The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  Seven centuries separate these two finds but they both tell tales of love. Of course our conjectures may be fanciful in their detail, but the core of the stories are beyond dispute. Both objects are relicts of love between two people and between one person and their god. These fields, a tiny geographical area, are rich; layers of intense experiences in one place.

  7 September

  We left the dogs and the horses and the farm to spend a day and a night in an old life. For more than twenty years we lived very happily in Edinburgh, most of that time in a small street of families whose children were all approximately the same age. Dealing with parenting, early careers, schooling, coping with all the switchbacks of constantly changing lives, five of the families became close friends and empathetic, helpful neighbours. On this day, one of the youngest of that generation of children was to be married in a ceremony at the Royal College of Physicians on Queen Street. Like many grand institutions that are less used by their membership than they used to be, they do weddings. And do them very well. I particularly liked the library and, with a glass of wine in hand, sat down next to a bookcase containing many medical texts, amongst them I noticed a two-volume history of diseases of the anus and rectum.

  8 September

  We spent a sleepless night trying to ignore the sounds of the city in a hotel very near to the house where we raised our children. A clear, sunny morning dawned and I found myself out early, walking down many lanes of memory: buying an armful of Sunday papers, fresh croissants and rolls, whole milk to make a decent cup of tea in the hotel room, reading the stories rather than skimming the headlines, with no dogs or horses to do.

  We walked past the back of our old house, noting how the garden had, of course, been changed, and the memories flooded back. Usually I feel tears prickle at the passing of all those happy times, but this morning we just talked about what a wonderful house it had been to raise a family.

  9 September

  Persistent rain fell, the puddles filled and the sky was a uniform grey. I came across a new verb for such a downpour. Rain was said to be ‘slenching’ down. There was no sign of it stopping and I had to hang up a sodden jacket in the boiler room and change my trousers. It was good to be home. Down in the Tile Field a chorus of cows was trumpeting for some reason. They had a tremendous vocal range. One hit surprising soprano notes, another definitely a baritone. Cowsi Fan Tutti.

  10 September

  Maps matter – not only for what they include but also because of what they omit. Between 1747 and 1755, after the defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden, William Roy was commissioned to produce a Military Survey of Scotland. So that rebels could not disappear into the trackless and unknown wastes of the more remote glens and mountains of the Scottish Highlands, good maps were essential. But Roy did much more than survey the Gàidhealtachd; he also mapped the rest of Scotland in some detail. In 1750, the first platte, or map, of the Haining estate and our farm was printed. There is no sign of the Henhouse, our farmhouse, and Roy’s survey bears little resemblance to John Scot’s estate map of 1757, drawn only seven years later.

  Instead of an elaborate layout of parks and meadows, there are a few enclosed fields to the west of the loch, and around them the parallel hatching that Roy used to denote runrig, groups of open rigs and their ditches where crops were grown. Our Deer Park is enclosed by long red lines, probably representing fencing of some sort rather than the hedging around the fields by the loch. Perhaps he had seen the surviving vestiges of the medieval park pale and was recording where it ran. And even though I have often seen the patterns of runrig criss-crossing the southern flanks of the park, especially in low morning sun or under a light sugar-dusting of snow, Roy does not show it on his map of 1750. That must mean Walter is right. The Deer Park was indeed ploughed during the hungry years of the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century.

  By 1843, Crawford and Brooke’s map of the Scottish Borders had reinstated the Long Track, and the woods, copses and stands of individual trees look very familiar to a modern eye, having changed little over the last one hundred and fifty years. But even though the weathered sandstone plaque that sat above the old front door of our house records a building date of 1821, the Henhouse is not plotted on this map. I wondered why it was such a secret, such a mystery.

  Eight years later, Thomas Mitchell drew a charming map of the County of Selkirk that features miniature drawings of grand houses. With its colonnaded portico and what looks like a remnant of John Pringle’s old house next to it, the Georgian version of the Haining dominates – even though it is in the wrong place, plotted to the south-west of the loch. Perhaps Mitchell felt his creativity cramped by the lack of space between Selkirk’s cluster of houses and the north shore, and so he summarily shifted the grand house so that he could show it off better. But what seems to be in exactly the right place, to the west of the Long Track, is our farmhouse. A small, single-storey cottage, it is drawn to scale (compared with the Haining and other houses) but there is no sign of the three stone-built looseboxes that abutted the southern gable when we bought the property in 1991. While the names of Hartwoodburn and Brownmoor are written on Mitchell’s map with a copperplate flourish, our little place remained once more anonymous.

  Finally, in 1858, the first edition of the Ordnance Survey appeared and, despite the fact that a magnifying glass is needed, there is the Henhouse and its three looseboxes in the corner of the Top and Bottom Woods. No track appears to lead to it. All of our farm forms part of the policies of the Haining, with stands of hardwood trees in grass parks, and the Long Track looks like a very attractive avenue. But still the Henhouse is not named and, given the amount of detail on the Ordnance Survey map, that was very puzzling. It was not until the second edition of 1897 that the name is finally recorded. It all seemed very strange, but if anyone could solve the mystery of the Henhouse’s anonymity, it would be Walter.

  11 September

  Having asked the question, I was told it would be better to meet for coffee than exchange emails. When I explained the puzzling omission of the name of my house from all and any maps until 1897, Walter answered my question with one of his own. Had I noticed anything odd about the Henhouse? Feeling like one of Socrates’ acolytes, I said I did think it surprising that there were three looseboxes attached to the original cottage. What farm labourer had the means to own three horses that needed stabling? Exactly, said Walter.

  He nodded for me to continue. I mentioned that on either side of the old front door there were two niches where small sculptures could have been placed, perhaps something of an echo of the Canova-style nudes that decorated the terrace at the Haining. Again, not exactly what a farm hand might have greeted when he or she returned home, weary from working in the fields.

  ‘What about the colour of the mortar on the walls?’ Walter asked. It is a deep pink, something that also surprised me. I liked how the grey of the whinstone and the pink suited each other, and when we doubled the size of the house in 1992 I asked the masons to mix new mortar of the same colour.

  Walter told me in hushed tones that the reason the name of the Henhouse was not marked on maps until 1897 was because it was a nickname, and also a place that did not need to have attention drawn to it. Like many other grand houses, the Haining hosted a great deal of entertaining, as the Pringles invited housefuls of guests from around the Borders and Edinburgh. The size of the ice house and the number of wine bins in the cellars were testament to a great deal of continuing conviviality. And because people coming from Edinburgh in particular took the best part of a day to reach the Haining, they stayed for several.

  Entertainment was required, said Walter, and it led to the building of the Henhouse, with its pink mortar, sculpture by the door and its looseboxes, all at a suitable distance from the big house. Horses were kept there for only a few hours and belonged to gentlemen callers. Installed in the Henhouse were hens, ‘young and accommodating ladies’, who entertained the men who rode down the Long Track and passed
the encouraging sculpture by the door. Watching all of this libidinous traffic, leaning on their hoes in the fields, were farm labourers, elbowing each other in the ribs, smirking or shaking their heads. It was they who dubbed our house the Henhouse, a salacious nickname that did not make it onto a respectable map until 1897. The census of 1841 shows that the cottage had become home to a farm worker. Its days as a house of ill repute seem to have been short, no more than two decades.

  Well. Goodness me. All of that came as an eyebrow-raising revelation. Colourful certainly, but also surprising. Jane Austen’s fan-fluttering version of life in early nineteenth-century country houses suddenly seemed a little tame. I wondered if a henhouse was thought to be as necessary as an ice house. Are there other lost henhouses with telltale looseboxes lurking down forgotten lanes? Cottages whose original, scandalous purpose has been covered over by Victorian respectability and collective amnesia? Looseboxes had led to amazing revelations about loose women. War had often marched through our farm, and now it had been replaced by horse-riding lust. An improvement of sorts.

  It does not do to project values and judgements backwards, and I had to resist a mixture of Presbyterian disapproval of the antics that took place in our farmhouse two hundred years ago and a headshaking smile. The past was a very different country.

  12 September

  In great, glossy profusion, clutches of brambles have followed the wild raspberries around the fringes of the woods. On the same stem I found several colours: black, russet and a rich red-wine shade. If I could find the time to gather some, their tartness would make a bowl of morning yoghurt taste even better.

  13 September

  Soon after dawn, the flying school assembled on the east-facing roof of the farmhouse. Basking in the morning sun, the trainees shuffled along the guttering, on the ridge of the dormer windows and above the Velux rooflight, newly fledged swallows waiting for their parents to swoop in with breakfast beakfuls of flies before they take off and begin to build the skills and stamina needed for their flight across the face of the Earth. Last evening we looked up at a swallow sky, scores of them wheeling above the stables, their birthplace down the generations, their home. Perhaps they were printing its image on their memories. They will be gone soon.

  14 September

  Where the trees have been felled to the south of the Haining Loch, geography encourages hierarchy. Most mornings Maidie and I are out too early to see other dog walkers on the path by the loch. It runs about fifty feet below our track into the Deer Park. But at weekends we sometimes see several. Standing tall, raising herself up to her full fourteen inches, Maidie surveys these lesser creatures trotting along behind their owners. When the dogs see her and bark, she does not retaliate with the sort of frenzy reserved for rabbits around the farmhouse. Instead she offers something more lordly, proprietorial, an occasional, single bark, more punctuation than annoyance. Her obvious superiority needs no exclamation mark.

  Suddenly swans lifted into the air at the farthest end of the loch, their wingtips brushing the water. Flying low, they wheeled around the remaining trees and up and over Huppanova. Until they are seen close-to, it is easy to forget how big these great white birds are.

  15 September

  Its footprint is much older than the fabric of the farmhouse. The date plate of 1821 seems to be definitive, but I am certain there was a cottage on the site before then, even though the maps do not record it. It may be that there was a medieval building that fell out of use, rotted down, roofless, sinking back into the ground, leaving only founds or a rickle of stones. What persuades me is not only the powerful sense of genius loci, the unmistakable sense of a place where people have lived and died for a time out of mind, but also some archaeology.

  When we had the looseboxes demolished and re-used the whinstone to build the new part of the house, a primitive sewage system was uncovered. Little more than a chute made from a single, long slab of whinstone, it conveyed waste from pots to the outside, where the noxious heap rotted before being spread on the garden ground. Around the chute, in the south gable of the house, we found that the earth was not dark brown but black. This is the mark of an ancient midden, the repository for all sorts of other waste, organic matter (what other sort was there before the nineteenth century?) that could be spread over the kitchen garden as compost. Its position was determined by the compass direction of the prevailing wind. Because of the burn to the south at the bottom of the garden – the later conduit for sewage, until into the 1950s; when the house was last occupied, a small, brick-lined septic tank was used with an outflow directly into the burn (frogs live in it now) – the house could only easily be approached from the north. That meant the midden had to be at the south gable, out of sight and where the west wind would keep its perfume manageable. Not that people cared as much about smells of all and any sort, bad and good, as much as we do now. Sniffy is the apposite term for snooty modern attitudes.

  The sun crept over the eastern horizon just at the back of seven this morning. This was a morning for Maidie and I to climb the hill in the Deer Park and check on the Old Boys, the mares and the mini-Shetlands. While the little Westie played canine tig with the minis, touching noses through the wire of the stock fence and running away, I was fascinated to watch a cloud of tiny birds, finches, I think. They seemed little bigger than butterflies and moved skittishly across the high willowherb and teazels along the banks of the Nameless Burn in the East Meadow, not staying long enough on each stem, it seemed to me, to eat the seeds. Perhaps fifty of them, they sometimes all flew in sync, swirling like shoaling herring, so that the sun sometimes caught the bright plumage of their bellies. For a moment, it glinted like blown sunlight and then they seemed to disappear as they perched once more on the stalks of the tall plants and were still. It was mesmerising.

  16 September

  As another day drew to its close, we sat with a glass of wine in the armchairs in the porch. Rather than switch on an electric lamp, I lit candles. They cast a much more kindly light. Lindsay and I talked of horses, hopes for the future and Grace’s lessons on her pony. We watched the little pipistrelle bats feeding, their jerky, frenetic flight over the track easy to recognise.

  When I took Lily out to pee at 10 p.m., she wandered off on a power sniff, weaving from side to side and further and further away. Normally she comes back immediately on the recall, but whatever she had found left no room in her head for obedience. As my commands grew louder, I set off the Newfoundlands down at Burn Cottage, half a mile away. Their booming bark made Lily look up and she came back to me at last. Doggy stereo to the rescue.

  18 September

  Our fields were frosted white. Another summer passes. Returning from my walk with Maidie, I brought back unused fence posts left in the Deer Park, large offcuts and pieces of discarded rails to add to the woodpiles by the barn. A new woodburning stove has been installed. Larger, taller, jet-black and more efficient than the old one (which was also cracked), it will warm us through the coming winter. Earlier than last year, Lindsay has switched on the radiators.

  Bringing in the wood, gathering winter few-ell, is an instinct as much as a task. The more I pick up, the warmer we will be in the depths of January. For ten thousand autumns, since the ice melted and the land greened, human beings have been gathering wood for their fires.

  Some swallows are still here, waiting for the north wind to carry them over the Cheviots to Africa.

  19 September

  Too often these days I begin my morning walk much daunted. Even on the clear sunny dawn I see from the kitchen window, my problems gather like dark clouds. I seem to have endless concerns about individuals, people either not doing what they agreed to, or doing it badly, slowly, not replying to requests to get on and do it, and so on, and on, and on. Although I work alone, and prefer that, I do depend on collaboration, and other people have their own agendas, and of course their own problems. But I am not happy when they become mine. I have enough.

  From hundreds, perh
aps thousands, of walks, I know that the first hour of the day spent outside with Maidie will not solve everything, but eventually my heart will lift. Making myself lift up my head from the business of putting one foot in front of another, pondering what to do about some problem or other, I look at the land and its animals, switching my attention to focus on its detail, its changes. Entirely unforced, the everyday glories of what I see around me begin to soften my mood and bring some peace, or at least proportion, to the turmoil.

  Instead of yesterday’s frost, a heavy dew lies on the grass, the metal gates, the stock fences and the leaves. For some reason, more water vapour than usual has condensed at the end of the night, reaching what meteorologists call the dewpoint. Any lower and it would be frost. In the area of felled woodland at the Haining, what looks like a dewpond has formed. There has been no rain since last weekend, and yet it seems to be filling.

  The leaves on the upper limbs of the old chestnuts in the Deer Park are turning a rich russet but one of their children, a sapling that was damaged and pushed sideways by the fencers, has put out new, pale green shoots at its top.

  20 September

  Last night, it was black-dark and moonless when I took the dogs out. But it was also warm. The dense clouds had wrapped us up in a giant, dark downie and I slept with little more than a sheet. I wonder if the swallows will go in this balmy spell, while plenty of insects fill the air. I saw none flying around the farmhouse this morning, but that has happened before, and then I have found they were still with us.

  Tonight, it was very different: an open sky, no moon but a canopy of pin-sharp stars. I was thinking that, before Grace, the last person in my family to be born and raised on a farm was Bina, my grandmother, the only grandparent I knew. My mum’s parents were Hawick mill workers and died before I was born, and my dad was illegitimate, his natural father having married someone else. That means that Grace will come to know what Bina knew, the auld life on the land. My granddaughter has begun riding her pony most days, bouncing up and down in the saddle, her face a picture of concentration and pleasure, pink wellies her preferred footwear. Easy with all sorts of animals, she is growing up in the clear air of the countryside but with none of the issues of remoteness that stigmatised my gran’s generation, as what she called ‘hicks off the headrig’. Digital technology means that Grace is aware of a much wider world.