5 June
After a night of prolonged rain, sometimes so heavy that I could hear it drumming on the slates, we woke to a thick drizzle. June is when it should be possible to unwrap, but here we were wrapping up against the miserable weather, me in a hat and waterproofs and Maidie in her pink coat, cuffing at it with a front paw. Lush-leaved and dripping, the land looked like a temperate jungle after the monsoon, and in the warming woods of the Hare plantation on the far side of the valley streamers of mist were drifting up into the low clouds. Washed off by the heavy rain, the tiny white petals of thorn tree blossom fringed the puddles of the Top Track like lace collars.
History has tapped us on the shoulder once more. Where the Long Track turns towards the mound of Selkirk Castle and the town beyond, Rory has found more coins. Two carry the head of Edward I, one minted in London, the other in York, and both represent more buttressing evidence of a large army camp on 25 July 1301. A further find is a rare Irish coin with the head of King John, an instant cue for thoughts of Robin Hood, the Merrie Men and the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham. What makes these muddy coins sing of the past is not only the context we have been able to assemble around them, but something more magical. Before Rory dug them out of the soil, the last pair of hands to touch them belonged to the man who lost them seven centuries ago.
The fields have given up more secrets and the pieces of a jigsaw are beginning to make a picture. Having found an ancient weight from a set of balance scales by the side of the Long Track, where it crosses a stream, Rory has found another relic of medieval business, of bargains struck and hands shaken. His metal detector buzzed loudly when he uncovered a lid from an early set of cup-weights. These were used to weigh bullion and other valuable items needing precision. On the lid is the French fleur-de-lis design. Did this belong to a merchant who had travelled a long way to the borders of Scotland? Ghosts are walking through this morning’s mist.
6 June
Lit by a hazy, hesitant sun, the subtle colours of the temperate jungle are glowing this morning. Perhaps most striking are the perfectly ridged leaves of the many beeches in the hedge by the Top Track, and their soft and quiet beauty is counterpointed by the yellow lichen on the branches. As Maidie sniffs the long grass on the verge for last night’s mice, voles and rabbits, I take my time and remember summers long ago when I was surrounded by loud, neon, wholly artificial, glorious technicolor.
In the school holidays, as young as fourteen or fifteen, long before there was any legislation to prevent it, I worked as a second man. In the middle of Kelso there was a wonderful Willie Wonka factory that made lemonade. In the main building a clinking, clunky production line of empty glass bottles shoogled unsteadily around a network that looked like a giant version of a model railway until they arrived at the spoots, the point where they were filled with fizzy, vividly coloured lemonade of apparently endless variety. Labels were then gummed on for Limeade, Raspberryade, Cherryade, Orangeade and many other ades. There was American Cream Soda, something called Palletta (very like Limeade) and, the biggest seller of all, colourless Plain Lemonade.
In summer the Borders worked up a great thirst for these sweet concoctions and, as a second man, my job was to help unload the heavy wooden cases of lemonade from the delivery lorry parked outside cafes, shops, pubs and hotels. Our products were very popular – and very good – and we seemed to make weekly journeys with repeat orders, picking up crates of empties in an age before toxic, throwaway plastic, and replacing them with the neon colours from the factory. Splits were popular at agricultural shows, weddings and summer functions. These were small bottles with metal caps that could be levered off and the nectar sucked out with straws.
The secrets of the lemonade factory were kept in the still room. A loft space reached by a long, wooden staircase, it was presided over by two ladies in white laboratory coats. From large, squishy containers of concentrated flavours which had probably never seen a raspberry, an orange or a lime, they mixed potions in the right proportions. These magical mysteries were masterminded by Margaret Allen, a great beauty with classic 1950s film star looks and immense, genuine charm. Always with impeccable make-up and lipstick and maybe a hint of perfume (or was it the concentrate?), she dazzled the awkward, gawky teenagers on the factory floor, me included.
Just like the smell of newly cut grass, white marquees and men in shirtsleeves, for me lemonade means summer – preferably warm lemonade, drunk through a straw.
7 June
Driving to Berwick-upon-Tweed for an early London train (that turned out to be late, as usual), I passed through the tiny hamlet of Carham, a few hundred yards on the other side of the English border. No more than eight houses, a church and a farm steading, it still has a red phone box by the roadside. As I slowed down I noticed that irony is alive and well in North Northumberland. The red phone box had a sign on it: Carham Visitor Centre.
8 June
Last night and this morning’s heavy rain followed a fortnight of mostly wet weather. At the corner of the Bottom and the Top Tracks, where the larch, the Norways and the American red oaks were parked, there is a riot of fecundity. As each tree reaches upwards to compete for the light, there is doubtless an invisible underground wrestling match going on amongst the intertwined roots. In the damp darkness all are snaking backwards into the rich, loamy bank at the foot of the Top Wood ridge. There they will spread and suck in all the goodness they can in order to help with the struggle above ground. The larch is tallest and this morning I could see hundreds of new lime-green cones bursting with vigour on its elegant branches. They are perfect, these triumphs of natural symmetry, each one apparently identical. I like the chaos in the corner, and all of the competitors seem to be thriving more or less in this perfect growing weather. But now we need some sun and warmth.
9 June
And this morning we have it: sun, warmth, the ground drying in a gentle breeze and the grass growing before our very eyes. Such scenes of peaceful fertility were often little more than a fond wish in the Borders five hundred years ago. I have been looking through the Protocol Books preserved by the Mason brothers and they make grim reading; inevitably there are lists of disputes, and of ruin and death in the century of warfare, and raiding that disfigured the landscape after the disaster at Flodden in 1513. But occasionally there is a smile, a flush of recognition, a document that springs off the page, one that speaks pungently of the texture of the old life in the Border countryside.
I would like to have met Gibbie Hately. He was a minor landowner and farmer who lived in a peel tower at Gattonside, near Melrose, about eight miles from here. A protection against the raiders and thieves who disfigured society for almost a century, many peel towers were built in the sixteenth century, and behind the barmekin wall around them people and stock took refuge when raiding parties struck.
Made in 1547, Gibbie’s will is distinguished by a clear sense of a life lived with relish in the first half of the sixteenth century. After reading it I felt I would recognise him leaning over a five-bar gate, looking at his lambs of a summer evening, and I would have liked him. The original document is written in wonderfully expressive Border Scots, the language Gibbie Hately spoke, and it is speckled with words and expressions long lost, so here is a translation:
To Geordie Basten, for the great trouble he took with my plant land when I could not attend to it myself and the expensive drive to the market of Stirling for which he could not be prevailed upon to take anything – no, not so much as the price of a single thousand of plants [probably kale]; to him I leave two mounds of turfs [peats], two rows of drying peats from Rob’s bog and a lypit-spade and a flaughter-spade [both peat-cutting implements] for cutting the same.
To Patie Dickieson for his kindness and attention even though he had gotten a thumb cut off at Elwan Bridge [near Lanark] by his brother in a duel; despite this, he had his men sow the Cotland barley and the broom seed on the face of the brae, the plants in the Abbot’s Meadow and a few oats in the east corn
er of the Quarterland and a capful of linseed [to grow flax] in the Harper’s yard; To him, I leave an oat riddle with the iron rim, my three best weights and the broom seed basket, my fish spear and my fishing tackle.
To Andrew Fisher of the West Houses, for helping me when I fell into Hamilton’s Burns with holding the Quaich too often to my head [getting drunk] on the Stears [?], on the Thursday evening of a fair day. I leave him my hazel staff with the horn head, my best bonnet and hazen [stockings] and the new shoes that Willie Fair brought me from Sandy Inglis of Selkirk, made of good buck’s hide and the soles of the same made from [the pelt of] the big boar shot by the Laird of Faldshope; also my farming oozlles [utensils], and snuff-horn, trimmed with silver.
To kind Adam Ormiston, the hangman of Edinburgh, for helping my father out of prison the night before he was to be hanged for killing one of the king’s deer on the Cauldshiels Moor and the king’s forester of the Melrose end of the loch who was very keen to make him his prisoner for killing the beast he had no right to. To him, I leave my great-grandfather’s silver tankard and one quaich which my great-grandmother received from Laird Maitland for helping nourish his brother Robert. Also my father’s gold ring in which [is set] the emerald he promised to Adam Ormiston if he could slip him out of the window of the prison unseen, which he faithfully did for the love he bore my father.
To the Laird of Langhshaw, I bequeath my broadsword and my dirk. To the Laird of Hislop, all my hawks and hounds. To Laird Usher, my brother-in-law of Fastenfield, a hundred marks Scots and my riding horse and two older horses I took from the lads of the Border when they came one night to harry me. To my brother-in-law commonly called Longsword of Faldonside, I leave two hundred marks Scots. To the Abbot and monks of Melrose [Abbey], I leave four hundred marks Scots, to pray for my soul and the welfare of my son, Jock. To Jock I leave a thousand marks Scots, one Cotland [about five acres] and one Quarterland [26 acres, a quarter of a husbandland], the Abbot’s Meadows and the old peel [tower] which I hope in God he will keep from all the English loons as his forbears have done before him.
This was clearly a will made during what are known as the Riding Times, a long period of raiding and warfare that lasted until 1603 and the Union of the Crowns and even beyond. The criminal society of the reivers coloured almost every codicil in Gibbie’s last testament. But the final sentence made me laugh.
10 June
This morning sunlight flooded the valley. It was still, cloudless and hot at 7 a.m. Beyond the old Roman road, the fields cant to the north as the contour lines climb up to the southern ridge and I could see that my neighbour had cut the lush grass park beyond Hartwoodburn steading. The green rows reminded me of braided hair. Three tractors rumbled past the bottom of the Long Track, each towing the machinery needed to lift the rows of cut grass and bale them for winter silage. Gleaming in the sun, the contractors’ huge John Deere tractors seemed new. It cheered me to see the land produce its fourth crop of the year, after the spring lambs, the calves and our winter store of freshly cut logs.
This afternoon I hauled all of our old and not-gleaming equipment out of the Wood Barn. With great difficulty, I managed to re-inflate the sagging tyres of the quad bike and the grass cutter we use to top the paddocks, but I could start neither of them. All winter they have stood idle and unused, happed up in old horse rugs, and I suspected that the petrol left in their tanks had grown stale. I splashed in some fresh fuel from the jerrycans. Still nothing, dead as a post. A mechanic needs to be summoned, but I should avoid that by keeping the quad bike going through the winter with logging jobs. There are plenty.
11 June
Last night I walked a ghost road. Spear-straight, the Long Track points due north through the Doocot Field and then abruptly disappears into a wood planted across its line. It then seems to turn sharply to the east towards the Georgian mansion of the Haining, but the trees and their planting told me this was a later diversion. Beyond the darkening wood, at the foot of a sloping field where an unexpected clump of purple rhodendra grew, I could see the line of another road. It seemed to me that the Long Track had once joined it. Like a holloway, it is steeply embanked on either side and it aims west to the Ettrick Valley. I could make out the evening shimmer of the river.
The western section is broad and a place where carts could pass each other. But on the road-bed there stands a line of mature hardwoods: oak, ash, sycamore and beech. By their girths and the toppled debris of even older trees that once stood alongside them, I guessed they were planted at least two centuries ago. The old estate map of the 1790s shows a line of hardwoods but no road.
As I walked through the long grass east towards Selkirk, I could see that the line of the holloway ran directly towards the West Port, the gateway into the town. Modern housing has obscured any junction. Walter Elliot told me that I had walked all that remains of the old medieval road that runs west up the Ettrick Valley and that it probably fell out of use in the 1770s. The trees agree with that judgement.
In 1757, John Pringle, a merchant who had made himself wealthy in Madeira, came to live at the Haining. He extended the policies, planting woods and creating gardens, and at that time he may have wished to move the old road into Selkirk further to the north, where it runs now. Once again the rude mechanicals were kept at a distance. And, once again, they were returning to rediscover their history.
With his metal detector and instinct for the lie – or the truth – of the land, Rory Low has confirmed the nature of the road. His discoveries have made it come to life. A Henry VIII sovereign penny (so-called because it shows the king enthroned) and an Elizabeth I sixpence are surely the first of many coins to come up out of the road-bed as he sweeps its line. On busy market days, farmers led carts and drove animals, the high banks keeping them safely corralled, others walked, carrying their produce on their backs, and some rode. And occasionally they dropped their hard-won coins. The Protocol Books add atmosphere. In Selkirk’s taverns and ale-houses, farmers took a drink after the bargaining in the marketplace and the baillies, the town officials, regulated the price of ale by chalking it on the doors of each hostelry. And in an age long before standard measures, they agreed on the size of the Selkirk Stoup, a jug of ale. Maybe some, like Gibbie Hately, had to be fished out of the Ettrick on their unsteady evening journey back up the valley.
When I walked down this old road, beside its ghosts, their chatter blowing on the freshening breeze, I noticed something odd. Where the banks are highest, there was a bend around what seemed like a grassy mound. Rory is much intrigued by this and wants to get the long grass cut so that his detector can find a clearer signal. Was this a tower like Gibbie Hately’s? It would have commanded long vistas west up the valley and over the hills beyond.
It was gloaming by the time I walked along the Top Track and I could see the lights in the farmhouse kitchen twinkling.
12 June
A wild north wind riffles the long grass like the waves of a choppy sea, and the new leaves are turned inside out, showing their light undersides. The skies are dark, rain threatens and it is cold.
13 June
Our book festival in Melrose began in a steady downpour that persisted until 7 p.m. There were wonderful sessions with Neil Oliver and Kate Humble, but neither were even close to full and that vexed me. In the rain, people don’t want to turn out and sit in a damp marquee, no matter how warming the words of these brilliant people.
14 June
This morning the world shifted on its axis and slipped once more through a crack in time. Two miles to the north, on the flanks of Peat Law, I saw three hundred and more riders led by a standard bearer, his flag streaming behind him in the breeze. Lit by the streaky sun, the grey horses stood out as this cavalry force climbed the hill to the Three Brethren. Cairns that mark the marches of the North Common, they were built centuries ago on the summit of the hill. There, the riders stop and sing, remembering a time out of mind. ‘Hail Smiling Morn’ rings out over the glow of the heather hills. �
��At whose bright presence, darkness flies away, FLIES AWAY!’ For at least five hundred years, men from Selkirk have saddled their horses to patrol these uplands and defend their rights and their common. From Windy Gates, I could make out a long, streekit line zigzagging before turning north to the cairns. For a long time, I watched history come alive, much moved by the sight of the largest mounted cavalcade in Europe.
It is Common Riding Day, the first Friday after the second Monday in June. Last night, the traditions began to roll back the years when the Burleymen walked the streets of the town. Burley refers not to stature but to statute. It is the phrase ‘Burgh Law’ rubbed smooth by the centuries. The Crying of the Burley ends with a proclamation, a call for the townspeople to assemble in the morning to ride around the marches or support those who will. It ends with a stirring exhortation that carries the hint of a threat: ‘There will be all these, and a great many more and all will be ready to start at the sound of the Second Drum.’
They begin early. At 4 a.m. the Rouse Parade of flutes and drums tours the town to wake the Standard Bearer and the Provost, and everyone else. Two hours later, after much ceremony, the First Drum sounds and all are out on the streets, dressed in their best, bedecked with rosettes, and marching. Linking arms in long lines abreast, the foot parade stops at certain places and sings songs that are only ever sung there on Common Riding morning. It is the soundtrack of centuries of continuity and a community coming close together to remember its shared history, celebrating nothing more, or less, than itself. At 6.30 a.m., on a narrow balcony, the burgh flag is ‘bussed’, blessed, the Standard Bearer installed with a red sash, and awkward, time-honoured Victorian phrases uttered. Reading from a script taped inside his bowler hat, the young man who has just been appointed to lead the cavalcade promises to ride the marches and return the flag to the Provost ‘unsullied and untarnished’. It never is, even on a rain-soaked morning.
The Secret History of Here Page 18
