The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  27 July

  Cool morning rain rinsed the sticky humidity out of the air. All over Britain meteorological records have been tumbling. In the south of England the hottest day ever was recorded when temperatures climbed to 101 Fahrenheit in Cambridge. Edinburgh sweltered in 89 degrees, another record, while in the north-west of Scotland the night-time temperature was an uncomfortable 60 degrees. Here we had 86 Fahrenheit and a sweaty, sleepless 57 degrees during the night.

  But on this silent morning the air was fresh at last, the scent of the honeysuckle near the Wood Barn intense and at the top of the Bottom Track tiny, vivid, red raspberries have formed on the canes in the last few days, as if they had been growing in a greenhouse. Which, of course, they have. I tasted one and it was soft but not yet sweet. The birds will spot them soon.

  Streamers of mist clung to Newark Hill out to the west and the rounded summit of Huntly Hill looked as though summer snow had fallen. But then, moments later, the mist changed shape and, from clinging to the contours, it rose up and plumed the top like ice cream on a cone. Even with leaden rain clouds moving through and little light in the east, the land does not need the sun to look beautiful.

  28 July

  In 1708, the year when the first Jacobite rebellion failed, John Pringle returned to the Haining to contest the first general election to the parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He need not have bothered to make the long journey north from London since no other candidate stood against him. His lucrative appointment as Keeper of the Signet allowed Pringle to develop the big house at the Haining. It grew into a U-shaped three-storey building with a large attic and an architraved doorway with the Pringle arms set above it. Wide policies were set out around the loch. This was a palpable break with the past. Good land had always been grazed or cultivated, but, enriched by their cut of the Equivalent (although there were rows about this – the Scots had expected to be paid in coin and not in Treasury bills, paper money still a novelty outside London) and well-paid sinecures, landowners could afford to leave ground fallow around their houses, plant it with trees and shape vistas to please the eye.

  Several big houses were built in the Borders in the early eighteenth century and for one of them excellent records survive. William Adam designed Mellerstain House near Kelso for the Baillie family in 1724 and, as at the Haining, he had a loch created in the foreground of a magnificent view. To finish it, he did what many English landowners did and had a folly built on a nearby hill. But it was the design of the house that showed how social attitudes were shifting, along with the redrawing of the political map.

  Before the Union of 1707 and the creation of links with London, all Scots, rich and poor, titled and humble, spoke Scots and because of the influence of the Scottish Reformation and its emphasis on literacy and education, there was not a great gulf in social attitudes. But in the early eighteenth century they began to widen. In 1726 William Adam wrote to George Baillie, proposing to lower the level of the floor of the kitchen in the servants’ wing of the grand new house to five feet below the windowsills. This would be ‘so much better in that it prevents those in the kitchen and scullery from looking into the gardens’. Probably much influenced by her visits to London, Grizel Baillie set down thirty-seven different directions for her butler (‘You must keep yourself very clean’), as well as detailing a system of signs to let him know when to clear away one course of a meal and bring in another and so on. Scotland was beginning to break up into more sharply defined social classes. And gradually, wealthy, titled people would increasingly be educated in England (Eton and Oxford and other combinations) and, crucially, would no longer speak Scots to their servants or tenants but a version of received pronunciation. The gentry were growing apart, becoming even more not like us.

  With the clear-felling of the woodland at the south end of the loch, the Haining house has once again joined its policies, our farm. Something of the vision that the Pringle family had has been restored. This morning with Maidie I walked around the revealed landscape and its reopened vistas. And then suddenly – from nowhere, it seemed – I saw a woman in a white dress standing motionless by the lochside, gazing intently at the big house. Silence, stillness, a humid air, a freeze-frame. Suddenly a dog barked, Maidie answered, the woman turned, pulled up the collar of her long white coat and took a lead out of her pocket as a bay Labrador bounded along the path. For a few seconds I had seen a three-hundred-year-old tableau, a set-piece, not a Canaletto but more like Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego.

  The foresters were forced to knock down part of our boundary fence and now dog walkers are often seen in the Deer Park. We have horses there and plan to run cattle and sheep soon. We will need to fence it off securely for everyone’s safety. It will be very expensive, but unless we do it the ground will be overrun and become useless for grazing. Then it will be Et in Arcadia fui.

  30 July

  Trailing wide, symmetrical wakes across the morning water, four ducks paddled up the Haining Loch as though they were part of a perspective drawing, leading the eye to the south façade of the big house and the vanishing point beyond. From out of the shadows, a heron flew low over the stillness, its slow wingbeats seeming insufficient to keep the great bird in the air. As it banked before the shore to find a perch, an extending claw touched the surface and a ripple sent out its concentric circles.

  31 July

  By 1753, John Pringle had begun to obliterate history and rearrange geography. Having resigned his seat at Westminster to accept an appointment as a judge at the Court of Session in Edinburgh in 1729, he spent much more time at the Haining. No doubt well aware of the magnificence of the Baillie’s new house at Mellerstain and others who had raised grand mansions in the Borders, he was determined to alter the map. Ordinary people, travellers, riders, carters and others, were not what he wanted to see from his drawing-room windows and so the Long Track was summarily erased. Perhaps deploying his legal expertise and political experience, Pringle had the road from Selkirk to Hawick shifted to the east, to its present course. Instead of an easy start to a journey through the flat Doocot Field for carters with a full load, they were forced to climb the Loan, a very steep hill beyond the town’s South Port. And from there, there is another incline to the east of the Deer Park. The West Road from the Ettrick and Yarrow Valleys also came far too close to the Haining for Pringle’s liking and it too was diverted by a more awkward route.

  Selkirk was also too close, and the laird of the Haining bought up houses in the Peelgait, what is now Castle Street, and demolished them to create a cordon sanitaire between his family and the common herd.

  But, behind all of this topographical bullying, problems were lurking. Despite his preferment at Westminster and almost twenty-five years on the bench of the Court of Session, Pringle was in financial trouble. Debts had piled up so high that when Pringle died, his son Andrew refused to accept the estate as his inheritance. Instead, he sold it to his younger brother, also John Pringle. Like Mark the duellist, he had made a fortune in trade, as a merchant importing wine from Madeira.

  The sum of John Pringle the merchant’s ambition can be seen on a fascinating map, the first map of our farm and its surroundings to survive. A Plan of Haining Estate. John Pringle Esq, Proprietor, accurately suirvy’d [sic] & drawn by John Scot is in fact nothing of the kind. Both the Long Track and the Deer Park and its pale have been summarily and completely effaced, even though traces of them were certainly extant. Fanciful and banal field-names have been scattered over the landscape. Moss Sluice Park, Cow Park, Beach (presumably a scribal error for Beech, the sea being at some distance), Hill Park and most of the others have all long since disappeared for the excellent reason that, apart from Pringle and his surveyor, no one called them that. Our land is labelled as East Haining, the Pond Park, Ryegrass Park (a hint that the new strains of grass had been sown) and the Back Park. Parks also imply grazing land rather than any cultivation. The sole echo from the long past is a misappropriatio
n. The course of the Hartwoodburn is plotted more or less accurately, but called The Lake, a memory of the Lost Loch where hunter-gatherers fished, fowled and knapped their flints. Other names are entirely unhelpful, but probably more accurate, such as The Wood, the Meadow Spot or The Whins.

  Most striking is a long perimeter of what seem to be strips of woodland around the policies closest to the big house. Like a huge screen, it runs around the eastern boundary of the Deer Park, up the line of the Long Track, west of the Doocot Field, and then returns to the Haining slightly to the north. It resembles a vast suburban hedge designed to keep out prying eyes or unwelcome visitors. Pringle must surely have known that ‘haining’ is an old Scots word for a hedged enclosure.

  It seems to me that John Scot had drawn a fantasy landscape, what seems more like plans and aspirations. A later map, drawn almost exactly a hundred years after the first one, has reinstated all of the features that had been obliterated on paper. The Long Track has acquired an avenue of trees, the Deer Park has its old quarries accurately plotted and there is no sign of the vast hedge. It may not ever have been planted.

  By 1757 the medieval map was fading fast, as fields were enclosed and open grazing was shrinking as lairds used the law to take more and more acreage into private ownership. There is no note of even the modern limits of the Selkirk Common on Scot’s map. The Haining estate extended much further to the west, beyond the motte (spelled Moat and possibly represented as a version of a folly) to Howden Farm and the mouth of the Ettrick Valley.

  The map is intriguing not only for what it omits but also for what is included. In addition to Mongos Well (sic), St Mungo’s Well in the Deer Park, there are others plotted that seem to have disappeared. Most suggestive is a well precisely where Walter, Rory and I found the remains of an early medieval village in the Doocot Field. And by the Hartwoodburn there is a Castle Park and a Castle Ford. They seem not to relate to the motte. Perhaps the names are an invention, an attempt at creating a setting of fake antiquity in the shadow of a place that was genuinely ancient.

  Most surprising of all is another disappearance. On the 1757 map there is no trace of our farmhouse. When we had it rebuilt and extended, the masons took off the old roof and found under the slates adzed tree boughs rather than machine-cut rafters. And the pitch was very steep, usually a sign of a thatched roof and the need for faster run-off in wet weather. The house seemed to be older than the 1821 date we found on the sandstone plaque, but on this map there was no sign of it. Perhaps this was more evidence of a localised clearance, as John Pringle pushed ordinary people to the margins of the view from Haining House.

  August

  1 August

  While wealth and privilege were changing the look of the land for pleasure – or at least to keep up with the neighbours – farmers, farm workers and a brilliant blacksmith from Berwickshire were changing it so that it became more productive. In 1764, workmen built a great forge and a range of workshops at Blackadder Mount Farm near Duns. Funded by John Renton, a visionary landowner with more than a good view in mind, a young blacksmith began work on an invention that would change the world much for the better. The Old Scots Plough was very inefficient. Made from wood and dragged through the unyielding ground by a team of four oxen or heavy horses, it often broke down. It needed not only a ploughman to guide it and a goadman to urge on the beasts, there was also a small army of plough followers. They had to beat down big clods with a mel and pull out the weeds. In his new smiddy, James Small was determined to create a new plough, one that was immeasurably more efficient. And he succeeded.

  Giving the ploughshare a new, screwed shape, much like modern ploughs, and casting it all in iron, Small’s design reduced friction, delved deeper and turned over the furrow slice so completely that weeds were buried and became mulched as extra fertiliser. There was no longer any need for plough followers or goadmen, and one skilled man could do everything. Guiding two strong horses (and later one, when the breeding of Clydesdales began in earnest as a response to Small’s invention), he could wrap the long reins around his fists while holding the plough stilts straight. Farming was revolutionised by James Small’s genius. Because deeper ploughing meant better drainage and fewer workers were needed, much more land was brought into cultivation, and crop yields soared.

  The grass parks to the west and around the farm of Hartwoodburn shown on the 1757 map were much larger when the 1858 map was surveyed. This was to allow longer furrow-runs with the new plough and reduce the wastage of land around the margins of smaller fields. While our farm is still shown as all grazing in the later map, with liberal tree planting, the plotting of several sheep folds suggests that flocks were reared close to Haining House. Instead of being used to feed a sense of acquired grandeur, the land was being used to feed people.

  2 August

  The first hour of each morning is more or less exactly the same throughout the year, the only difference being the seasons, dark in winter, light in summer. Once downstairs I pick up the three feed bowls for the dogs, change their water bowl, give Lily lots of pets and attention (she is old and sensible enough not to need to sleep in a crate) and go into the kitchen to measure out the breakfasts. After making tea, I take out each one for a morning pee. Once that is done, the dogs eat their breakfasts and I do a programme of stretching and bending, more and more necessary as the years wear on. Then I water the tomatoes and lettuce in the conservatory. I open my laptop to check the weather, and also check we are not broke, or no more broke than usual. Then I have my breakfast before taking Maidie out for our early morning walk. I do all of this in the same order, like a series of reflexes rather than any conscious thought. Probably just as well.

  3 August

  On either side of the Long Track run parallel strips of temperate jungle, tangles of cow parsley, different grasses, mostly tall Timothy, nettles, thistles, wild parsnip, poisonous hemlock, willowherb and many leaves I can’t identify. On this misty morning, the dried and darkening crowns of the cow parsley and parsnip were enmeshed by hundreds of spiders’ webs. Silver, dew-drenched, their fine lace tracery mummified the dying plants. White thistledown lay thick in places, marooned on this windless morning.

  This is the seed time, when parent plants cast their fertility. With no breeze to carry away next year’s growth, the grasses and the parsley need the goldfinches and the other tiny birds to work for them. When Maidie and I came to Windy Gates, dozens of little ones were pecking amongst the stones of the track, searching for seeds. Beyond the jungle strips, fat lambs, belly-deep in lush grass, watched us pass, and unseen, down on the lane, I heard the clip-clop of a trotting horse.

  4 August

  Last summer’s storms blew down a magnificent beech tree in the Deer Park, and yesterday two foresters logged most of it. They had to leave about twelve feet of the main trunk because if they had cut any more it would have altered the balance and the tenacious, sinuous roots on one edge might have sprung it back up to the vertical, not something you want to have happen with a chainsaw in your hand. With a tractor and tipping trailer, the foresters brought down about twelve tons of prime hard-wood and dumped it at the Wood Barn. Most of it is seasoned. The big discs from the upper trunk and main limbs will take some splitting but there are plenty of smaller logs and all cut to a handy size.

  Many, many butterflies flittered around Maidie and me this morning and the flies were at their worst. The swallows would say they were at their best and tastiest as they swooped around us, scooping up an aerobatic breakfast.

  6 August

  Indefatigable, precise and persistent, Rory keeps digging up more and more of the history of here. At the weekend he found a Charles I half-groat in the Doocot Field, probably minted in 1645, the same year as the slaughter at Philiphaugh. Was it dropped by a soldier? Maybe. The tiny coin made the metal detector buzz only three feet from the doorway of the doocot itself and, in the addictive sequence that followed, one I recognise all too readily, that find set Rory off researching the his
tory of what the early maps of the Haining call a pigeon house. And when he sent me what he had found, that set Maidie and I off on a walk over to the doocot.

  As Rory pointed out, the building was designed in the lectern style, very singular and peculiar to Scotland. The back wall was sheer with no openings and faced north, backing the doocot into the bitter winter winds. On the southern façade a steeply pitched roof sloped down to a lower wall where the doorway once was. And on either side there were smooth walls topped by crow-stepped gables. Ingeniously worked out, the lectern shape was designed to keep out predators. When Maidie and I reached the old ruin, I could see the remains of a projecting string course that would stop rats, stoats or pine martens from climbing the walls. The roof was so steeply pitched and probably smoothly slated that, even if a rat was acrobatic enough to climb around the string course and get up the wall, it would slide off the roof, its claws finding no grip. Pigeons could perch there and sun themselves, but the pitch was too steep for heavier hawks or buzzards. The entrances or flight holes were usually few, only six or so, and they were almost always placed in the centre of the pitch. Doocots were often built in open spaces, just like the field we stood in, and not near trees where hawks could conceal themselves.

  Inside this fascinating little building were many nesting boxes built into the walls, about a foot square in shape and formed with flagstones. On the upstanding back wall I counted two hundred, and on the other three walls there will have been more, perhaps five hundred in all. It occurred to me this morning that there was less of the doocot than there used to be and later, in my office, I checked some old photographs. Vandals or thieves have clearly paid several visits because until recently part of the east wall and its nesting boxes, and parts of the south wall, were still standing. But around the base of the wall I could see no fallen stones. Had people been robbing out the sandstone? Garden rockeries?