The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  8 November

  Friendships come and go. Even the most intense usually flower and then fade because circumstances change, locations shift and interests diverge. From the gregarious social ferment that university can be, when I seemed to know scores of people very well, to my life now, the difference is stark. I have five people I would call good friends, but I see them rarely, at most every couple of months. That is partly a function of living on a little farm where the nearest neighbour is half a mile away and the nearest city forty-five miles to the north.

  This coming weekend is the exception to all that drifting apart. At lunchtime, we will drive up to a stunning modern house perched high on a river cliff over the Tay about ten miles north of Perth. We will meet our old neighbours from Edinburgh, ‘the street’. On Friday nights, after a week of work, we would often gather in our kitchen. Once I remember coming back from Barra in the Hebrides with a sack of cooked langoustines and lobster that needed to be eaten immediately. It was chardonnay then rather than sauvignon blanc.

  When we moved down here to the farm, our old friendships might have withered into exchanges of Christmas cards. But such was the strength of those early bonds we decided to come together once a year for a weekend of three Friday nights in this beautiful house. Even though we have all grown old together, the years seem to fall away, at least for the first Friday night. The future may well not be what it was and that space is mostly occupied by children and grandchildren. But the past often comes alive again, especially after a glass or two.

  What particularly attracts me is the shape of each of the two full days. Chronically unable to lie in, I get up and walk into the village for the papers at 6 a.m. After tea, toast and an hour with the news, I make a fried breakfast on a production line, as our friends pad downstairs one by one. I like the early time to myself, looking out over the great river, reading and looking forward to the warmth of good company.

  There used to be six couples, but, very sadly, one husband died in his early sixties and now we are eleven. Departures will begin to happen again, but for a time the street will meet once a year. You don’t make old friends.

  12 November

  Home to familiar sounds and smells: the purr of the shepherd’s quad bike up at Brownmoor, the trumpeting of the cows in their winter byre at Hartwoodburn and the squelch of the clatch as we bring in the horses off the sodden fields. All of it a comfort.

  13 November

  At first light, the partridge family were skittering about the home paddock. Spooked at the sight of a little white dog, they scattered in all directions. But Maidie had more interest in sniffing after the trails of animals that had passed close to the house during the night.

  It was a moonlit dawn, the light black-and-white in the west, like an old film, warming to a pale yellow in the east as one planet rose and a star set. For a time both were visible in the morning sky, the moon big as it slipped behind Peat Law and the sun brilliant over Greenhill Heights. A hard frost for the Old Boys, the minis and the mares in the outbye fields, the best sort of winter weather for horses. The worst is cold, wind-driven rain and no doubt we will see plenty of that before the clocks change at the end of March.

  14 November

  The last of the night-snow speckled surfaces that were raised off the warming ground. White flakes lay on the compost in plant pots, on the ash bucket and on the seats of the benches down at the stable yard. The first snow of the winter, it was strewn lightly on the western hills, the line of the track up Newark Hill still visible under what had been only a sugar dusting. The morning sun will make this harbinger of what I fear will be a cold winter disappear, but on the twigs and branches of the naked trees hung a tracery of frozen water droplets as though caught in the act of dripping. Stars of ice reached across the puddles like Christmas tree decorations and the old spring at the foot of the Bottom Wood glistened solid and motionless.

  Before more snow comes, now is the time to make preparations. I have ten bags of road salt for the tracks but I need the winter grit mixture of sand, salt and fine particles of crushed stone. It lasts and needs only to be spread every few days, but I cannot find a local supplier. The other priority is to bring forward the big logs for our second, much larger woodburner and I will use a barrel-sized basket outside the porch, cover it with a horse rug and weight it against the wind.

  This morning’s sun will warm the house through its many windows and melt the tissues of ice on the tracks, but when the bad weather comes and walking is precarious, everything essential needs to be readily to hand.

  Our absolute attitudes to warmth in the winter have changed during my own lifetime. All that will have heated the Spidens, Ann Moscript and the Wilsons in the nineteenth-century Henhouse was the range in the kitchen and perhaps the open fire in the other room. A hundred years later, the sole source of heating in the council house I was raised in was a coal fire in the sitting room. On bitterly cold nights when ice formed on the inside of the panes of the bedroom windows, I slept under thick blankets, a quilt and sometimes an overcoat on top of all that. What kept me warm was my own body heat. Sometimes the tip of my nose became cold. When the alarm went and my bare feet touched the linoleum, it was like stepping onto ice, and we all grabbed our clothes and rushed downstairs to the sitting room where my mum had lit the coal fire. That was where we pulled on socks, warm clothes and sat with a steaming bowl of porridge. Only then, fortified and clad, could the day uncurl and begin. Such is early conditioning, I still cannot sleep in a warm bedroom. In summer, the window has to be open, and in winter the radiator is kept just above freezing.

  15 November

  I met an old friend in Selkirk this afternoon and he amazed me. Rolling back the decades, he told me that tomorrow, Saturday 16 November, will be exactly fifty years since we first played rugby against each other. Since the tender age of seventeen (and I was tender when the final whistle went), I had appeared in the Kelso front row and my friend was also a young starter. Colin and I only ever talk when we bump into each other by chance, but the bond of old-fashioned comradeship is always remembered with a smile and a handshake.

  Like the common ridings, the summer festivals where horses are everywhere, rugby is woven into the fabric of community life in the Borders. Each of the main towns has a club and a surprisingly large stadium, out of scale with the population size. The Border League was the first rugby competition in the world, outraging the blazer-wearing alumni of posh private schools and the ancient universities who could afford to cling to amateur ideals and who ran the Scottish Rugby Union. In the Borders, working men played the game, butchers, bakers and bricklayers, and the competition between the towns was fierce, forging generations of excellence. And because rugby was preferred to football by small children playing in parks, their catching and passing skills were ingrained from a very early age. The likes of Hawick, Gala, Melrose, Kelso, Jedforest, Selkirk and Langholm regularly beat the old boy clubs of Edinburgh and Glasgow and yet it took many decades for their players to break through the snobbery barrier and get into the Scotland team, controlled as it was by the blazerati.

  I loved the spirit of the amateur game, the fun as well as the glory. In 1958 Ian ‘Basher’ Hastie, a gifted Kelso player, was at last selected to play for Scotland against France. We watched the match on the grainy black-and-white TV of a neighbour and erupted when Ian scored a try in the corner. I was mystified when my grannie shook her head. On the following Monday morning, Basher was back at work at Kelso railway station and when he cycled past our house my gran waved her stick at him. ‘Here! Come here you!’ When this huge man dutifully stopped, he heard her complain, ‘Why did you not run under the posts to make the conversion a bit easier?’ The huge man’s face fell. ‘Sorry. Sorry about that, Mistress Moffat.’

  Rugby is now a professional sport and it has moved far from the game I used to play. Heroes no longer walk, or cycle, down the streets of Border towns. Like professional footballers, they inhabit another world. But I smile at the
memories shared with my old adversary, Colin. And the thrill of running onto a pitch to be watched by thousands is a moment and an image I will never lose.

  16 November

  We returned late and in darkness from a long, three hundred and seventy-mile round trip to Inverurie on more equestrian business. From the Borders to the Don Valley in Aberdeenshire, it is a journey up much of the length of eastern Scotland that moves through our culture and history. Crossing a range of southern hills, the Firth of Forth opened below us, and after the hills of West Fife and Kinross we crossed the Tay and on through the undulating, well-drained and fertile fields north of Dundee. On this long road, it is possible to observe the wash of centuries of change across the landscape without leaving the car.

  Road signs are the markers of the movement of peoples. South of the Lammermuir Hills, the Lambs’ Moors, the Dark Ages kingdom of Northumbria is remembered in the predominantly English names like Selkirk, Galashiels, Stow, Middleton and many others. The earlier stratum of Old Welsh sometimes pokes through in the likes of Peebles (from pybyll, for a shelter or a shieling) or Penicuik (the hill of the cuckoos), and we pass by the conundrum of Edinburgh. Who was the Gaelic or Old Welsh-speaking Eidyn and why was his name attached to the Anglo-Saxon burh for a fortification?

  In Fife, the mixture of recent English, earlier Anglian, Gaelic and Pictish reflects a jigsaw pattern of ownership and multilingualism in North Queensferry, Crossgates (a crossroads), Kinross (Gaelic for the ‘head of the promontory’ that stretched into Loch Leven); names like Pitreavie and Pitlessie have the Pictish prefix for a parcel of land.

  Beyond Dundee, the road signs show extraordinary eccentricity, place names unlike any others in Scotland, probably a cocktail of Pictish, Norse and Gaelic. Happas, Memus, Bogardo, Idvies, Bogindollo, Ballindollo, Edzell and others. The ‘dollo’ suffix is probably the genitive case of the Norse dalr or perhaps Old Welsh, dol or maybe Gaelic, dail. All mean a valley. Edzell may be a very heavily corrupted version of a name that incorporates one of these. Baile in Gaelic is a settlement and that may make Ballindollo something like ‘the settlement or farm in the valley’. Happas, Memus and Idvies will forever remain a source of wonder and delight.

  17 November

  More and more rain saturates the fields and turns the tracks into torrents. In the last few days there has been extreme flooding in South Yorkshire and Gloucestershire. This is fast becoming part of a new pattern, the effect of more extreme weather in turn caused by climate change. Politicians will be forced to react to these symptoms (to say nothing of the financial pressure insurance companies will exert) by building flood defences. But my hope is that the cause – the undoubted fact that our planet is burning – may be recognised by more and more people. Perhaps they will force our boneheaded governments and those in other countries to react before it is too late. If there are votes in tackling global heating, then politicians will deal with it. I hope.

  19 November

  During the night the temperature dropped to minus ten, the coldest so far this winter. At 10 a.m., in hazy sunshine, it was still minus four and I loaded the woodburners with logs. Both are blazing. The still morning sparkled with frost that did not thaw, the lacy tracery of the long grass very delicate. The metal gates were so cold my fingers stuck to them for a painful moment. I need to wear gloves, but the fiddle of taking them off to unpick a knot or make a note is maddening. Huddling close to the hedges and woods on the edges of their parks, the sheep were seeking places where the temperature might have been a degree or two higher. This deep cold in the early winter will see some of the older ewes die if it continues, and especially if snow comes. Fingers of ice were reaching across the Haining Loch.

  20 November

  We are ice-bound. During the night, more ice crept across the tracks like freezing lava. Probably because the temperature rose slightly, more water trickled out of the Top Wood and, with no trees to soak up moisture, it oozed from the warmer grass to the exposed surfaces of the tracks and froze, making movement of wheel and foot difficult and even dangerous. The good news is that I have found a supplier of winter grit and twenty-five bags will arrive, but not until next week. If we run out of grit, no vehicle can go anywhere and we will tread with great caution. Lindsay attaches a wire version of climbers’ crampons called Yaktrax to her boots and I have a pair somewhere that will come into service soon. Already, in late November, we find ourselves in the deeps of the winter.

  21 November

  The bright pink crayon marks on the backs of the ewes catch the eye on a grey morning. They are graphic evidence that the rams have done their duty and the tupping is complete for another year. An ancient seasonal cycle sees the sheep moved to better grass in one of the western parks, and as the days grow dreich and short the work on my neighbour’s farm settles into a rhythm of feeding animals. The grass will soon turn bitter and feed will need to be taken out to the inbye fields to keep the pregnant ewes thriving through the winter to come. Our own winter cycle is also beginning; the first round bale has gone into the ring feeder in the East Meadow so that the Old Boys can continue to do well, rugged up, warm and contentedly munching.

  Sheep rearing in the upper valleys and on the hills that shelter them can be very different, the weather often significantly worse, more snow and ice making moving the flocks more difficult. Walter Elliot once took me out to Ettrickbridgend to meet Tommie Wilson, one of the last of the hill shepherds. Now long retired, he remembered summering out with the ewes and their growing lambs up on the high pasture, sleeping out at the shielings with only his dogs for company. And he recalled some of the winters with a shake of the head. Drifting snow was the great killer and many times Tommie used his crook to prod for trapped ewes. He told us a tale of a heavy fall of snow very late in the winter, just as the hill ewes were beginning to lamb. One was found in a drift that had overwhelmed one of the dykes that run across the high pasture. In a snow pocket on the lee side, the ewe had given birth and in that white space had begun to suckle her lamb.

  When I told Tommie we were at the Henhouse, he said, ‘I mind fine driving sheep along the old road below you. I was taking them from up Ettrick across to the mart at St Boswells.’ In the 1950s and early 60s, there was much less traffic and not many hill farms had access to the big transporters that carry beasts to market now. So Tommie and his four dogs drove flocks at the end of every summer along the side roads to the mart and the railway station beside it. ‘If a car did come, the collies saw it first and just set themselves in the middle of the road and wouldn’t move until it stopped. They sort of faced it down.’

  Walter was born and raised in the valleys and I enjoyed listening as he and Tommie reminisced about country dances at the Boston Hall, the shepherds’ meets at the end of the year, and at the beginning. Any sheep that had strayed onto another hill farm were brought to these gatherings to be claimed, as was whisky, food, music, song and storytelling. Rare and very sociable, these occasions were highlights in a solitary life of self-reliance and reflection amongst the hills and the high country.

  22 November

  Like the clacking of a football rattle, the cackling of the crows builds to a crescendo in the hour before dawn, as they lift invisibly into the dark sky. Only the receding sound tells me they have taken flight. An increasingly large flock of perhaps one or two thousand has taken to roosting in the fields around the farmhouse and when they rouse themselves the noise builds surprisingly. If it was not so familiar, the cacophony might seem sinister. It is definitely not birdsong.

  24 November

  So that the working days do not shrink to only the six or seven hours of light available, I start in the dark. After all the dogs are done, fires lit, my tedious but necessary routine of exercises complete, and emails done, Maidie and I walk out into the dark. Being a white-haired terrier, at least I can see her. I might fall over a black lab. This morning we heard but could not see another dog walker on Huppanova. But when he or she moved to the near horizon there was
just enough light to make out a dark silhouette.

  In the distance, against a black sky with no horizon, I could see the brilliant overhead lights for a new set of roadworks on the main road. Traffic lights added a little colour as they blinked in the dark, sleeping land.

  25 November

  I seem to be travelling too much, and I long for the peaceful and productive routines of the farm. Taking the train to Fife for a meeting, I crossed the Forth Bridge. Normally, the spectacular sweep of this stunning structure never ceases to impress me, but there was so much mist billowing up the Firth that there was little to see.

  Driving home up the Long Track in the dark, I turned a sharp left at Windy Gates and the headlights flushed a young fox from the dieback of the Top Wood. Not much bigger than a cat, it loped along in front of me, not weaving from side to side or diving back into cover but showing all the confidence of a top predator. Later I came across what might have been one of its kills when I took Lillie out to pee. A big rabbit, not long dead, lay behind the box hedge below the house. I had to fight with the dog to get it out of her mouth and fling it over the hedge. Where the young fox will find it.

  26 November

  I watched two buzzards glide over the Young Wood south of the East Meadow. They were set upon by a gaggle of angry crows and driven off towards the high ground of the Deer Park. Was it territoriality? The buzzards surely presented no threat. There was no food to fight over and it seemed to me to be nothing more than a dispute about who owned the airspace.