The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  12 April

  For more than a thousand autumns, my ancestors barely rustled the leaves of the woods or left little more than gossamer marks on the land. The Romans were builders and road makers, the legionaries and auxiliaries experts in their various trades, their prefects and officers having all the skills of civil engineers. No series of concerted or organised efforts at building anything that endured followed their departure from Oakwood sometime after AD 100 until the medieval period. The park pale and the motte-and-bailey castle in the corner of the Deer Park were substantial projects but probably not dug until the later twelfth century.

  This morning’s hard frost and low, dawning sun showed up the characteristic pattern of runrig ditching across the southwestern flank of the Deer Park. Between the lines of drainage ditches on what is a steep and difficult gradient, the upcast was piled to make long cultivation strips. On that sunny slope, barley was probably grown, the altitude too high for wheat. But the runrig is impossible to date. It might even be a remnant of what was known as Napoleonic ploughing, an attempt to bring into cultivation as much land as possible in the early years of the nineteenth century, when imperial France dominated Europe and isolated Britain.

  13 April

  Chance is indeed a very fine thing, but combined with coincidence it can sometimes seem like providence. The day after complaining about the darkness of the past, a bright light suddenly shone on the story of the Long Track that made it even more of a highway through history. Last night, I had an email from a metal detectorist who had been sweeping the northern section of the track. After rounding the little hill that my children used to call Huppanova (because the ground rose up and down over the other side), it runs due north past a ruined dovecot before swinging east towards the Georgian mansion house known as the Haining. It was the centre of the estate of which our farm used to form a part. So much earth was shifted in building and landscaping that it hid the original route of the track. In the early twelfth century when the motte-and-bailey castle in the corner of the Deer Park first comes on record, it led from its west gate. Two centuries later, the Long Track rang with the clangour of war as soldiers tramped, carts creaked and the heavy horses known as destriers snorted. Armies were marching north and the skies over the Borders darkened.

  In his fascinating email, the metal detectorist listed the many medieval coins he had found and added that he had turned up part of a small, silver crucifix, perhaps worn by a woman. ‘Hen’s teeth rare’ is how he expressed his delight at discovering a German coin minted in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV. His troubled reign ended in 1215 after a bitter civil war fought all over Western Europe in which English kings were heavily involved. Richard I had made Otto Earl of York in 1190 because he was his brother-in-law, and later King John had sent a vast subsidy of 6,000 marks in the form of about one million silver pennies. Despite the English cash, Otto’s cause failed.

  Some of the other medieval coins were minted later and date from a period of intense activity at the castle and on the Long Track. After the death of Alexander III in 1286 and the ensuing succession crisis, Edward I of England used the opportunity to establish his overlordship in Scotland. There followed more than a century of intermittent warfare. Between 1301 and 1304, Selkirk Castle was rebuilt by the English and a stone keep raised on its mound. Carts trundled along the Long Track carrying stone (perhaps some of it came from the three quarries in the Deer Park), timber, lime and other materials. The Exchequer accounts recorded the immense cost of the project, as the local economy was flooded with cash. More than 329,000 silver pennies were paid to workmen and suppliers. As they made their way along the track, some of these people dropped coins that were trampled into the mud to wait seven hundred years to see the light of day once more.

  What these finds mean is something striking. Unlike the runrig on the flanks of the Deer Park, the Long Track can be dated by the coins lost on its margins. Not since the flints and the spindle whorls picked up by the Mason brothers have the fields around our farm yielded such a pungent sense of their past. I walk the Long Track almost every day with Maidie, and while I know all the puddles, ruts and big stones I have little idea of the stories that lie only inches below my feet. But I feel the ghosts of the past whispering beside me and, even on sunlit mornings, their quiet tread can be heard.

  A small village formed around Selkirk Castle, its earliest houses probably built along Castle Street on a ridge that runs downhill from a gate in the north-western defences. When the castle fell into disrepair and eventual disuse in the later fourteenth century, the Long Track seems to have shifted its route slightly to the north so that it arrived at the West Port, the gate to the growing village. It then began life as the main road between Selkirk and Hawick.

  14 April

  It is Palm Sunday. A week before Easter and the beginning of Christ’s passion, it recalls his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when crowds strewed palm fronds in front of him and his donkey. All over Christendom the faithful used to flock to their churches to pray and to celebrate. Inside the cemetery or the sacred precinct, crowds ate, drank, danced, and played music and games without inhibition, a high contrast with the aura of solemnity that surrounds churches now. In his De Temporum Ratione (The Reckoning of Time), Bede recognised that the term Easter came from Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon dawn goddess associated with the renewals of spring. Christian missionaries quickly made a link with Christ’s resurrection, but the cakes and ale were probably a harking back to pagan practices.

  The sun shone on this Palm Sunday morning and I took Maidie and Freydo down the Long Track. Yesterday the normally aggressive little Westie had to be dragged past the ewes and their lambs standing by the fence – outnumbered by small, white creatures that looked a bit like her, and intimidated by their mothers standing their ground, she was scared. So my wife suggested I took Freydo this morning and, after a little initial reluctance, all was well.

  15 April

  The archers hiding in the woods above the river watched a belly-hollowing sight. Strung out as far as the eye could see along the old Roman road on the south side of the Tweed was an enormous army. Boots and hooves thudded, some men sang, trumpeters sounded signals and history rumbled westwards. In the van rode armoured knights in their war splendour, pennants fluttering in the breeze, their helms slung on their saddle horns. It was a warm July day and the riverside breeze that riffled their silk caparisons was welcome. Behind the destriers marched men at arms in their heavy mail coats. Some with bowstrings strung taut and quivers quickly to hand, a company of Welsh archers made their way over the fraying surface of the old highway. And guarded by household knights, their squires on their ponies awaiting messages to be carried along the line, the long pennant with the three lions of England, yellow against red silk, was carried before the king.

  Edward I had come north to humble the Scots, and from Berwick he led almost seven thousand men westwards. He knew his army was being watched, and although they rode and marched in full armour and mail in case of attack, show mattered too. It was a sight meant to hollow bellies.

  Edward moved through a hostile countryside. Small groups of Scottish archers – some from the hunters of the Ettrick Forest – and crossbowmen could get close if the terrain allowed. Behind the thudding tramp of soldiers, the baggage train trundled, and behind that rode the rearguard. The destriers needed a supply of replacement shoes and hundreds were carried in stout carts, as well as the anvils for the farriers and charcoal for their forges. These horses could be fearsome in the ruck of battle. They were trained to bite and kick out with their metal-shod hooves. Big clench-nails could tear at skin, as well as deliver stunning blows. Sacks of corn to feed these horses and the soldiers followed, and behind them trotted movable supplies of food, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. Edward’s army was far too large to depend on foraging.

  On 24 July 1301, the knights reined their destriers up the Long Track. Edward I had come to Selkirk Castle and almost certainly followed
the Roman road that led on to Oakwood Fort. Almost 1,200 years earlier an army of about the same size had laid it, digging the drainage ditches on either side that can still be seen up at Hartwoodmyres. English scouts had swept the surrounding ridges before leading this huge medieval host through our farm. That summer, the rebuilding of the castle began and it may be that the king’s pavilion was set up close to the mound and its ditches. Almost seven thousand men and all of their gear, supplies and camp followers needed a great deal of open space, a water source and security from Scottish guerrilla fighters who might have stolen upon them at night.

  The farm was a good place for an army camp and it is highly likely that hundreds of pavilions, tents and shelters were erected on either side of the Long Track. With the Hartwood Loch to the south and the Haining Loch to the east, there was some protection from intruders, and the ridge of the Top Wood offered commanding views up the Ettrick and Yarrow Valleys, the direction from which trouble might come. The herds and flocks will have been safely corralled inside the pale of the Deer Park, and at the foot of its southern flank runs a small burn that feeds the Haining Loch. Its water is clear and sweet and our Old Boys in the East Meadow drink from it. When night fell on 25 July 1301, in the fields around our farmhouse hundreds of cooking fires will have flickered in the gloaming.

  On that day, the Exchequer Rolls record that the king’s paymasters doled out hundreds of thousands of silver pennies to the soldiers. Some of them were German mercenaries and one might have dropped a coin minted in the name of the Emperor Otto IV. Soldiers enjoy gambling and, with silver in their pouches, some will have played at the dice tables. In the half darkness, winnings might have been dropped and not picked up again until a metal detector buzzed in the twenty-first century.

  It must have been a spectacular sight – and sound. English, Scots, Welsh, French, German and Gaelic rang out as men shouted for their horses to be saddled, their tents to be pulled down and food to be found. But it was not the first time – or the last – that an army would rumble up the Long Track.

  16 April

  Another turning moment in the year saw me take the log and kindling baskets up to the Wood Barn, where they are stored over the summer. Encouraged by the forecast of rising temperatures for the weekend, we hope not to see firewood in the farmhouse until late October. Meantime, many logs need to be cut from the piles of seasoned timber next to the barn.

  I drove down to Kelso to find my grannie’s grave. Armed with a map of the cemetery’s zones, all identified by a letter, and a list of the headstones that stand either side of her unmarked lair, I was sure I would find her this time. But despite walking up and down the rows of headstones I could not. It was more than vexing, as though the earthly remains of Bina, her mother Annie and her aunt Bella had evaporated. Unmarked graves for unremarked lives. Not if I can help it. I shall ask for more information and go back until one day I find her.

  17 April

  At least some of Edward I’s scouts and generals were aware that they had been advancing in the footsteps of history. For many centuries, Roman roads were known as strete, or streets, as in Watling Street and Ermine Street. It denoted a paved road rather than a mere cart track, something not built between c. AD 400 and the coming of the first metalled roads in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  18 April

  A very misty morning before what might be a warm and sunny spring day. Dense mist and fog shrink the world, muffle sound and act as a continuing reveal, lifting a rolling curtain on a landscape that seems less familiar.

  The fields of the East Meadow begin to emerge and the Nameless Burn trickles into the Haining Loch. Just beyond the edge of the mist, the tents and pavilions of Edward I’s army are waking as grooms fit halters on the snorting destriers and take them down to the burn to drink, as men emerge into the chill of the early morning, stretching, shivering, looking around for somewhere secluded to relieve themselves. A smoky sun rises over Greenhill Heights.

  19 April

  As Maidie and I passed my son’s house, Grace banged on the window. It was only a little after 7 a.m. but she was up, had breakfasted and wanted to come out into the misty morning to walk with me and my dog. It was a first, and it made the trip down the Long Track very different. From a perspective about three feet lower and sixty-five years younger, Grace sees things differently. The silver orb of the sun was showing through the mist and I said that it was unusual to be able to look directly at it. ‘Yeah,’ Grace mused. ‘Weird.’ When she came to the many lambs by the fence, the little girl did not send them scattering for their mothers as she lifted her hand and said, ‘Hi guys.’ I suppose she is too small to worry them. I watch all this and feel the tears come. Listening to Grace make her own story of this place moves me very much, probably because these are the early chapters of a long continuity. I hope so.

  When we reached the dried-up puddles on the Long Track, we sang our mud song anyway. It is the first few lines of Flanders and Swann’s ‘Hippopotamus Song’, with its chorus of ‘Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood’. It is very surprising that this witty ditty should surface from an age that was bygone when I was young. Michael Flanders and Donald Swann were two dinner-jacketed performers who appeared on early black-and-white TV. Swann played the piano, while Flanders sat next to him in a wheelchair (he had contracted polio in 1946). They seemed to come from the world of concert parties and theatrical revue, the land of light entertainment. But the mud song is memorable and Grace likes it, especially the ending. When we get to the last line of the chorus – ‘and there we will wallow in glorious MUD!’ – the final word is an exultant shout.

  Although it has been cold, the days of sun are working their transformative magic. Some of the red birches are in leaf, blossom is showing, just, in several thorns and geans, and the buds of the magnificent acer by the gates into the stable yard have begun to unfurl. The contrast of the colours – lime-green against a rich, deep magnolia – is unlikely but glorious. Textile manufacturers and fashion designers have long imitated the colour combinations they see in nature, but, so far as I am aware, I have never seen magnolia and lime-green used together. It should be.

  From last year’s diary, I see that the swallows came yesterday. It has been too cold for them, and the flies they need, and the winds have come from the east, the wrong direction. But the weekend forecast is good and the wind will be back to the southwest, the right direction.

  This is Good Friday, the first of the three days of Easter, a holiday when many take a spring break and much chocolate is eaten. It was the day Christ was crucified, a cruel and lingering death used by the Romans to advertise the consequences of breaking the law. Swift executions like beheading were over too quickly and many more would see the agony of the cross and be intimidated by it. It is a gruesome image to celebrate, but of course the power of Easter also comes from the Resurrection two days later. The principal Christian festival from which others follow, the date of Easter was settled at the Synod of Whitby in 664 after a long controversy. The Celtic church based on Columba’s mission and Iona had been very influential in Northumbria, founding the monastery of Old Melrose only a few miles from the farm. Its bishops reckoned the date differently and all sorts of political pressures pushed for uniformity. But one that is frequently forgotten relates to a battle no longer fought.

  At Easter, the war with Satan and evil was at its height and to defeat the forces of darkness, or at least keep them at bay for another year, God needed to be supported by all who believed in Him. And the way in which Christians could do that was by praying. Like a battle, numbers mattered, and if some Christians were praying at a different time, because they reckoned the date of Easter fell on another day, then God’s army was much reduced. All Christians needed to pray for the defeat of Satan at the same time.

  20 April

  By calling it a bank holiday weekend, many people seem to prefer to relate Easter to money rather than Christ’s Passion
, his death and resurrection. It is a strange and surprising switch. This morning’s tabloid headlines warned of sweltering temperatures in the eighties, and so when I put on a suit to drive down to Kelso it felt like far too many clothes. But I was determined not to turn up in a shirt and shorts because that would have been disrespectful. With the kindness and help of the cemeteries department of the Scottish Borders Council, my grannie’s grave had at last been found. I wanted to go and see it for the first time, to attend the funeral I had missed all those years ago.

  Only moments after I walked through the gates of the old cemetery, I saw the forlorn little white peg placed by the foreman. In a corner, shaded by a huge holly tree and a newly trimmed yew bush, he had written on it: Moffat G187. I took off my hat and after a while hunkered down on the ground where my gran had been buried in 1971 when I had been in Italy. Bina was laid down over her mother Annie, who had died in 1936, and before that, in 1928, her aunt Bella had been lowered into the lair. It felt as though I had walked around a wide circle to come at last to this shaded, forgotten corner.

  I had been unable to find my grannie’s grave because some of the lairs to her right also had no gravestones and hence no names I could match with the list I had been given. The one for Jessie Oliver that I might have recognised had collapsed. Old bricks and a lump of broken concrete lay to one side and over the years the yew had begun to encroach. It seemed that she and her mother and aunt were being squeezed out of history. Yew trees are often found in churchyards and cemeteries because they live to a great age and remember a pre-Christian sanctity, and I consoled myself with the ancient notion that when the roots reach down to the dead, they touch them and release their souls through the tree and on into the sky above. Next to Bina’s lair, I could see roots as thick as a forearm showing through the grass.