The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  19 May

  The land hides its memories, keeps its secrets. The homely geometry of green fields, thorn hedges, fences, tracks and woodland is recent, no older than the two or three centuries since the enclosures and the rapid modernisation of farming. But just below the surface of a rural landscape many believe to be old and traditional, even timeless, there lies a faded map water-marked and stained with blood and history.

  This morning Grace knocked on her window as Maidie and I passed on our way out for a morning walk. My granddaughter wanted to see the Dangerous Brothers, the lambs that career around the Doocot Field in endless wacky races, exulting in life just as Grace does. She is fuelled by toast and Coco Pops and they thrive on sweet spring grass. On the tracks we saw rabbit poop, big bird poop, sheep poop and fox poop I had to drag Maidie away from. ‘There’s poop everywhere!’ exclaimed the wee lass, her palms upturned in cheerful, exaggerated exasperation. We rescued a drowning snail from one of the puddles on the Top Track. When we entered the Deep Dark Woods, we found a ground nest near the old fence. It was a rough circle of flattened grass and willowherb about two feet across. Something large, like a deer, had made it overnight, sheltering under the trees from the showers. Grace knelt down for a closer look and when I pointed out deer tracks in the mud nearby, she wanted to follow ‘to see if it is OK’.

  Grace loves the land, and our farm is her kingdom. Her story of it is fresh and constantly renewing just as mine is deepening. Rory emailed last night with photos of more finds from the fields we walked through this morning. Many small blobs of lead have come up and a new metal detector seems to be locating much more of the detritus of war. He thinks the blobs have been dropped on the ground during the process of metalworking, probably the production of lead shot. There is so much hidden deep in the field that it may have been a substantial operation. But why were musket and pistol balls of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries being cast there, only a short distance from our farmhouse? There should be the outline of buildings of some kind, however temporary. Perhaps we will find out next weekend, when Walter Elliot brings his divining rods and his expert eye for the lie of the land.

  Rory has also found fragments of twentieth-century ordnance. Brass base plates of Mills bombs come up regularly. These were the first hand grenades, used in the trenches of Flanders from 1915 onwards. The plate Rory gave me has WD on the inside, for War Department, and a capital Q for Qualcast, the manufacturer, much more famous for making lawnmowers. Two sorts of grenades were manufactured. The more familiar is the grenade that was thrown in the classic manner, overarm with the thrower immediately ducking down out of the blast. The edge of its range was about one hundred feet and cricketers were thought to make the best grenade throwers. Rifle grenades could be fired about one hundred and fifty yards but were even more dangerous to launch. A soldier had to seat the butt of his rifle in the ground because the recoil of firing such a heavy object was too great for his shoulder. When the pin was pulled, he had only five seconds to pull the trigger to fire a blank that would in turn fire the grenade. If the rifle jammed, there was nowhere to take cover. It seems that essential training for this particularly dangerous art of war took place in the fields of our farm and in the Deer Park.

  Last night Rory sent me a photo of a shell primer he had dug up in the Doocot Field. It came from a 1941 British 25-pounder gun, a standard piece of mobile artillery in the army for twenty-five years, only decommissioned in the 1960s. Its design is instantly recognisable from many war films and TV documentaries. A two-wheeled gun with its barrel projecting from a wide, protective metal screen, it could be set up quickly and fire rapidly. Depending on the elevation of the barrel, its range was between five miles and six miles. Which begs a question: where was the shell that Rory found fired from? If these guns were trundled onto our farm for training exercises, as they must have been, where were they set up? My only answer is the high plateau of the Deer Park. Its long vistas out to the west will have allowed instructors to see where shells landed, whether or not they were on target. Perhaps they detonated. Not only was the detritus of war left lying, the projection of grenades and shells will have roared through the sky before exploding on this peaceful landscape where the Dangerous Brothers career around.

  20 May

  Out with Grace, I have to bear in mind when pointing out things that she is half my height and sees the world from three feet and not six. Maidie sees it from about ten inches, fourteen if she stands up straight, a very different perspective. Sometimes I think her lack of height frustrates her and she often scrambles onto a tree stump for a longer view. To her, almost everything is close-up. At fourteen inches, the sides of the Long Track are high and it must seem like a canyon. Every patch of ground she crosses is examined with great intensity, her head swinging from side to side as she sniffs after the scent of animals who passed that way before she did.

  Maidie has a jaunty gait – her little paws seem to bounce off the track, and when she is navigating her way around a particularly interesting sniff she often lifts a front leg to avoid too much disturbance. I have seen her hop daintily in a confined space, turning on a sixpence. Outdoors she sees everything from low down, but in the house she leaps up to the backs of chairs and sofas to look out of the many windows. Searching distant horizons for danger, her tail is an indicator of any threat level, and there are many. Straight up is DEFCON 1, all the way down is zero. Her sudden barking at God knows what annoys me (I think she finds some trees and bushes irritating) and I often shout at her. But all she is doing is protecting the pack of which she is a (crucial) member.

  Never having had one before, it has taken time for me to get used to the terrier temperament. They bark a great deal and are naturally aggressive. Even though she is younger and smaller than our labradoodles, Lillie and Freydo, Maidie has asserted herself as Top Dog and there have been one or two scraps that have gone beyond playful. She is certainly not a lapdog, but she does follow me around, and when we sit in the porch in the evening with a glass of wine she often jumps up onto my lap. But not for long and not entirely out of affection. From my lap, she can see more, and sometimes the tail suddenly flicks up to DEFCON 1, especially if a dangerous pheasant is sighted.

  I often wonder what goes through her head. Does she live in an eternal present? She certainly has memory. When we walk down the Long Track to the bottom, Maidie sniffs the grass verges with great concentration. But when we turn to walk back up and round to the farmhouse, the little dog stops every twenty yards or so and turns, looking back to where we have been. Standing very still, she stares back down the track. What is she waiting for? What is about to appear? I suppose we are not so dissimilar, my dog and I.

  23 May

  On 23 May 1940, history was being made, lost and found. After German panzer divisions had smashed through French lines and raced into the valley of the Somme, they began to encircle the British Expeditionary Force and some retreating French troops clustering around Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk. Defeat was inevitable, surrender likely. France would fall in only a few days and the evacuation of the BEF from the beaches of Dunkirk would begin. Shock and panic ricocheted around the walls of the War Office in London. Thirteen days before, Winston Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, and his famous call of ‘Action This Day!’ rang around Whitehall, and directives of all sorts flew out of Downing Street.

  On the same day as French resistance was crumbling, its army surrendering en masse, the manager of the Commercial Bank of Scotland, 10 High Street, Selkirk, sat down at his desk. Each morning began with the same ritual, as he opened the post with his chief clerk in attendance. There was an unusual, official-looking communication, perhaps something that caused the manager to raise an eyebrow. A directive from the War Office required immediate action – this day! No quantities of paper or other combustible materials should be stored in the attics or upper storeys of buildings because they presented a greater risk of incendiary damage from the bombing raids that
would surely come.

  The stately offices of the Commercial Bank had once been those of the town clerk of the Royal and Ancient Burgh of Selkirk and the manager knew that there were many boxes of old documents in the attic and upper floors of the bank. An odd-job man was found and told to carry the boxes and sacks down into the back garden and burn the lot. Forthwith.

  Next door to the bank was Masons’ Tearooms, where Bruce and Walter Mason were bakers, making scones, teabreads, Selkirk bannocks, cakes and biscuits. Out of the bakehouse window, they saw plumes of smoke billowing upwards and went outside to investigate. Both were aghast to see four hundred years and more of the town’s history going up in flames. Bruce and Walter pulled out some papers not yet alight and saw that they were from the sixteenth century and had royal seals attached. Rushing into the Commercial Bank, they pleaded with the manager for permission to go through the papers that were left and preserve what seemed to be important documents. This was summarily refused on the surprising grounds of confidentiality, a characteristic reflex of a bank manager.

  Undeterred, Bruce and Walter resorted to covert action. Having given the odd-job man half a crown, they asked him to bring down the sacks and boxes of papers very slowly. Having quickly sorted through what had survived, they managed to save thousands of documents from the flames and secretly stored them in the bakehouse loft in flour bags, tea chests and barrels.

  Perhaps they feared prosecution, perhaps they had breached some law or other. The Official Secrets Act? Even after the end of the war, the Mason brothers told no one that the documentary history of Selkirk and the farms around it was hidden amongst the bags of dried fruit, candied peel and wheaten flour stored above the tearooms. By the late 1950s, they decided that the coast was clearing and the brothers agreed to let Walter Elliot into the secret. The three men began the vast task of deciphering what had been saved. The documents turned out to be a revelation, as though a brilliant sun had suddenly risen over a dark landscape.

  On 31 August 1531, the geography and pattern of ownership of our farm and the land around it was laid out in a document written out by the priest ‘William Brydin vicar in Selkirk’. Philip Scot of Edschaw [Headshaw, a farm near Ashkirk] made a will in favour of his son, Robert, leaving him the farm that lies immediately to the south of ours:

  His place commonly called Hartvodburn [Hartwoodburn] after his decease, the which place Philip Scot holds in tack of [rented from]our lady Margaret Queen of Scots lying in Ettrick Forest in the sheriffdom of Selkirk between the kirk lands of the most reverend archbishop of the diocese Glasgow, viz. Synton and Edschaw on the south and west, le Myddilsteid [now Middlestead] on the west, Haning [Haining] on the north and Selkirk Common on the east.

  Astonishingly, all of the farms and properties still exist in precisely the same configuration. The major change is the subsequent passing on of ownership of the royal hunting ground (of which our farm was once part) of the Ettrick Forest and of the land owned by the Archbishop of Glasgow. Only thirty years before the Reformation swept over Scotland and broke up the great church estates, this document shines a brilliant light on the late medieval landscape around us.

  Another document dated 24 January 1536 (or 1537, to take account of changes in reckoning the calendar) animates the map, giving details of rural crime, of accusations of unwitting reset. It reads like the legal residue of harsh words, perhaps even altercations. The accuser was our predecessor at Hartwoodburn:

  James Bradfutt, Baillie of Selkirk showed how it was alleged by William Scott in Hartvod [Hartwoodburn] that the same [William or John?] was selling stolen skins openly in the market having no suspicion the skins were stolen . . . and that the said William Edmont frequented the market of Selkirk . . . to sell openly his merchandise without suspicion . . . and it should not turn to him in prejudice and slander.

  These extracts are from the earliest documents, written by priests and notaries from 1511 onwards. After the Reformation of the 1560s the same men became lawyers, in practice if not by qualification, because they could write and knew the legal formulae. They also dabbled in banking and insurance, as well as sorting complicated cases involving slander and stolen goods.

  Before Walter Mason died in 1988, he asked Walter Elliot to take the documents for safekeeping. Having no immediate family, he feared they might find their way onto another bonfire. Some documents were so dry and brittle they crumbled to the touch, others were damp and mouldy. But all were precious. With thousands of records and handwritten books, Walter Elliot sought professional advice. Dr John Imrie, the recently retired Keeper of Scottish Records, spent two days meticulously going through the collections before announcing that they were of immense national importance, especially the sixteen Protocol Books. These were the core legal notebooks kept by priests and notaries from 1511 to 1668 and they recorded land transfers, disputes, marriage contracts, wills and inheritances, letters and commands from the king and much of consuming interest. Nowhere else in Scotland had continuous records of the life of a community survived in such detail and quantity.

  What became known as the Walter Mason Papers were also important culturally. Written at first in late medieval Latin and early forms of Scots in shorthand (to save paper), they showed how the language changed and developed over almost three centuries, how land use altered and how communities, especially town, country and the aristocracy, interacted. But most striking of all, they give occasional voice to ordinary people, the vast majority who lived in and around Selkirk, those who are very rarely heard before the late nineteenth century. All of this, the very best, most pungent sort of history, was painstakingly transcribed from pages and notebooks, frayed at the edges, soggy with damp and mould, nibbled by mice and partly burned by English invaders, Border Reivers and the manager of the Commercial Bank of Scotland in Selkirk.

  24 May

  On the wall of my office hangs a framed letter from a king, signed and sealed by him, promising to protect our farm. In late 1542, James V of Scotland wrote to the Abbey of Kelso with a warning. Written in Scots, here is a partial translation:

  Baillie of the Regality of Kelso and your deputies. It is our will and we charge that ye, bie yourself, your kin, friends, servants and portioners, not nae others that ye may let make onie invasion, skaith [damage], harm or displeasure to our burgh of Selkirk or inhabitants there of bounds and freedoms of the same in onie ways in time coming bie eating and destruction of corn sown or other ways [otherwise] but bie order and process of law discharging you thereof notwithstanding onie other of our private writings in the contrary. Because we have ordanit and command . . . to ablat(?) on you in our . . . in this time of trouble as you be required . . . Given at Edinburgh the last day of August and of our reign XXIX years.

  The king’s reference to troubled times reflected more than trouble. Earlier in August, Henry VIII of England had sent a small army north to prick James into supporting him in his break with the Pope in Rome. But the Scots king remained resolutely Catholic, burning Protestant martyrs below the walls of Edinburgh Castle. A few days before the letter was sent to Kelso Abbey on 31 August 1542, a battle erupted nearby. At Hadden Rig the Earl of Huntly scattered a small English army, but this success was blighted by farcical failure further to the west. At Solway Moss a huge Scottish force was defeated by a much smaller and much better led English army. Only a month later James V turned his face to the wall and died. He was only thirty years old.

  From reading through the thousands of entries in the Protocol Books and piecing together their patchy geography, it is clear that the Deer Park and all of our grass parks in the East Meadow and near the farmhouse, down to the boundary of the Common Burn, formed part of Selkirk’s South Common. And since the Abbey of Kelso owned the land immediately to the east, it seems likely that it was our corn that their men despoiled. The Haining and the southern part of Hartwoodburn Farm, what lies on the far side of the old Roman road, appear to fall outside the common. So it was not actually our corn that the Kelso men stole
, it belonged to the burgh of Selkirk. Which is still annoying.

  25 May

  After another warm and restless night during which I heard heavy rain, the morning scents were intense. Not only were there the sweet pleasures of the stand of poplars at the corner of the Haining Wood, there was the lush and earthy odour of burgeoning grass, especially on the margins of the tracks where it is not grazed. And in the thorn hedge a single dog rose had opened. Its perfume was pungent, magical, a thing worth getting out of bed for.

  Walking out to the East Meadow to check on the mares, the mini Shetlands and the Old Boys, not something that needs to be done so much in the summer, I could see they all had plenty of grass.

  When Maidie and I came back up the track by the meadow, our neighbour was shaking out bags of hard feed for his sheep and cows. That surprised me. Perhaps he has stock that won’t keep. The bull was with his cows and he greeted us with a mighty roar, more like deep trumpeting, that rang around the valley. And, my goodness, what a pair of balls that king of cattle has swinging under him.

  26 May

  Grey sheets of welcome rain blew down from the western hills this morning.

  27 May

  I feel we stand at a crossroads in our history. After years of ineptitude and muddle, our people long for strong or at least clear leadership to navigate us safely through hard times. Of course, the most pressing issue of all is the rescue of our dying planet. Everything else is a long way second.

  My craven instinct is to turn inwards and look backwards, and it is difficult to resist. On the farm we do all we can in the fight to save our planet from ruin. We have planted three hundred trees, use no pesticides or artificial fertilisers, avoid long journeys, have put up thirty-three solar panels and with our mile of hedging encouraged the return of many animals, principally birds. They feed on the flies that in turn feed off the horse muck. We could no doubt do more, and it feels like a piddling effort in the face of China belching out kilotons of foul pollution every day, but what other option do we have?