The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  When the riders return, clattering up the old toll road into the town, something unique and magical takes place. Flags are everywhere, those of the craft guilds, the ex-servicemen, the exiles. On a dais in the market square more than a thousand people watch as all of the standard bearers cast their flags. To the accompaniment of the silver band, each man performs a similar ritual. Planting his feet apart for balance, he begins to wave the flag slowly from side to side, then behind each shoulder, pulling it forward. Squatting down on his haunches, he then rotates the flag in wide circles over his head before standing up to perform the last movement as music stops. It is spine-tingling, very moving, stirring ancient resonances, and it is seen nowhere else.

  After all the flags are cast, the band plays a lament, the ‘Liltin’’. A friend once whispered a question during the two-minute silence that followed, ‘Is this for the fallen of two world wars?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but also for those who fell at Flodden.’ Five hundred years ago. Memories are long and do not fade. When we came to live on the farm permanently, I went to the casting of the colours with an old friend I had played rugby with. Craggy, hard-bitten and no-nonsense, he had tears in his eyes when the ‘Liltin’’ was played. ‘Aye,’ he said, perhaps to himself, ‘we come from nothing small.’

  15 June

  Late back home from the joys of the book festival and a day when the sun had shone, I drove in the half-dark of the summer up the Long Track. Suddenly a big, very white barn owl lifted into the air. Flying first to my left over the grass park, it crossed in front of the headlights, only a few beats of a metre-long wing-spread taking the great bird higher. The owl then flew up to my right before circling over Windy Gates. It was playing with me, and welcoming me home.

  16 June

  Today is my sixty-ninth birthday, a number I find hard to credit, never mind absorb. Perhaps I shouldn’t. It is only arithmetic and I am blessed to be alive and in reasonable health, despite my serial excesses. My dad died of a heart attack when he was barely seventy and if I pass his mark I shall be happy. On the way up the Bottom Track with Maidie, I noticed three purple foxgloves, their trumpets beginning to open in the morning light. I am lucky to be alive.

  17 June

  On a blustery, puddle-splashing morning, my three-year-old grand-daughter knocked on the window of her house as I passed. Pulling on her pink wellies, pink hat and flower-covered waterproof, she wanted to walk the Long Track with me and Maidie. About halfway down, I pointed to some animal tracks in the mud. Perhaps one set might have been roe deer, I explained, as we hunkered down like North American Indian trackers, and the other might have been badgers snuffling about in the darkness before dawn. ‘No, Bada, polar bears and penguins.’ If the climate keeps changing rapidly, the wee one might come to be right. Reindeer instead of roe deer.

  Moments later, mostly to herself, Grace began to sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, how I wonder what you are’. As she walked, doing all of the actions, singing the first verse over again, I don’t think she saw her grandpa, her bada, pull his hankie out of his pocket.

  18 June

  In the Doocot Field, more mystery has risen up through the grass. Rory Low has found a strange sort of lead shot. Spheres larger than a musket ball have been cut into quarters like segments of a deadly orange and it does not seem as though they have ever been fired. Perhaps they were intended as fragments of canister shot, a kind of shrapnel fired from cannon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was used to devastating effect at the Battle at Culloden in 1746, as the clansmen charged the government artillery. On a very misty morning, out with Maidie on the Long Track, it occurred to me that this mystery might have something to do with mist and the quartered lead shot was the ghost of a grisly story.

  In the War of the Three Kingdoms – thoughtlessly, inaccurately and chauvinistically known for years as the English Civil War – Scots played crucial roles and one of the turning points of the long conflict took place as cavalrymen crossed our farm. Charismatic and tactically brilliant, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, had formed an alliance with the MacDonald clan leader Alasdair MacColla and together they defeated the armies of the Covenant, the allies of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary Party in six battles, most of them in the mountains of the north. But by the late summer of 1645 the clansmen had decided to follow MacColla westward to attack Clan Campbell lands and Montrose was forced to march south to the Borders to raise more troops loyal to Charles I. The recruitment drive was not successful and, to make matters worse, a large Covenanter army had tracked the royalists’ movements.

  Early in the morning of 13 September, our little valley was blanketed in a dense mist. To the north of Howden Hill, on the flat ground by the Ettrick at Philiphaugh, Montrose’s shrinking army had camped. Only about a thousand strong, they had dug ditches to defend their position and their officers had billeted themselves in Selkirk, about a mile away. All were entirely unaware that Sir David Leslie’s army was approaching fast from the east, hidden by the mist. Royalist scouts reported no enemy activity, presumably because they could scarcely see more than a few yards in front of themselves. Mist muffles sound, but if any royalist riders had ridden down the Long Track from Philiphaugh, they would surely have heard movement along the old Roman road.

  Suddenly and without warning, Leslie’s forces bypassed Selkirk and charged in a frontal attack on the royalist position by the Ettrick. Montrose was roused and he rode hard from the town to marshal his meagre forces. At first his Irish regiment repulsed assaults, but neither they nor their commander realised that Leslie had sent two thousand cavalry to outflank them and attack from the rear.

  On the old Roman road at the foot of the Long Track, unseen and unheard in the morning mist, their pistols loaded, their buglers silent, the squadrons of horsemen cantered over the still-hard surface. Sound carries over Howden Hill and they will have heard the thunder of battle on the other side, the shouts of men, the discharge of guns and the clash of steel. Hidden by the hill, they cantered down our little valley, turned north and formed up at the foot of the steep slope. Then they splashed across the Ettrick, kicked their horses into the gallop and their charge roared across the fields. Taken in the rear, the royalists were attacked from all sides, rolled up and routed. Surrounded by thirty of his own cavalry, Montrose cut his way out of the encircling Covenanters and fled into the hills.

  Col. Manus O’Cahan’s Irish regiment was persuaded to surrender in return for their lives, and then immediately betrayed. ‘Jesus and no quarter!’ was the baleful, bloodlusting cry and, at the insistence of the Covenanting ministers, the popish Irish were cut down, as were three hundred camp followers, many of them women and children. The nearby place name of Slain Men’s Lea remembers this cruel, cynical and soulless act of senseless slaughter. Following a perverted logic, these clerics thought they flew on the wings of Heaven, doing the bidding of the Lord by ridding what they called the Godly Commonwealth of these idolators, but in any recognisable reality they were, in fact, barbarous butchers. As with Isis and the Taliban, the distance between what they believed they were doing and the horror of what actually went on was and is unbridgeable.

  Perhaps Rory has found the remains of a skirmish in the mist. Royalist scouts did engage some of Leslie’s outriders and perhaps the quartered lead spheres were dropped in a melee. Soldiers did carry spare lead to cast their own musket and pistol balls.

  The morning of 13 September 1645 was not the last time history rumbled across our farm and its fields, but in the centuries that followed much less blood was spilt on its stones.

  19 June

  Very surprisingly the Protocol Books are silent, making no mention of the battle and the slaughter that followed at Philiphaugh. Instead they continue to record the detail of domestic life. Many of the entries are written in a rich and vivid Scots, what was clearly the language of all who lived in and around Selkirk, masters as well as servants. Not until much later was social class given away by accent. I have translate
d much of the Scots but tried to preserve the syntax so that it is just possible, across four centuries, to hear people talking.

  When Bruce Mason died in 1963, his attic was found to be crammed with books and objects of all kinds and from many periods. Jostling for space with Neolithic flint arrowheads, Roman pottery, Chinese snuff mulls and French glass paperweights were many books, some of them of great antiquity. Buried in the magpie hoard were two hundred pages from a previously unknown Selkirk Protocol Book, whose entries dated from 1557 to 1575. There were also folders of random pages that took the story of the town and the farms around it into the seventeenth century.

  In the summer of 1569, Selkirk was simmering in iniquity. On 16 July, the Court Book entry reads:

  The inquest aforesaid finds that the provost and baillies does not their duties concerning their office in suffering a multitude of whoremongers, whores, and their common oppressors to remain within the town in respect that they were delated [reported – in the sense of being informed against] and ordains the said provost to put them out of the town according to their duty and if they suffer them to remain unpunished the said provost and baillies are in default thereof.

  It is striking that a small community should have sustained not one or two but ‘a multitude of whores, and their common oppressors’, or pimps. Perhaps fewer than a thousand lived in sixteenth-century Selkirk and my suspicion is that on market days in particular more were offering their services openly than was thought seemly. Despite the glares of the local ministers and church elders.

  In the decades following the Reformation of the 1560s, what became known as the Parish State had come into being, with the burgh and the Kirk overseeing almost every aspect of life, public and domestic. In January 1572, James Kerr was charged with ‘lying in fornication with Janette Chisholm and the said James was bound and obliged never to have melling [intimacy] with her except he make completely and solemnly the holy bond of matrimony with her’.

  Marriages were not only insisted upon, they were also patched up. David Stoddard was accused of evicting his wife, Margaret Scott, but he ‘declared that he had never deported or put her forth from his house and likewise was ready to receive her and use her as his wife to his power in all agreement’.

  Other vices were recognised but regulated. Gambling for money was discouraged:

  The which day [the entry is, in fact, undated] the whole community has ordained that no young men or other indwellers such as honest men’s bairns or servants who have the credit of other men’s goods play at cards or dice, except for ale, in time coming whether within the burgh or without under the pain of remaining in the tollbooth [prison] in irons or in the stocks.

  Dated 26 May 1591, a strange contract was entered into:

  Thomas Kerr, writer [lawyer] in Selkirk promises his brother James in Whitmuir and John in Whitmuirhall that, from the feast of Whitsunday, 1592, he will not drink in any place in Selkirk or other places where he has to pay silver or money except in his own house where he is allowed three chopins [three Scots half pints, more than two litres] per day. Also any drink in his work service with his master where he shall get his food and drink for nothing. If Thomas bides by the contract he will get the grey russet breeks [trousers] which James was presently wearing and the white fustian doublet which John was presently wearing.

  Behind this entry there seems to lie a long story of broken promises, alcoholism and penury, as well as a society that clearly consumed a quantity of beer. Part of the reason for this was the variable quality of drinking water, and it may have been the case that Selkirk ale was not strong. But its consumption was clearly bankrupting Thomas and his behaviour was exasperating his brothers. There is no record of the beer-swilling lawyer after this date, but John did go on to set up a legal practice and kept a Protocol Book between 1629 and 1633.

  20 June

  My neighbour has begun to cut the lush grass parks on either side of the Long Track to make hay. The air is heavy with the scent of all that green goodness.

  21 June

  This is the day of midsummer, the longest, the time when the sun climbs to its zenith and when in place of night there is the summer dim. In the small hours there was enough moonlight to see that the livery horses in the Tile Field were lying down. Flight animals, one often remains standing guard, watching for predators in the shadows. Horses always choose open ground to lie down, but how they decide which of their number should watch over them is mysterious, secret. The American author Jane Smiley once wrote that in a horse’s eye there are things beyond comprehension.

  Across the valley, green barley fields ripple in the breeze as Maidie and I walk out. Flowers carpet the grass parks: daisies, their tiny white petals tinged with crimson, buttercups egg-yolk yellow, and the white crowns of clover are everywhere. Yesterday Grace and I counted eleven sorts of wildflowers around her house, and one pansy that had self-seeded from her grannie’s pots. The wee one hunkers down to pick the daisies and presents them as gifts. My pockets are full of little dried-up blossoms and one sits at my elbow as I write this.

  When the sun begins to die in the west late tonight, I shall fire up my quad bike and go to the Bronze Age fort that dominates our valley so that I can watch it slip behind the hills of the Ettrick Forest. Perhaps ghosts will flit amongst the shadows of the trees, whispering of ten thousand midsummer eves.

  22 June

  From the summit of Soutra Hill, the watershed ridge between the Lothians and the Forth and the Tweed Valley, I gazed over the majesty of Creation. The midnight light in the north glowed dusky yellow as the unset sun moved slowly behind the mountains, just below the horizon, edging around the rim of the world to meet the morning. The vastness of the cloudless, pale-blue Heavens soared above me and dimmed towards the southern darkness.

  I was driving home from a book launch at Dunfermline Abbey. My old friend Gordon Brown and I have written a history of Fife, and four hundred people filled the old church to listen to us talk of history, of kings, saints, miners, weavers, Andrew Carnegie, North Sea oil and the uncertainties of the future. The abbey is a thin place where the veil between a long past and the present is no more than gossamer. Beneath the flagstones where I stood, Alexander III of Scotland is buried, his brains dashed and limbs mangled after a fall from his horse down Fife’s Pettycur cliffs on a stormy night in 1286. His death plunged Scotland into two centuries of war with England. Behind me was the tomb of the man who eventually succeeded Alexander, the saviour of Scotland, the victor of the battle for a nation at Bannockburn, Robert Bruce. And beyond the apse stand the remains of the shrine of Holy Margaret. A Saxon princess married to Malcolm III Canmore, a roaring, Gaelic-speaking, bearded king, she tamed the wildness of his warrior court and her piety earned her sainthood and enduring reverence. It was a privilege to speak there and listen for the long, faint echoes of Scotland’s past.

  The magnificent reach of the three Forth Bridges are our versions of the great churches, abbeys and cathedrals. The new Queensferry Crossing is elegant, monumental, like the flying buttresses at Dunfermline and the shattered spires of the ruined cathedral at St Andrews. Driving home, I had moved seamlessly between ages, between worlds, and to stop, stand on Soutra Hill and look back to the undying midnight sun, I thought of continuity in this cradle of Scotland, the lands on either shore of the Forth, of the generations that had passed into darkness and those that are to come. Up on the windy hill, perhaps for a fleeting moment, I could touch the edging light of eternity.

  Warmed by the soft sun of the morning, Maidie and I walked along the Top Track. I wondered if Walter Scott talked to his dog as much as I do. I hope so. Rounding the corner at Windy Gates, I saw a stoat skipping over the rows of cut hay-grass before disappearing into the safety of the hedge. The sweet scent of cut grass was already heavy in the air.

  23 June

  Until today we had no idea if the house martins were coming or going. At the end of May four arrived after the long flight from Africa and began to refurb
ish last year’s mud nests under the eaves above the porch. Ruthless colonisers, sparrows tried to take over these ready-made pods; to discourage them, we suspended a row of shiny washers on strings from the guttering. This contraption was supposed to discourage the sparrows and allow the more athletic martins to fly behind the dangling obstruction to reclaim their property. It did not work. Now we have a noisy, squabbling extended family of sparrows and no martins.

  But this morning I saw six flying at great speed around the farmhouse, the white stripe on their backs unmistakable. They swooped down to where the trickle from a broken stone drain makes mud on the side of the track and were scooping it up in their beaks. Nest-building! Better late than never. But where? Martins will not build nests on wooden buildings because the mud pellets do not stick to the smooth, painted surfaces. Only stone will do, and the only stone building is the old farmhouse. And I can find no sign of anything being built under the eaves or on the walls. Mysterious martins. But at least they are here and we have the daily joy of watching their aerobatics.