The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  Determined not to leave my gran in this dusty corner, I walked down to the Tweed to a garden centre to buy a flower holder that could be set in front of a tombstone, even though Bina did not have one. A gormless girl had no idea what I was talking about, but an older lady advised me to try the florist in the town. She turned out to be the soul of kindness and, with two bunches of yellow carnations in a conical holder filled with water, I walked back to the cemetery to bring some spring colour to my gran’s grave. Carnations would last, said the florist.

  I don’t know how these matters are arranged, but I wondered if I should be buried with Bina so that she could keep me close in death as she had cuddled me in life. I stood for a long time, thinking what I should say, out loud. Love is by no means a given in families, but my gran gave me unconditional love and I wanted to thank her for that, no matter how banal it might have sounded. And then for a few moments I wept for the loss, for the passing of almost fifty years since I had seen her. But at last she was found and I promised to come back with more flowers. And with my sisters’ help, she and her mother and aunt will have a head-stone inscribed with their names and the span of their lives instead of a little white peg.

  21 April

  To lift my sadness, last night the swallows came. Six swooped over the stable yard, diving between the boughs of the old oak and the plantation of Norway spruce and larch behind the hay barn. Having completed their astonishing journey from Africa, these little daredevils had come back home and they celebrated with some virtuoso aerobatics, synchronised swirls and turns, doubling back on themselves and flying at breakneck speed into the stable boxes where the old nests are. Then they disappeared, off over the fields for an evening feed. It was a wonderful moment.

  Grace has taken to coming out with Maidie and me on our early morning walk. Looking very grown-up in a denim jacket, pink leggings and blue wellies, she marched down the Long Track to see the lambs. On the way home, she looked up at me and said something that turned my heart. ‘I had a wee sister once.’ And she held out her hands and arms as though she was cradling a baby. I thought Grace was talking about her older sister, Hannah, who died stillborn. But when I did not, could not, say anything the wee lass carried on, explaining that babies came out of tummies and when she was a flower girl at Auntie Beth’s wedding, that was when she had the wee baby. It was a three year old’s story, woven from overheard fragments, nothing to do with Hannah, but it brought more tears. I wiped them away before my granddaughter noticed and we walked on down to the farmhouse.

  Wherever her parents decide Hannah’s ashes should be buried, I shall be buried there beside her, instead of with my gran. I won’t let the little one be alone for too long.

  22 April

  Up at Windy Gates with Maidie early this morning, I heard the clank of the jaws of the harvester in the distance, a dinosaur-like machine with a swinging saw-arm that can cut down tall trees in ten seconds. When we climbed up a little at Huppanova, I could see that the wood had now been clear-felled to reveal . . . a mobile phone mast. But the shape of the land, hidden for so long by the sitkas, was laid bare. A few hardwood trees were left as lonely survivors amidst the carnage. Soon the summer’s growth will begin to hide it and let the land heal a little.

  It was a sight that reminded me of how much the land can change – and quickly. When Edward I’s army camped around our farm, there were no fences, no dense plantations and indeed very many fewer trees. All the colours of the landscape were natural, the hundred shades of green, brown, grey and yellow. And the silence was only punctuated by the calls of birds or the lowing and bleating of animals. Against the deep camouflage of the land, farmhouses could often only be made out by the spiral of smoke from their cooking fires. When the royal and noble silk standards fluttered and the destriers were clothed in their caparisons covered with heraldry, vivid colour will have splashed, something rarely seen. And the landscape will have rung with the call of orders and the clatter of movement before the army rumbled on.

  In the early fourteenth century, after Robert Bruce defeated Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314, the climate began to change the look of the land radically. When the triumphant Bruce surrounded Carlisle in the summer of 1315, it rained so torrentially that his army and its siege engines became irretrievably bogged down in bottomless mud around the city walls. After a short time, all efforts to capture Carlisle were abandoned and a sodden Scottish army moved on. That autumn waterlogged fields produced a meagre harvest and the following year was little better. Hartwood Loch will have refilled and looked much like it did to the flint-knappers who lived on its margins five thousand years before. The Little Ice Age was beginning, a period of about five hundred years that saw long and regular periods of bad weather. Famine frequently stalked the land and it was not until the 1850s that there was sustained improvement. Now we face more extreme fluctuations. When the sun shines as bright as it has for the past few days, my enjoyment of it is heavily qualified by anxiety about more climate change, this time brought on by man-made causes that will be almost impossible to halt unless action is taken, not soon but now.

  23 April

  Last evening I met Walter Elliot and Rory Low, the metal detectorist who had found the medieval coins around the farm. Washed and polished after centuries in the soil, Walter called these small, glinting objects treasure, but not for their value as bullion. In reality they are thin and very light. Their value is in the knowledge they give of the past. The German coin with the head of the Emperor Otto IV was fascinating. Looked at through a magnifying glass, it was possible to see that his crown followed a Byzantine model, with side-pieces like large pendant jewels. The wafer-thin silver penny of Robert II of Scotland looked as if it had been newly minted and the image of this, the first Stewart king, was very clear and very regal. Sadly the historical reality was very different. Having succeeded to the throne in 1371 at the advanced age of fifty-five, Robert turned out to be so ineffectual that the royal council removed his power to govern in 1384 and appointed a regent. Such was his miserable, beleaguered demeanour, the king was nicknamed Auld Bleary.

  After Rory had packed away his coins and the other items he had found in the fields (many legs for iron and bronze pots used for cooking but, strangely, very little metal horse gear), we drove up to the top of the Deer Park. I realised I had not been up to the plateau for at least a year. Walter wanted to look at the probable site of the Ogham stone I had found because he thought it might have been a sacred enclosure. Perhaps there were graves, perhaps facing east to west, something characteristic of Christian burial. But there was very little reaction to his divining rods and, with his detector, Rory found only some spent cartridges from the Second World War.

  Nevertheless, it was good to be up at the top of the park. The views to the west and the dying sun were heart-filling and we stood in that intensely atmospheric place and talked about nothing very much for a time before descending. On the way down, I noticed that a majestic, mature beech tree had been blown down in the summer storms of last year, its leaves having acted like fatal sails in the seventy-mile-an-hour winds. They were still on its boughs, rust-coloured and brittle. The roots had been torn clean out of the ground and the thick trunk was exactly horizontal. I was vexed to see that and will ask a chainsaw operator to log it for me. It is more than I can manage with my saw. My brother-in-law is a talented woodworker and he might use some of this beautiful, pale-cream-coloured wood to make a table or a stool. That way it might live on.

  In this morning’s early and warm sun I watched my son and Grace take the two big dogs up the track. The wee lass skipped for a few steps and her walk was jaunty. Why do little children skip? I think it must be joy that prompts them, the joy of being alive and with lives stretching out before them on a beautiful spring morning.

  24 April

  Where the Bottom Track turns through ninety degrees to become the Top Track, someone who used to help around the farm parked several saplings in the banking. He once worked as a for
ester and sometimes did that to help these sticks root before moving them elsewhere. Except neither he nor we ever got around to doing that. Now, about five or six years later, in a space less than a square metre, there are three American red oaks, two

  Norway spruces, two trees I could not identify and a larch. The larch has climbed highest but, because of their position, all are well watered and in sun for most of the day.

  Just beyond the fences by the side of the Long Track, I saw the first and so far only casualty of this year’s lambing lying in the grass, its eyes pecked out by crows. Spring growth followed by spring death.

  27 April

  It was a damp, muted morning after overnight rain that will help the grass as temperatures rise. One of the mares, Wendy, is carrying a foal that will drop at the end of May and good grass at this time in her pregnancy should help. I plan to plant out tomatoes this afternoon on the terrace in the hope that they will thrive outside this summer. In the past I would have worried about rabbits eating the sweet shoots but several times in the last few days I have seen a stoat prowling the terrace and the garden. Not only will he or she keep the mice and voles manageable, they will also keep rabbits at bay. Spring is when their kits are born and it seemed to me that our stoat was out hunting to feed his mate who would be suckling their young wherever their nest is. This seems to me to be a tomato-friendly micro-ecosystem working well.

  28 April

  Lichen grows everywhere on our farm: on tree bark, on the old stones of dykes, even creeping over an abandoned field gate in the long grass of the Top Wood. It is delicate, beautiful, very rewarding close up. The deeply corrugated bark of older elder trees is often covered with a patchwork of a yellow lichen of great subtlety and density even on cloudy mornings. Sometimes rich egg-yolk, sometimes the pale yellow of the waning moon. Clustered in small filigree clumps on the branches of the birches on the fringes of our woods, light grey lichen grips so tight that not even last year’s summer storms can shift it.

  When the farmhouse was rebuilt in 1994, the roof was lifted up to allow a second storey of bigger and higher bedrooms. The steeply angled gables were formed by precisely cut slabs of sand-stone copes that rested on corbelling projecting out from the walls. For years they were the colour of freshly baked shortbread and looked very new compared to the grey whinstone of the old house, but now they are patterned with patches of green and grey lichen and spotted with a white variety that looks like accidental splodges of dripping paint.

  It turns out that these crusty, bushy and sometimes shrub-like plants are not plants. Even though they seem very adhesive on trees and stones, they have no roots and absorb water not from the surfaces they colonise but through photosynthesis in the air. And they grow in profusion where the air is pure, although some of the thousands of varieties can tolerate pollution. Apparently lichen can also survive in space. A Russian crew released a canister with lichen in it and exposed it to the airless atmosphere for fifteen days before bringing it back to Earth unaffected. A little more research told me that a staggering 7 per cent of the planet’s surface is covered by lichen and some varieties can live for ten thousand years. I found that a comfort.

  All I knew about lichen before we came here was that in the Hebrides weavers harvested it to make dye. The muted, subtle colours of Harris Tweed come from what the Gaels call crotal. It can also be used as a simile that made me smile when I first heard it. A friend of mine who lived on Skye went bald but retained a patch of hair above his forehead and his alleged friends called him Donnie Crotal because his scalp looked like patches of lichen on smooth rocks. Here, nature has painted our farm and its trees and stones in a hundred colours, many of which will still flourish long after we are gone.

  29 April

  Rory Low, the metal detectorist, has found something strange, unexpected. On its way to Selkirk Castle, the Long Track runs spear-straight through the Doocot Field. Dovecot in English, it is so-called for the ruin of a large stone building whose southern wall has collapsed to reveal about a hundred nesting boxes. As gardeners fed them with grain and other morsels, doves or pigeons were encouraged to multiply there and supply a handy source of meat for the occupants of the big Georgian house at the Haining.

  Rory has found a lot of English and some Scottish silver pennies in a wide cluster around the doocot, strongly suggesting that this was the centre of the English army camp in the summer of 1301. But yesterday he came across something else: a very thick piece of heavily patinated lead. Found deep, twelve inches down, in the same stratum as the coins, it seems to be a large fragment of roofing material. It has grooves along one edge that suggest it was formed over some other material, stone, wood, perhaps glass. The rich patina and the thickness of the lead suggest it is very old, perhaps medieval, like the dated coins. Was there once a building in the Doocot Field, by the Long Track? A chapel?

  We plan another field walk with Walter and his divining rods, and I will scour old estate maps I have acquired.

  30 April

  Bickering like an old married couple about which way to go, two Canada geese flew round and round the Tile Field before heading east towards the sun, the agitated honking fading as they breasted Greenhill Heights.

  May

  1 May

  On a still May morning of sticky buds, lustrous leaves and a soft rain, I was thinking not of new life but of death. For the Scottish Borders, the fourteenth century was little more than a mournful procession of disasters. When Robert Bruce died, he was succeeded by David II, a child only five years old who turned out to be a hapless king. After a costly defeat at Halidon Hill near Berwick-upon-Tweed and the loss of the town in 1333, Scotland was riven by civil war as Edward Baliol tried to wrest back the crown from the Bruce line. His father, King John Baliol, had been summarily deposed by Edward I in 1296, and at Stracathro in Angus he was humiliated as the royal arms were ripped from his tabard. When Edward I rode south, he is said to have remarked that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’.

  Baliol’s son styled himself Edward I of Scotland and it suited Edward III to support him. Armies marched back and forth across the Tweed Valley, trailing tremendous destruction in their wake. But there was much worse to come.

  In June 1348, the Black Death made landfall in England, having raged across Europe. A year later, the pandemic had yet to reach Scotland. The more simple-minded called it ‘the foul English pestilence’, believing that the Scots were naturally immune because they were Scots. They also believed that Englishmen had tails. About six miles from our farm, at

  Caddonlea, an army massed to invade England and take advantage of the chaos wreaked by the plague. Probably brought by mercenaries, the fatal disease suddenly erupted amongst the campfires and the army of opportunists panicked and scattered. The south-east of Scotland suffered badly after 1349, with about one-third of the population struck down. Fields were left uncultivated, beasts untended and the local economy plummeted into a long recession. And none of this was helped by the weather. In the second half of the fourteenth century famine struck twice and recovery was slow. An undernourished population was very vulnerable to disease and the plague returned in 1361 and 1369, with mortality rates of between 10 per cent and 15 per cent.

  The past is fascinating, but sometimes not a time I would want to return to.

  2 May

  Across the battle-strewn landscape, its population fearful of repeated returns of the great pestilence, there were green shoots of hope. Difficult to date but easier to detect, these took the form of appropriation, as ordinary people began to assert their rights. Selkirk’s royal charter was probably granted sometime in the twelfth century when the castle was built and the Deer Park established, and as a consequence of some lost legal grant, or perhaps through custom and practice, the townspeople began to use the land to the north and south. There they grazed their cattle and sheep, dug peat for their fires, gathered kindling and cut bracken to cover their floors and thatch their roofs.

  Li
kely land originally in the king’s possession – what became Selkirk Common – included our little farm. The king and his town were the first recorded owners of the fields and tracks we have come to know so well. We know that the farm formed part of the South Common because its boundary, the Common Burn, runs behind the stable yard. It is an ancient margin and on each side its banks have been built up higher, not to minimise flood risk but to make its course more emphatic in the landscape. Beyond its banks lay Hartwoodburn Farm, just as it does now, and it was privately owned – the resort of villains. Sometime before a circuit court convened in Selkirk in the summer of 1510, the farmer at Hartwoodburn and his men led his beasts across the burn so that they could graze our fields, even though at that time they were owned by the burgesses of Selkirk. In court, the sheriff found the Hartwoodburn men guilty and probably forced them to pay a fine.

  The burgesses were zealous in protecting their common against encroachment by surrounding lairds and, in 1541, John Muthag, an early provost of Selkirk, and his baillie, James Keyne, went to Edinburgh to plead a case at the Court of Session. They were ambushed and murdered somewhere on the road. The town could not survive without its common, and it was indeed a matter of life and death. Until recently, food and fuel came directly from the lands to the north and south of Selkirk. Most townspeople kept cows for milk, cheese and butter, sheep for wool, milk, cheese and meat, and they still gathered the seasonal wild harvest of fruits and berries, wood and kindling. To the north rises the low hump of Peat Law and on its flanks the remains of the banks where peat was dug and dried are still visible. Now, almost all of Selkirk’s food and fuel arrives at its shops in articulated lorries from large depots, often a long way away, and an ancient bond with the land has been broken.