were no other clocks in the house, not on the mantelpiece or in the hall, no one knew what time it was for a week. All of the others came up from London and at first they found this timelessness disconcerting. No one was sure if they were hungry, tired or if there was enough time to go out for a walk. But soon a surprising pattern emerged. People began to get up not long after sunrise, ate breakfast, went out, even in the soft Highland rain, for long walks, came back for lunch when they were hungry, snoozed or read, had drinks and dinner and went to bed when it grew dark. A daily round not unfamiliar in our little valley two thousand years ago.

  8 March

  A morning of sun and ice dawned, its rays glittering and flashing off the ponds in the Tile Field and the pools on the Long Track. When the door flap was pushed aside, eastern light flooded the roundhouse and its people emerged to walk over the cracking crust of frosted ground to gather logs from the woodpile, answer nature’s call, shiver and look up at the sky to judge the sort of day to come. A woodpecker drummed in the woods beyond the military road.

  Spring would bring bounty: nests would have eggs, lambs and calves would be born, but rumours of war would float on the warming winds. After Y Rhufeiniwr, the Romans, had abandoned their turf rampart in the north and retreated behind the White Wall, there had been a few years of peace. Then the kindreds of the northern mountains and the fertile straths had raided down the great road, crossed the Wall, defeated the legions and killed their general. The Romans bought peace and, in exchange for much silver, they recovered their captives.

  By AD 193 Septimius Severus had established himself as undisputed emperor, the first African to wear the purple, and fifteen years later he came to army command north at York to take personal control of the campaign against the Caledonians. For four years Eboracum, York, was the centre of the Roman world, as he mustered a huge expeditionary force, more than forty thousand men, the largest army ever seen in Britain until modern times. Marching six men abreast, the infantry stretched for nearly three miles along Dere Street. Behind them the baggage train was a tail of another two miles, and the imperial party and its bodyguards and standards must have added a splash of purple at some central, well-guarded point. Protecting the flanks of this prodigious force were cavalry regiments skirting the hills on either side. These patrols will certainly have reached as far as our little valley.

  When the expedition left the depot at Newstead, Trimontium, a series of huge marching camps in Lauderdale mark its slow progress. It took four days to cover the thirty-eight miles to Inveresk on the Firth of Forth. When the end of the column was leaving one camp, the advance party of surveyors was approaching the next.

  9 March

  Last night the years rolled back and time seemed to be fixed at a single moment. Fifty-two years ago a team of callow schoolboys ran out onto a rugb
y pitch in front of a large crowd to play against a Welsh Schools team and for the first time since that damp March afternoon in 1966 we all met again. Old men travelled from deep in the south of England, one flew from South Africa, and others, like me, were much closer to the hotel in Melrose where supper and some surprises waited.

  I am suspicious of reunions and, until last night, had never gone to any. They can be competitive and depressing, reminders of how unkind life sometimes is and how age really does wither. But this occasion was very different. Laughter rang round the room, good stories were told and my memory was jolted repeatedly when events I had completely forgotten were recounted. I played at loosehead prop, our captain was hooker and the tight-head prop I had not seen for fifty years. We were all big, strong lads with good technique and real skill, and we dominated the opposition in those far-off, black-and-white days. I have a photograph of us taken last night and I shall print it and pin it on the wall. We are still all big lads, just not the same shape.

  Thinking about the reunion this morning, it seemed to me that it worked so well for a simple reason. We had all first come together at one of life’s turning points. When the team to play Wales was announced, it was the first time any of us had been picked, selected, told we were good enough at something to represent our part of Britain. And because rugby is a team game, where players physically support each other and attempt to overcome the opposition, there was a remembered closeness that reached across a lifetime to bind us together again. I am certain that my views – political, social and otherwise – will not be shared by many of those who came, but none of this was discussed. It did not matter.

  10 March

  At first light, it was snowing heavily, big flakes falling gently out of a windless sky, eddying and swaying, blanketing the land. The old oak and the twisted, gnarled thorns by the side of the burn were mantled white, snow piling impossibly high, stacked along the branches, layer upon layer settling and freezing. Inside, in the circle of firelight, there was quiet, a hypnotised silence, staring at the yellow flicker as flames licked and crackled, the bark of a damp log sometimes hissing. On the flat cooking stone, set inside the circular hearth, sitting amongst embers, a pot seethed. The last of the winter store of barley was eked out with bones whose goodness had been long boiled out of them. Dried silverweed roots, dried funghi and hazelnut paste thickened the meagre mixture but it had at least the merit of being warm.

  To pass the long hours when nothing could be done in the white landscape beyond the door, tales were told. Family stories, childish escapades, hunting lore, lambing, calving and the wider world were all woven in the circle of firelight.

  In the year of the Great Army, when the first squadrons of mounted soldiers rode into the little valley, they would have found no one – deserted farms, empty barns and houses whose thatch had been pulled down so that they could not be burned. With all they could carry, and having hidden or buried what they could not, the families had driven their flocks and herds up to the high shielings in the western hills. Not daring to light a fire in the black-dark landscape for fear of Roman patrols finding them, they shivered through the long nights, whispering, listening for hoof beats, the echo of shouted orders, the jingle of harness.

  But at least their beasts would have survived, not taken because they were widely dispersed across the high plateaux. Armies only marched in the summer, when the grass grew and their horses, pack and traction animals could graze, and that was when the high pasture would have been eaten anyway, even if war had not burst over them. These dark and hard times would have made for vivid memories.

  By midday at least six inches of snow lay on our fields and I crunched through it on my way to the Wood Barn. I had lit both of the woodburners at first light and they were consuming logs quickly. Nothing could be done outside once the horses in the outbye had been fed and, after a day of paperwork, we sat around the crackling fire, the draughty old house at last warm, insulated by the snow, with no wind whistling around its walls searching for the gaps in the window frames.

  Perhaps in an unconscious effort to keep their memories alive, Lindsay and I sometimes talk about the stories our parents told us of their lives before we were born. Only we know them now, and before we die we must pass them on. These memories are the best sort of history, personal and vivid.

  They all lived through momentous times: the Great Depression, the hunger marches and unemployment, the rise of fascism in Europe. Both of our fathers fought in the war in Europe, the Near East and Africa. My dad’s medals are in a box near our bed and I shall not only pass these on to my children but also explain what they mean. In the Borders, my mum worked in the Hawick textile mills, turning out kit for the armed forces. Her neighbours came together in a tight-knit, supportive community and I remember stories of Uncle Bill catching rabbits with his ferrets, and another neighbour, an expert poacher, who gaffed salmon in the Teviot and Tweed. They kept Allars Crescent supplied with class one protein throughout the hungry years of war. Sharing, mending, making do – and at the same time coping with long spells of ignorance of what was happening to their men thousands of miles away, where battles raged through ravaged cities and countryside, and many died.

  For Lindsay’s mother, the war came directly to her. Working in the War Office, she experienced the terror of the London Blitz, fire-watching on the roofs of high buildings in the burning city. Not knowing if she would survive the nightly bombing raids, working long hours, she lived a provisional, exhilarating life, making fast friendships that endured until she died. She formed a friendship with a Belgian airman and wrote to him with encouragement and support as he flew sorties in the summer skies of the Battle of Britain. He was later killed in action. Helen was never so animated as when she talked about those years in the eye of the storm of war. They all lived high-definition lives that might have been cut short in a moment.

  Beyond the circle of firelight, the ring of memory, the snow was still falling. When I took the dogs out before we went to bed, a pale moon lit the white land and all was silence.

  11 March

  A reluctant day in the city. Even though Edinburgh is spectacularly beautiful and much less hemmed-in than the canyons of central London, I find myself increasingly relieved to be going back to the peace of the farm at the end of the day. Cities are places of edges, sharp angles with no give or growth in them. And everybody seems constantly to be going somewhere, checking their phones, watching the time, waiting for the green man, busy, busy, busy.

  At Waverley station some of the shops on the concourse were advertising Easter, apparently now a festival of chocolate. The vividly coloured boxes of eggs were stacked high and baskets of small, foil-covered versions were on each counter, an easy addition to a lunchtime sandwich. Like many of the rituals surrounding Christmas, all of these gaudy displays suggest recent invention, but in fact Easter eggs are an ancient, attractive tradition. Jacob, one of the Brothers Grimm, was also a folklorist and he reckoned that eggs were associated with the pagan goddess of springtime and fertility, Eostre. Easter derives from her name. Christian communities in the Middle East adapted the tradition and at the time when Christ’s death and resurrection were commemorated, eggs painted red to symbolise God’s blood were exchanged.

  Wondering what the date of Easter was, I remembered that of course it was a famously movable feast, unlike Christmas. The Book of Common Prayer contains the formula. Easter Day is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after 21 March. It is a very old-fashioned way of reckoning time, and that sentence probably needs to be read twice. Even more complication sets in when the formula has to be adapted to deal with clashes. If the first full moon following 21 March is on a Sunday, then Easter Day falls on the Sunday after that. This was agreed to avoid clashes with the traditional date of the Jewish Passover. In most Mediterranean languages ‘Easter’ is a derivation of the Hebrew word Pesach for Passover; Pacques in French, Pascua in Spanish, and even Pasg in Welsh and Caisg in Scots Gaelic.


  The whole of the rest of the Christian calendar flows from the date of Easter and that ancient way of reckoning the landmarks of the year is very attractive. In the Borders, it is still used to work out the dates of the most important secular festivals, the annual common ridings. Selkirk’s riding of the marches of the common land falls on the first Friday after the second Monday in June. Another sentence that needs to be read twice. It means that if this year the common riding falls on 14 June, then the dates of all the other towns’ festivals will be reckoned in the same way.

  The snow is disappearing fast, melting in shiny rivulets running down every incline. What my grannie would have called a glushie day.

  12 March

  A welcome day at home. Perhaps I am becoming more reclusive, or at least antisocial, but I do enjoy the rhythms of life on our farm and seem to waste less time, principally through avoiding travelling. I was able to walk off some arthritic soreness with Maidie this morning and reflected that, unlike my ancestors, it was not cold and dampness that stiffened my bones but age. The pain can sometimes be persistent and it does bore a hole in your head. I will have to start experimenting with therapies, leaving painkillers as a last resort.

  As we wandered down the Long Track on a dreich, grey morning after heavy overnight rain, I noticed scores of worms on the hard surface. With their burrows filled with water, they had been forced to come up to the surface to breath. Exposed on the track, I suspected they would soon be food for the hungry crows.

  13 March

  Fierce winds raged around the house, roaring and buffeting, rattling the slates. Fiadhaich is a word the Gaels use, and it means savage, like a wild beast. The Hebridean crofters built their black-houses with massive stones and no windows so that they could keep out the worst of the savage winds that whipped off the Atlantic, and their thatched roofs were held in place with simmens, lattice works of heather ropes weighed down with big stones. These are ancient and were probably used to keep the roofs on roundhouses. Severe storms must have wrought great damage and literally blown houses down. Only in the modern era have we been able to build largely reliable shelter. In the long past, the threat of winds like last night’s was very real.