by Graham Robb
The Ridleys of Northumberland had been one of the main reiving families, and there seemed to be something of the reivers’ devil-may-care attitude in Nick Ridley’s handling of delicate political situations. But this was not a mischievous outlaw mocking the high and mighty: Ridley was a Cabinet minister in Her Majesty’s Government. His memoirs, which were written at the house and published two years before his death in 1993, show a reckless delight in antagonizing opponents, however impotent they might have been. His comment on Scottish resistance to the poll tax, which dealt a near-fatal blow to the Conservative Party in Scotland and created a surge of support for independence, was typically undiplomatic: ‘It is hard to be right with the Scots!’
The fact that Ridley had settled on the border itself was a kind of provocation, as was the title he chose for himself when he was created a life peer: Baron Ridley of Liddesdale. If only in name, he would be lord of that troublesome valley, a greater part of which belongs to Scotland than to England and which would thenceforth be officially associated with one of Margaret Thatcher’s most devoted servants. The righteous anger of political enemies was a minor consideration for Baron Ridley of Liddesdale, but the presence in a front room of a red button set in a brass plate and connected – we assumed, no longer – to the nearest police station was a reminder that the United Kingdom had been a nation at war.
Of Thatcher’s three closest friends in parliament, two had been murdered by Irish Republican terrorists. Airey Neave was killed by a car bomb outside the House of Commons in 1979. Ian Gow was blown up in his own driveway in Sussex in 1990, two weeks after Ridley’s resignation from the Cabinet. Ridley himself was the obvious next target. Irish drug dealers were known to use the old smugglers’ route between Galloway and the North Sea, and their vehicles were occasionally seen in the area. Several local people who worked on the house remember having to obtain security clearance before they could paint a wall or install a toilet.
There was a pleasant irony in the thought that an occupant of this border hermitage had been so recently embroiled in the political history of Britain. The border itself was just a detail in the estate agent’s description, an obsolete curiosity like the panic button in the front room. It had ceased to exist as a national frontier in 1707 when England and Scotland had become the Kingdom of Great Britain. But perhaps the peace was deceptive. Tremors of indignation at the Westminster government’s high-handed treatment of the Scots were still perceptible in Scotland and, in some minds, the border was once again a serious political division.
The river which served as a moat and the ancient woodland which formed the battlements encouraged a longer view. The song of the river had filled the ears of people who lived here long ago. Five hundred years before, there had been anarchy and bloodshed, compared to which the political debate on devolution was a polite conversation. I wondered whether, when the planting season came, the spade would turn up a reiver’s skull, a rusted lance or another relic of the Border wars. There was nothing in anything I had read to suggest that the serenity of the land across the river was a faithful image of its past.
*
As soon as the business of moving in allowed, we began to explore the surrounding area. There were provisions to be bought, the nearest shop was ten miles away, and since public transport was almost nonexistent, it was essential to acquaint the bicycles with the topography and terrain. A bicycle seems to have a memory for gradients and surfaces and the ways of the wind: the better it knows them, the more efficient it becomes. It was just as well that we took advantage of the weather, because that autumn, when a warm Gulf Stream wind wafted in from the Solway Firth, proved to be a brief concession before the great freeze.
One day, as we hurtled down a steep hill to cross the Liddel into Scotland, I realized that we had been there before. In 2002, we had been cycling up to Perthshire to visit my mother. A ‘Scotland Welcomes You’ sign had suddenly appeared at the bottom of a twisting descent. At the foot of the sign was a burnt-out car. It looked like a warning to English visitors not to expect a tourist-friendly Brigadoon and it would have made a nice picture to show my mother, who, as a proud Glaswegian, had always complained about the Scots’ undeserved reputation for rowdiness. But the last thing a cyclist wants to do when faced with a climb is lose momentum. I accepted the gift of gravity and shot up the opposite slope. The unphotographed image left a vivid impression and I was glad not to have stopped.
Now, in 2010, even if there had been no sign, it would have been obvious that we were crossing a frontier. On the English side, a man was walking a dog. He saw us approaching and pulled the animal onto the verge. I thanked him as we passed, and he answered, in a clear Cumbrian accent, ‘No trouble at all.’ Half a mile into Scotland, the same thing happened, but this time the answer was, ‘Nae bother!’, in an unmistakably Scottish accent.
This was an arresting discovery. In most parts of England, accents mutate as gradually as the terrain, but on either side of the Anglo-Scottish border, despite the sameness of the landscape, the change is abrupt. The distance perceptible to the ear between Canonbie in Scotland and Longtown five miles away in England is equivalent to about a hundred miles in the south. The fact which surprises many Scots as well as English is that this sharp divide in accent has no social equivalent. In shops and pubs, at church, at sheepdog trials and auctions, the Scottishness or Englishness of a person is never a matter for comment, let alone antagonism.
To say that border Scots and English get on well together would be to attach significance to an insignificant trait. Only twice have I heard any pointed reference to the border as a dividing line of adversaries. A farm worker who had helped the previous owners of the house with the garden assured me that the molehills we could see had been created by moles ‘from ower there’. Not content with the boggy earth on the Scottish side, the determined creatures had allegedly swum across the Liddel to help themselves to English worms. There was, however, no suggestion that humans ‘from ower there’ presented a comparable threat.
The other reference was made by one of the firemen who had come to the house five years before. He had stayed on to repair the damage and became a painter and decorator. He now covers, sometimes single-handedly, an area of about two hundred and fifty square miles. After meeting his two sons, I observed that while one of them spoke with a Cumbrian accent like his father, the other sounded entirely Scottish. ‘Aye, he does,’ he agreed. ‘But he’s no thistle-muncher!’ This picturesque term had been elicited purely by my clumsy observation. The man who was with him at the time was a ‘thistle-muncher’ himself and cheerfully admitted it.
The borderers’ indifference to nationality is not a recent development. During the First World War, a nine-mile-long cordite factory stretched from Longtown in England to Eastriggs in Scotland. Twenty thousand workers were accommodated in the surrounding farms and villages. Pubs and breweries were taken over by the government to prevent drunkenness from interfering with the manufacture of explosives, but there was never any cross-border tension. Longtown owed its nickname, ‘Dodge City’, partly to its long main street and partly to the unruliness of local lads who found enough to keep them occupied on Saturday nights without resorting to nationalism.
According to the national censuses, the house where we now lived – along with some temporary structure long since vanished – had been a model of Anglo-Scottish cohabitation. In 1841, it was occupied by a Scottish woodman with a Cumbrian wife and daughter. In 1861, a Scottish blacksmith and his family lived alongside a Scottish railway worker and a railway superintendent from Yorkshire with an Irish wife. Ten years later, the resident blacksmith was English, as were the quarryman and his family who shared the house with a Scottish labourer and his family. This struck me as a good example of mobility in the Victorian Age, but it had been typical of the region many centuries before the two enemy nations had become a united kingdom.
4
The True and Ancient Border
Settling in to a new place is a
lways complicated by the perception of time. Immediate concerns compete with a long-familiar past and an unfathomable future, but the new world has its own time scale to which the incomer has to adjust. I wanted to know, not just where the nearest post office was and when the buses ran, but where we were in historical time and space. The border was the boundary line of half our property and I felt that it was as important to find out exactly what it represented and how it had come to be as it was to locate the stopcock and to plumb the mysteries of the heating system.
The answers, of course, might turn out to be trivial and obvious. The accent divide, for instance, is probably quite recent. Local children have the accent of their primary school: pupils at Bewcastle School sound English while pupils at Newcastleton School, six miles away in Scotland, sound Scottish. Before compulsory education to the age of fourteen, there seems to have been very little difference in the speech of Scottish and English borderers. The vernacular of the Border characters of Walter Scott and John Buchan could be voiced just as well by a Cumbrian or a Northumbrian as by a Lowland Scot.
To some urban Scots, the border might stand for a cultural and historical chasm, but to the local population, it is primarily an administrative nuisance. People in need of a hospital who live less than fifteen miles from Carlisle but on the Scottish side of the border are forced to travel twice that distance to Dumfries Infirmary. No modern borderer would think that the national frontier was something worth dying for.
*
In a place where geological forces can be seen at work every day in the boulder clay which slithers off the slopes and the river which carries it away, historical time contracts. On a local time scale, the national border itself is recent. Before the Romans, there were tribal divisions which I assumed to be untraceable. The Romans then created their own temporary borders as they moved north through Britain. When the Romans departed, the British tribes established or restored their own frontiers.
The muddle of those Dark Age kingdoms is sometimes tidily represented on speculative maps purporting to show the outlines of Bernicia, Deira, Rheged, Strathclyde, Northumbria and Cumbria. While nationalists, regionalists and genealogists in search of historical homelands find such maps evocative and convincing, historians tend to be more philosophical about the gaps in the record. A professor of Medieval History who visited us not long after we moved in was amazed to discover, as he drove up through Cumbria and saw road signs to the gigantic ‘Rheged’ visitor centre near Penrith, that the location of that unlocatable and perhaps fictitious sixth-century kingdom had been so confidently identified.
None of those shifting borders appear to match the future Anglo-Scottish border: the kingdoms of Northumbria and Cumbria encompassed lands on either side. Assuming that the political boundaries of Dark Age kingdoms reflected cultural or linguistic differences, place names might provide more tangible clues than early medieval poems celebrating the exploits of legendary leaders. But the place names of Liddesdale are the jumbled residue of centuries of invasion and settlement. Within half an hour of home, there are hills which form part of the same small range but whose names are derived from several different languages: Cumbric (an extinct form of Celtic), Old English, Old Norse, Middle English and Scots.
The first sign that any part of the future border was used as a frontier comes from the mid-ninth century: according to later traditions, Kenneth MacAlpin, the Pictish king who is popularly considered to be the first king of Scotland, claimed land as far south as the river Tweed. The Tweed still forms most of the border from Carham to the North Sea – eighteen miles of river, plus a five-mile deviation called the Bounds of Berwick. Scottish possession of lands north of the Tweed was confirmed by the Battle of Carham in 1018. In the west, Carlisle and the kingdom of Cumbria also came under Scottish rule, which explains why Carlisle belonged to the diocese of Glasgow.
In 1092, William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, made Cumbria an English colony. Although Carlisle changed hands again more than once, the border as it now exists was effectively set. On-the-ground details are lacking until 1245, when a Northumbrian knight called Hugh de Bolbec sent a letter to Henry III of England, describing an apparently futile meeting which had taken place on Friday, 13 October at Reddenburn near Carham on the Tweed.
To resolve a boundary dispute between two estates, the King had ordered the eastern marches to be settled ‘as they were in the time of King John and his predecessors’. Six knights were chosen by each side to walk along the line separating England from Scotland. The six English knights confidently traced ‘the true and ancient divisions and marches between the two kingdoms’, while the six Scottish knights ‘dissented and contradicted’ at every step.
The first walk having failed to produce agreement, six more knights were appointed by each side, making two parties of twelve (‘for greater security’, the letter explained) and the process was repeated. The freshly harvested fields of the Tweed Valley now saw twenty-four knights, with their servants and men-at-arms, processing along the border line. Once again, the Scottish knights voiced their unanimous disagreement. The ‘true and ancient’ boundary was proving elusive. Despite this second failure, doggedness prevailed over diplomacy and another twelve knights were sworn in on either side.
This time, before the forty-eight knights strode forth, the English took the precaution of declaring ‘on oath’ that the true border ran from the confluence of Reddenburn and Tweed south to Tres Karras and Hoperichelawe (no longer identifiable) and then in a straight line to Witelawe (White Law hill, on the main watershed of the Cheviot Hills).* But as they set off along an increasingly muddy border line, the leaders of the Scottish contingent turned aggressive, ‘opposing with force and impeding the perambulation with threats’, whereupon the English, perhaps having no further knights to hand in that northern extremity, ‘firmly asserted that the places aforementioned were the true and ancient marches and divisions’.
Hugh de Bolbec sent his report to Henry III, and since the Scots had apparently acted out of pure mischief, the ‘ancient’ border remained where it had already been for several generations. If either side had cause for complaint, it would have been the English rather than the Scots. Some time between 1018 and 1245, Scotland had acquired a great deal of land south of the Tweed, but the English never tried to push the border back to the north. A similar perambulation took place in 1246. After that, except for local disputes over fishing rights and the occasional English field sown with Scottish wheat, the border appeared to be fixed for all time. The significant exceptions were the Bounds of Berwick-upon-Tweed, which was captured by the English in 1482, and the Debatable Land in the west, the extraordinary nature of which would never be fully recognized by either side, then or since.
*
This surprisingly persistent border between two rival nations is probably the oldest national land boundary in Europe. Pre-modern borders are sometimes said to have been zones rather than lines, but each frontier has its own peculiarities. Most of the Anglo-Scottish border was defined as precisely as on a modern map. Not until the age of motorways, when tarmac and speed turned physical geography into an esoteric branch of historical investigation, was it described as ‘arbitrary’.
It followed streams and rivers, ran over named passes and peaks, and along the main watershed of the Cheviot Hills: the Chevyotte ‘mounteyne’ (or range), a survey of 1542 explained, ‘devydethe England and Scotland by the heighte of yt as the water descendeth and falleth’. This might account for the southward dip of the line after Carham: the southern limits of the Tweed catchment area rather than the Tweed itself were taken as the border. It threaded onto a remarkably consistent diagonal a hundred-mile-long sequence of traditional, perhaps prehistoric meeting or ‘trysting’ places, where cross-border affairs were discussed (fig. 1). In the few sections where nature became vague, it was marked by field boundaries, dykes, crosses, ancient oaks, standing stones and cairns, and, in one part, by just over a mile of Roman road. As the land dropped down towards
the Solway, it continued on the same diagonal by following the Kershope Burn, the Liddel and then the Esk.
The natural logic of the border is, paradoxically, a sign of its bureaucratic origin. In later centuries, colonial committees would draw straight lines on maps and then transfer them to the ground. In the Middle Ages, lacking accurate maps, administrators used the straight lines provided by nature. In theory, no one could quarrel with a river or a watershed line, and, apart from the disputatious knights and a few invasive ploughmen, no one did. The only serious deviation of the line occurred more than six hundred years after the knights’ perambulation in what must be the most obscure episode in Anglo-Scottish history.
Contradicting all previous maps and the knights of Henry III, the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1859 moved the border half a mile to the east, leaving White Law and the high moors of Yetholm Common well inside Scotland. On the second edition of the map (1896), without any explanation and, it seems, without anyone ever noticing, the border returned to White Law. No doubt this had something to do with the gypsies who camped on Yetholm Common and who owed allegiance to neither nation, but this sudden, brief wavering of the line also suggests that, by then, the meanderings of the border mattered as little to human beings as they did to birds of prey.
Three years after moving to Cumbria, I began to compile a catalogue of cols and passes and found the borderlands to be one of the most scantily mapped areas of the British Isles. Several of the passes mentioned in sixteenth-century lists of the ‘ingates and passages forth of Scotland’ have disappeared from the map though not, of course, from the landscape. The physical separation of the two nations was evidently a subject of such indifference that the highest mountain on the border has lost its original name (Windgate Fell) and acquired another (Windy Gyle), which was never the name of a mountain.