To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  Guided he hoped by God, Cuthbert allowed the currents of the great river to bear him eastwards, further and further from the cares of the world he had left at Old Melrose, towards the rising sun. Little more than a mile downstream from Kelso, on a promontory north of the farm at Whitmuirhaugh stood a place the saint may have wished to avoid. Aerial photographs of fertile riverside cornfields have shown up traces of a large seventh-century settlement otherwise invisible from the ground, its wooden buildings long since rotted and disappeared. It was enclosed by a ditch and a stockade rammed into the upcast on the landward side and defended by the wide river to the west. The outline of large rectangular timber halls, a possible church, partly sunken houses known as grubenhauser, and a field system complete with drainage ditching can all be seen as cropmarks or discolourations of the topsoil, and the photography is so clear that almost every one of 368 graves in an adjacent cemetery can be made out.

  Whitmuirhaugh was probably what Bede called an urbs regis, a royal township, and as such will have been visited by the kings of Northumbria as they progressed around their realm. They apparently arrived in some pomp, a procession preceded by the royal standard and also a post-Roman emblem known as a tufa. A winged orb set on a pole, it may have been carried in front of the king as the symbol of the Bretwalda, the Britain-ruler, a title several Northumbrians claimed. When smoke from the cooking fires from the houses and halls at Whitmuirhaugh came into view, as Cuthbert rounded the bend of the Tweed, he may have kept rowing, not wishing to explain himself to the royal prefect who governed this large and now all but invisible settlement.

  A few hundred yards downstream the little River Eden flows into the Tweed and it may be that Cuthbert rowed over to the left bank and pulled his curragh some way up its course so that he could visit a place where he might pray, a place already sacred. Close to Edenmouth Bridge I parked my car and put on waterproof walking boots so that I too could make a detour, but into my own past as well as the vanished world of the seventh century. Climbing fences and staying as close to the Eden as I could, I found it well named. Its little valley is indeed Edenic, very beautiful, quiet, still and small, a place shaped by the hands and sweat of men and women who cultivated the fields that are moulded to the meandering of the river and its gentle slopes on either side. Many admire, even revere the wildness and the majesty of the mountains of the Highlands, but for me it is the landscapes that people have made and cared for that I love. They are memories of uncounted generations who grew food and tended animals in the fields and on the hillsides, and the lower Eden valley is a lovely palimpsest of all that day-in, day-out labour. The lives of kings, queens, saints and the notorious are recorded in history books, visitor centres, street names and in a host of other ways, but until the coming of the census in the middle of the nineteenth century, the voices of others are largely silent. The fields, however, seem to me to remember their people, those who tended them. Until recent times, they had no other monument.

  I noticed that at the end of this very dry summer the Eden was low, certainly too shallow for even a light craft like a curragh. But no matter, neither Cuthbert nor I had far to go.

  The tiny village of Ednam is ancient, beginning life with the Anglian name of Edenham, and it is the oldest parish to come on record in Scotland, the subject of a grant from King Edgar in 1105 to a man called Thor Longus. Probably of Scandinavian origin, Thor the Tall was given Ednam in return for services rendered to the king, probably military. The charter noted that the land was ‘deserta’. This may mean that no one farmed there, but given the fertility of its free-draining fields and their helpful southern orientation, I think that would be surprising. It may be that the charter makes an early reference to a former diseart, also a possible translation of ‘deserta’. The Eden does loop at Ednam, but the site looks unlikely. Perhaps a holy man, his name long forgotten, lived there in a simple wooden cell or hermitage. Encouragement for the notion of the village as an early Christian focus of some sort is supplied by a bell. In the Royal Museum of Scotland, the Ednam handbell is preserved and it is very old indeed. Probably used to summon a congregation much as church bells in a tower or steeple do now (and also possibly used for cursing – apostates, sinners or even exorcising devils), it was cast from iron some time in the seventh century. Its clapper has not survived, but when rung it will have made a distinctive noise. In a landscape where only natural sounds were heard, the harsh clang of a bell would have made people look up.

  The old kirk at Ednam is beautiful – and dedicated to St Cuthbert. The entrance to the kirkyard is also the way into a private house and there are notices advising visitors on the subject of parking. Not that they are much needed, except perhaps on Sundays. The day I came there was no one about, and in any case I had left my car at the mouth of the Eden. Part of my purpose was to revisit an extraordinary coincidence.

  Bina Moffat, my grandmother, was born in 1890 at Cliftonhill Farm, close to the village. On my way to the kirk, I had walked through its bottom fields. In the kirkyard, there is a tall headstone with the names of my direct ancestors carved on it. For a farm worker paid in kind as well as cash, it is a surprisingly expensive stone and I am sure it was an expression of great love and loss, for it was erected by my great-great-grandfather, William Moffat, in memory of his wife, Margaret Jaffrey. She died at Cliftonhill Farm in 1891, a year after my grannie, Bina, was born. Margaret was only sixty-four. Into the same lair, William Moffat’s coffin was lowered some time after 1 March 1896, when he died at Wormerlaw Farm, about two miles north-west of Ednam. Their daughters came to join them in 1920 and 1931.

  I have often thought about these people I never knew and their lives at Cliftonhill, Wormerlaw and other farm places. They made my grannie, and she made my dad, who grew up in Kelso with his great-aunts. And my grannie helped raise me, as my mum went out to work at the local Co-op and did night shifts in what would now be called a care home. Working on the land – what Gran called the ‘auld life’ – they were out in most weathers without waterproofs, sacking across their shoulders to keep out the worst of the rain, bending their backs in the fields and the stackyard, coming back to their cottage when the light failed, tired and hungry. Life was harsh, certainly, and without free health care they died younger than we do now.

  Farmers paid part of their workers’ fees in what were called ‘gains’ – potatoes, oatmeal, coal and other consumables – and, despite the elaborate headstone in the kirkyard, there was little money. When Bina was born in 1890, William Moffat, his wife Margaret and their three daughters (including Annie, my great-grandmother) all lived in a two-room cottage. In such a small space, their lives were necessarily intimate, sharing beds and sitting around the warmth of the fire and the range as winter winds whistled up the Eden Valley.

  In those decades of high farming, ploughmen and other farm labourers often moved, but rarely very far. They were employed for fixed terms at hiring fairs held every six months in local towns. As farm workers stood in groups in the market square or street, farmers struck bargains with a handshake, a coin and sometimes a drink in the local public house. But in truth, these fairs could be a bitter experience, and publicly shaming for those whose hands were not shaken and were left standing at the end of the day, unemployed, unable to feed their families. William Moffat was first horseman, or head ploughman, at Cliftonhill and he was an attractive man to hire because he could bring three unmarried daughters into the bargain as supplementary field workers. Bina was an illegitimate child, as was my dad, and so there was no husband to claim Annie. In the farms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘wumman workers’ did all the jobs not associated with horses, such as weeding, singling, shawing, harvesting root crops, dairy work and sometimes scything. My grannie remembered her mother and her aunts singing as they worked in the fields around Cliftonhill, moving along in a line, the music helping to keep a rhythm.

  In an age before mass transport, life for my family was local. They went to church down the hill
at Ednam, celebrated in the stackyard at harvest time, danced in the village hall and went courting only as far as they could walk. In Annie’s case, more than courting. Over 250 years, as far back as the census and parish records allowed me to trace their lives, my family did not move far, living out their hardworking lives little more than two or three miles from Kelso, where I was born, and on the farms of western Berwickshire.

  Sometimes I remember to take flowers to Ednam kirkyard, and it is a place that always seems peaceful, settled, even a sanctuary when problems pile up. I have no sense of my ancestors, these people I never knew, raging in their graves. They lie quiet, I think, at peace after all those long days in the outbye fields. There are no photographs of them, but I believe I can hear them, their voices whispering across the furrows and pastures of the farms of the Eden Valley. My dead may be invisible to me but they are never absent, and one day when she is old enough to remember if not understand, I will take Grace and any other grandchildren we might be blessed with to Ednam kirkyard and tell her something of where she came from, who her people are.

  By contrast with me, my wife has led a very far-travelled life. The daughter of a regular soldier, Lindsay was born in Hamburg, lived for a time in Hong Kong and went to boarding school in Gloucestershire. Sometimes, she reflects that there was nowhere she could call home – until we came to live in Edinburgh for twenty-five years, and then to the Borders for another seventeen. And so it was astonishing to discover that less than twenty yards from the headstone William Moffat had erected in Ednam kirkyard there is another impressive memorial that commemorates her direct ancestor, a tenant farmer from the mouth of the Eden called Robert Kerss. He died in 1849 when William Moffat had begun work as a ploughman in the farms around Ednam. They may have met, known each other or of each other. It is such an astonishing coincidence that I do not know what to make of it, except to observe that I am not the only one to have come back home to the Scottish Borders.

  The Tweed flows through a history of disharmony; on its banks stand the blackened ruins of centuries of war, the forgotten altars of a disputed sanctity, and again and again memories of division peep through the dense undergrowth. As he rowed on eastwards, Cuthbert will have been unaware of all of this, for it lay far in the future. He would live and die in the kingdom of Northumbria as it rose from a nest of pirates on Bamburgh Castle Rock to become a beacon in Western Europe that glowed with the creativity of Bede of Jarrow, the raising of the gorgeously painted and carved crosses at Bewcastle and Ruthwell, the writing and decorating of the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the forging and working of jewellery of glittering opulence. Over four centuries, Northumbria forged a common culture between the Firth of Forth and the River Tees and beyond. The Scots language arrived as a dialect of Northumbrian English and early patterns of place-naming and land management were established in the Lothians and the Tweed Basin. And most significantly, the genetic mix of the communities of old Northumbria formed the basis of the modern population.

  Not far beyond the place where the Eden joins the Tweed, the river makes yet another long, lazy loop around Birgham Haugh, and as I made my way along the southern bank early on a bright September morning I eventually arrived at the cause of centuries of disharmony, times when fire and plunder came repeatedly to the Scottish Borders, when rivers of blood ran and great slaughter stained the pages of history. Where the river reaches its most southerly point before meeting the North Sea at Berwick, an insignificant little burn trickles into the Tweed. Known as the Reddenburn, it has formed the border between England and Scotland for at least eight hundred years. Even at its mouth I found that I could easily step across it, hopping from one grassy bank to another, moving between two different national jurisdictions. And yet despite the fact that this little stream draws a thick, dangerous, black line through our history, I find myself able to straddle it in all senses. My ancestral DNA was Northumbrian long before my nationality was defined as Scottish, and my people, the men and women who worked the fertile fields around Ednam, are the same people who farm the land to the east of the Reddenburn, people who must call themselves English. The price of that distinction has been paid in blood, the sacrifice and waste of hundreds of thousands of lives.

  Perhaps only a few hundred yards into England lies Carham. It existed in Bede’s time and he recorded the name as Aet Carrum. In 1018 this sleepy little hamlet would ring to the clash of steel. Malcolm II, king of much of what would become Scotland, made an alliance with Owain, the last king of Strathclyde, and in May of that year, in the woods of the narrow valley of the Caddon Water, between Galashiels and Selkirk, they massed their host for the descent into the old and failing kingdom of Northumbria. As the war-smoke billowed from their campfires, Malcolm, Owain and their captains laid their battle plans.

  Scouts reported that Earl Eadulf of Bamburgh (the old royal title had long since been downgraded by the ascendant Wessex kings) had reached the Tweed at the head of a force of spearmen but that it was not large. Malcolm and Owain hurried down the Tweed to meet them and the hosts clashed on the haughland near Carham. On 26 May 1018, the grass was soaked with blood, as Malcolm’s Highlanders roared their war-cries, incited each other into ‘freagarrachan’, or ‘rage-fits’, and swung their axes as they pushed back Eadulf’s shield-wall. Triumphant, the Highlanders climbed over the wrack of dying and screaming men and drove the defeated Northumbrians into the river. The chronicler, Symeon of Durham, recorded great carnage at Carham when he wrote ‘all the people who dwelt between Tees and Tweed were well-nigh exterminated’.

  To the men and women who stood up on the ridges to the south to watch the battle rage below them, the Scots did not defeat the English. In their reality, a Gaelic-speaking king and his Highlanders had invaded Northumbria, their homeland, and slaughtered their people. Like the warriors who died on the banks of the river, they spoke English, and when it became clear that Malcolm II’s host would prevail, they would have fled in fear of their lives and their homes.

  Having sought permission from the vicar, I climbed the decidedly rickety stairs inside the bell tower of the old parish church at Carham so that I could take photographs of the river as it turned towards the sea. To the north, I could see the line of the main street of the village of Birgham, or at least the back of the houses on its south side. It lies in Scotland because from the Reddenburn the frontier follows the midstream of the Tweed almost to Berwick. The original place-name may have been Briggaham and a bridge may have crossed the river nearby. But the village claims a corner of history for another reason. Perhaps on the park called the Treaty Field, a group of Scottish barons gathered to meet English envoys in 1290. They may have chosen Birgham because there was a bridge. Four years earlier, Alexander III had been killed when his horse lost its way in the stormy darkness and both of them fell to their deaths over the cliffs near Kinghorn on the Firth of Forth. His heir was his granddaughter, a seven-year-old Norwegian princess. Known as the Maid of Norway, Margaret became Queen of Scotland, and almost immediately diplomacy began to decide her future.

  Edward I had conquered Wales in the previous decade but he realised that his designs on Scotland would be better served by dynastic marriage than the spilling of more blood, to say nothing of the expense. At Birgham a nervous arrangement was agreed by the Scots. Edward of Caernarfon, the heir to England, was betrothed to Margaret of Norway, but the Scots baulked at the crippling conditions Edward I’s negotiators attempted to impose, such as the surrender of Roxburgh and Berwick castles and the acceptance of the virtual overlordship of Anthony Bek, the Prince-Bishop of Durham, a man who styled himself the heir of Cuthbert. In the event, the little girl died in Orkney on her way to Scotland, and claimants to the vacant Scottish crown quickly began to contend. This process eventually resolved into the failed kingship of John Baliol and his deposition led to the Wars of Independence. When he was stripped of the crown at Stracathro, near Montrose, Edward I is said to have remarked, ‘A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd.’
For almost three centuries, and with few respites, armies marched across the fields of the Tweed Valley, trailing destruction behind them. From my vantage point at Carham, I could see the innocuous little village where the history of the Borders began to unravel.

  Creation looked well that morning, man’s as well as God’s. And by God’s I mean the transit of the seasons and all of the shifts of the natural world we cannot influence. The sun lit the riffling leaves and the lush grass as the birds welcomed the morning, and a fresh autumn breeze blew along the river. On the edges of the woods near Carham Hall elderberries were growing in abundance. Heavy clusters of these beautiful purple berries hung from the trees, their weight bending the branches low. Bina, my grannie, used to make elderberry wine and with my sisters, Barbara and Marjie, I was sent out to pick clusters – with very specific instructions. I can’t remember what they were, just Bina’s wagging finger. I imagine she told us how to recognise ripe berries and leave the green ones. When she had enough to fill her big jam pan (it was called the enamel pan, dark blue on the outside, white on the inside, and seemed like a small bath), she began the ritual. Using a potato masher, my grannie crushed the berries after we had turned our hands blue stripping them off the stalks. Then she boiled it all up with water before tipping in bags of sugar. To get the mixture to ferment, she made toast, a thick slice of near-burnt toast. On it was slathered yeast and it floated on the surface of the blue-black mixture. I am not sure, but this may have been an old farm-cottage way of slowly introducing the yeast as the toast soaked and it seeped down. When we were coughing with colds, Bina used to give Barbara, Marjie and me thimblefuls of elderberry wine and it was sweet and rich, like port – alcohol for the under fives. I am certain my mum had no idea and we never told her.