Walking the Border

by Ian Crofton

  Scotch Knowe appeared before me not a moment too soon. With all this talk of predatory burn-beasts and bleached bones, I was clearly suffering from exhaustion.

  Scotch Knowe is a small area of flat ground beside the Kershope Burn. Three Forestry Commission signs face each other here in a triangle, marking the junction of the forests of Newcastleton, Kielder and Kershope, as well as the meeting of the three counties, and the two countries. It’s a long, long way from any public road, one of the remoter spots in these islands.

  There was a stone-ringed fireplace with two upright sticks holding a horizontal bar from which to hang your billy can. Three or four sawn-off logs served as seats. Most of the ground was bog, apart from a small patch of dry grass above the bank of the burn, just big enough for a single one-man tent. It was up in a moment, and soon the evening air was filled with the roar of my stove.

  I had less success with the fire I attempted. The brushwood caught well, but the larger lumps of wood were sodden and would not take. After forty minutes of blowing and puffing, there was a friendly crackle and a bit of flame.

  I left my fire-tending duties for a few minutes to cross the burn and inspect the place where Limy Sike entered the Kershope Burn. Then I saw a small stone inscribed with the letters ‘THE LAMISIK FORD’.

  So the name – Lamisik, not Lamisisk – was not entirely forgotten. It also occurred to me, belatedly, that the Lamisik was not some fabulous animal but simply a version of ‘Limy Sike’. Perhaps there was some limestone further up the hill.

  When I returned, the fire was looking very sad indeed. I decided to put it out of its misery. If I didn’t, the chances were it would suddenly get frisky and next thing you’d know the largest man-made forest in Europe would be up in smoke.

  If the fire wouldn’t keep me warm, then a dram in my sleeping bag might just do the trick. I crawled into the tiny tent and nodded off before I got to the second page of my book. Overhead another skein of geese headed north into the twilight.

  * It was as well I didn’t. I have since learnt that eating wild watercress is a good way of infecting yourself with liver flukes. These parasitic flatworms are deposited in water via the faeces of sheep and cattle. Once in the water they are taken up by water snails, which in turn feed on watercress. Thus humans feeding on the watercress may in turn find their livers and gallbladders riddled with blood-feeding worms. Even food for free may come with a cost.

  * A Scots word meaning ‘talking nonsense’.

  FIVE

  UTTER DESOLATION

  Scotch Knowe to Deadwater

  This region cannot be called beautiful; its chief charm, if indeed it has one, is its utter desolation.

  – James Logan Mack, The Border Line (1924)

  Day Three: Sunday, 26th May 2013 It had been a cold night, punctuated by the grunts and barks of roe deer. Unzipping the tent, I blinked in the bright morning sunshine. To the sounds of birdsong and trickling water, I stripped off and washed in the burn. I knew today was going to be one of the toughest days of the walk. I was in no hurry to start.

  From my camp I could see the way ahead. The Border here follows the middle of the diminishing Kershope Burn, and then runs up its principal feeder, Clark’s Sike. The burn winds its way between steep banks towards the high moorland. I could make out tussocky bog and extensive areas of clear felling, littered with brushwood and stumps. There was no sign of a path.

  ‘The Kershope Valley is peaceful enough to look at from a distance,’ wrote James Logan Mack, ‘but woe betide the unfortunate person who endeavours to walk alongside the Border Line up the banks of the burn.’ Logan Mack was an Edinburgh academic who explored the Border in the early years of the last century. In 1924 he published The Border Line, a dry but scholarly account of the terrain and its history.

  Up to the last bridge, I had had the benefit of a forestry track running close to the burn on its northern side. In Logan Mack’s day there was no forest, and no network of forestry roads. So he had had to resort to a track on the southern side ‘some little distance away’ from the Border. Beyond that track, he wrote, ‘lies one of the most desolate regions in Great Britain’. A 1754 map published by Emanuel Bowen, Royal Mapmaker to King George II, describes this area as ‘Mountainous and desart parts, uninhabited. A large wast.’

  I’d left the track behind the previous evening. Now it was just me and the large wast. Or what passes for wast in modern Britain: blanket bog and brashings – swathes of hacked-about brushwood.

  As I followed the burn the landscape opened up. Behind and below me wedges of fir and spruce jutted across the hillsides. But up here the moorland plateau was only a hundred feet or so above me on either side. The sky was clear blue, with just the occasional puff of cloud. The day was glorious, but the going was rough. I lost count of the number of times I had to cross the burn – and the Border – to dodge steep slopes plunging into the water. Sometimes there was level ground on one side. Sometimes the level ground was on the other side. Even the level ground was barred by bollards of grass and reeds, or clumps of deep heather, or felled branches. Sometimes there was a mixture of all three. Many years before I’d tried to make my way through clear felling in a forest in Knapdale. It took me an hour to cover half a mile through waist-deep brashings. Today I was doing little better. The ground was treacherous, scratchy, ankle-snapping.

  Sometimes I scrabbled across the burn by wet mossy slabs, sometimes by stepping stones, sometimes I just had to jump. At one point an overhanging cornice of turf collapsed beneath me. I jarred my knee on the hard mud below.

  This was indeed a ‘desart wast’, but the sign of man’s hand was everywhere in the landscape, from remnants of iron fence posts to expanses of felled forest. Here and there, for some reason left unfelled, stood the stripped trunk of a tree, stark against the skyline. It looked like the Western Front after a particularly heavy bombardment.

  But nature was present here too, in tension with human works. At one point I found a patch of celandines, in flower two months later than they had been in London. I was several hundred miles to the north, a thousand feet higher. I might have been on a different planet.

  I was more aware of my physical presence within this landscape than I would have been in a city. I constantly had to adjust my feet, my legs, my body, to negotiate its roughnesses. Wind blew soft air across my face. Unsated by the brash colours of urban signage, my eyes could feast on subtler greens, browns and yellows.

  And then my nostrils caught the sharp, sweet smell of resin. The stumps I was passing were still red and raw. They could only have been cut a few days before.

  In the distance were piles of logs. I knew that where there were piles of logs there would be a forestry track. That would provide an attractive alternative to the clumps of dead reeds and hidden mossy quagmires that lay in my path as the burn shrank to a trickling ditch. But I knew that forestry tracks have a habit of not going the way you want them to go. They have a different agenda, and rarely take you direct from A to B when circuits around C, D, E and even X, Y and Z might be compassed. But I was stuck with this linear project, to follow the Border line.

  It wasn’t always obvious where this line was. The conifer plantations closed in again. Sometimes I had to crawl under low branches, sometimes negotiate a fallen fir. At one point I very nearly set off in entirely the wrong direction, until put right by a very old, lichen-encrusted forestry sign. ‘Bloody Bush’, it said, and pointed right.

  Bloody Bush, whatever it was, was marked on my map. It lay the other side of Hobbs’ Flow. I checked with my compass, set myself right and so avoided the allurements of what I now realised was Queen’s Sike rather than Clark’s Sike. Which queen owned this sike remains a mystery, and I never followed it to its source to find out. Perhaps this queen was the Queen of the Faeries, the ruler of Elfhame, thought to lie somewhere amongst these Border hills – some say beneath the Eildons, others on a loch-topped hill near Eskdalemuir. I recalled her words in the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer
:

  ‘O see not ye yon narrow road,

  So thick beset wi thorns and briers?

  That is the path of righteousness,

  Tho after it but few enquires.

  ‘And see not ye that braid braid road,

  That lies across yon lillie leven?

  That is the path of wickedness,

  Tho some call it the road to heaven.

  ‘And see not ye that bonny road,

  Which winds about the fernie brae?

  That is the road to fair Elfhame,

  Where you and I this night maun gae.’

  Her way, it was said, was neither the way of heaven nor the way of hell. But I did not take her path. I suppose something in my Presbyterian ancestry reared up and forced me down a stricter route, into the depths of Hobbs’ Flow.

  Hobbs’ Flow, when at last I found it, turned out to be the ‘braid braid’ way of hell the Queen of Elfhame had warned against, a via infernale. Or, if not a via infernale, at least a via dolorosa, one that nearly had me weeping in frustration – had not the sheer absurdity of its awfulness made me chuckle instead. Perhaps I was away with the fairies after all.

  Regarding Hobbs’ Flow, Logan Mack issues this stern warning:

  In a wet season its passage should not be attempted, and even in a dry one the traveller is not free from the risk of being engulfed in the morass. While I have crossed it twice in safety, I do not advise that this route be followed, and he who ventures into such solitude should keep to the west and circle round on higher ground.

  The western deviation Logan Mack recommends did not look any more appealing than the direct route, so I took a bearing of thirty-five degrees, eyed up the rotten post stumps that marked the Border line across the Flow, and stumbled on.

  The edge of the Flow was dotted with clumps of bog cotton, not yet in their full summer glory. The locals call these grasses moss troopers, alluding to the lawless armed bands that roamed the Border moors during the years of chaos and civil war in the seventeenth century. These freebooters acknowledged loyalty to neither king nor parliament. One of the most notorious leaders among them – perhaps the black sheep of some local landed family, or an army officer turned freelance – bore as his standard a brandy barrel stuck on top of a pike.

  At first the Flow did not seem too bad. But experience made me wiser, and I found that Hobbs’ Flow is very, very wet indeed. Before long the water was coming through the worn-out stitching in my boots.

  Hobbs’ Flow, now a nature reserve, is an example of what is known as ‘blanket mire’ – a large area of upland bog. It is one of several blanket mires found around and in the midst of the Kielder Forest. These mires are too waterlogged for the Forestry Commission to bother planting. The vegetation is dominated by sphagnum moss and coarse grasses, and provides a haven for moorland birds. The birds must have remained hidden in their haven, as I barely saw a single one, bar the odd white flash of a wheatear’s rump.

  The identity of the Hobbs of Hobbs’ Flow is as obscure as the identity of the Queen of Queen’s Sike. Hob was formerly a familiar name for anyone called Robert or Robin. The English soldiery gave the nickname ‘King Hobbe’ to their enemy Robert the Bruce and sang a rather rude song about him in Middle English (the precise meaning of which eludes the modern reader, but the general drift is clear). Hob was also a name for Robin Goodfellow, the mischievous sprite also known as Puck. Robin Goodfellow was associated with will-o’-the-wisps, the pale flares of marsh gas sometimes seen in boggy areas at night. They were thought to lead unwary travellers – who took them for friendly lanterns – into the heart of the morass, where they would drown. The Latin name for will-o’-the-wisp is ignis fatuus – foolish fire.

  In broad daylight, there was no fire to be seen up there on the Flow. But there was, without a doubt, a fool.

  I squelched on through the mosses, keeping a wary eye out for hidden traps. Once, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed something wriggly and reptilian scuttle under a hairy tussock. It looked too wet a place for a lizard. But if it was an amphibian, more suited to the habitat, it must have been a toad with a very long tail. Perhaps the Queen of Queen’s Sike had mutated some unwanted suitor into a species unknown to our mortal taxonomies.

  While pondering this question I found my foot at the bottom of a boghole. There was a dreadful sucking sound as I pulled it out. My boot and lower leg were covered in brown yuk. At least it didn’t stink of slurry.

  The Flow gave way at last to thick clumps of heather, but there were still mossy wet boggy bits in between. I felt the lack of what the Scots call ‘heather legs’ – long, strong legs fit for louping through deep heather. My legs are short, and at this point felt particularly puny.

  In the distance I could see the Old Toll Pillar marked on my map. It didn’t look far, but the going was so slow I knew it would take me some time to get to it. Although the ground was more or less level, I had to plunge down the defiles of the Coal Grain and the Watch Grain and up their other sides, further slowing my progress.

  Eventually I reached the Pillar. It marks the intersection of the Border and the rough old track known as the Bloody Bush Road. It had taken me two and a half hours to cover the one and a half miles from my camp at Scotch Knowe. The Pillar was bigger than I’d thought, some fifteen feet high. I raised an imaginary glass to toast my arrival:

  Here’s to the Bloody

  Here’s to the Bloody

  Here’s to the Bloody Bush Road.

  Then I slumped against the pillar and brewed up some tea.

  The Bloody Bush Road is now only used by mountain-bikers, but it was once an important trade route. Before the railway was built in 1862, coal was taken this way from the Lewisburn Colliery, five miles to the south, destined for the Border textile mills. The Pillar itself enumerates the charges for use of this private road, payable at the tollgate near Oakenshaw Bridge. ‘Persons evading or refusing to pay at the above-mentioned toll-gate,’ the Pillar intones, ‘will be prosecuted for trespass.’ Horses ‘employed in leading coals’ were charged 2d. each, other horses 3d. each. Cattle only had to pay a penny per head, while sheep, calves and swine got off with a halfpenny.

  There is no bush apparent at the place by the Old Toll Pillar marked on the map as ‘Bloody Bush’. But there is a story attached to the name. A band of reivers from Tynedale had been pursuing their chosen profession in Liddesdale. Returning home, they’d set up camp by a bush near here. For some reason they hadn’t posted a sentry. In the night a posse of vengeful Scots fell upon them and slew them to a man. Hence the bush by the camp where they were slaughtered became bloody. No source I can find gives any more details than that, and all are very vague about the date. There is an additional story – again without any clear foundation – that no bridge ever built anywhere near Bloody Bush has survived more than a decade. Either the bridges are mysteriously destroyed in the night, or found so covered in bloodstains that the locals have demolished them. Oh, and on certain nights, it’s said, you’ll hear the thunder of ghostly hooves.

  It sounds as if the Bloody Bush is one of the more creative achievements of the Border Heritage Industry.

  I leant against the Pillar and chewed on an oatcake and cheese. As my billy came to the boil I spied a cyclist toiling up the Bloody Bush Road from Kielder. I hailed him, asked him if he’d like a cup of tea. He grinned. I told him I was going the crazy way, along the Border. He was going the sensible way, I said, sticking to the track. ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ he said in a Brummie accent. ‘I wasn’t expecting it to be so rutted.’ He was hoping to get to Carlisle that night. He only had a sketch of his route. I pulled out my 1:25,000 map and hesitantly pointed out that he wasn’t going in quite the right direction. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, there was a fork a bit back.’ I said it would be a lot quicker cutting down by the Kershope Burn to Liddel Water than heading northwest over the shoulder of Larriston Fells by the Bloody Bush Road to the upper valley of the Liddel. The only thing, I said, was that I’
d seen a sign at Kershopebridge saying that the trail was closed till the summer due to tree-felling operations. But it had all been clear along the stretch I’d walked, I said, so it might be ok. It all depends whether the end of May counts as summer. My Brummie friend said he’d give it a go, and after swallowing his tea pedalled back down the way he’d come.

  After a while another three mountain-bikers heaved into view from the English side. I had a similar conversation with them. Andy, Stewart and Rachel were from Newcastle. They realised they’d come the long way. ‘Slight deviation,’ they joked. ‘We wanted the exercise.’ One turned back, but two decided to press on over the Bloody Bush Road.

  After an hour’s rest, I got myself ready to go. The weather looked like it was on the turn, with the wind getting up from the southwest. There was a front forecast for the next day.

  As I heaved my sack onto my back, I spotted another cyclist, head down, coming up from Kielder. Looks like the same one as last time, I said to myself. Surely not. But it was indeed my Brummie. He’d tried the trail, but it had been completely blocked by forestry operations somewhere between Willowbog and Black Cleugh. He was tired but philosophical. I suggested the Bridge Inn at Penton might be a more realistic destination for the night. He liked the sound of that.

  The going was little better north of the Toll Pillar. It was still rough, tussocky ground, interrupted by more substantial obstacles, including the steep-sided cleuch of the Bloody Bush Burn. The Border along this stretch was more clearly defined, not by the topography but by a relatively new barbed-wire fence running in parallel to a broken-down wall. At one point I thought I’d found a path, at least a sheep path. I recalled the words of Logan Mack: