Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  Even now, long after the end of droving, their routes can still be made out, especially in the more remote glens. At their habitual overnight stopping places, what were known as ‘stances’, the beasts’ droppings mucked the ground over many summers. Consequently the grass in those places still looks significantly greener in the springtime and the ewes and their lambs graze there because it is the most succulent. It is a surprising but appropriate elegy for a remarkable age, a period when many peaceful journeys were made across the Highland Line.

  7

  Swordland

  ON 8 APRIL 1940, Colonel Birger Eriksen must have reflected that, in life, timing was everything. The commander of the Oscarsborg Fortress, an artillery battery built on islands in the Oslofjord, was 64 and had only one year’s service left until retirement. When Hitler had ordered the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Eriksen and his fellow officers suspected that there would be war in other parts of Europe and that Norway’s neutrality was unlikely to be respected. What made matters even worse was an immediate lack of manpower for the Norwegian army. Conscription was quickly introduced. Almost the entire 450-strong garrison of the Oscarsborg Fortress was made up of raw recruits and, as if that was not bad enough, the commander of their most deadly armament, a secret land-based torpedo battery was on sick leave.

  Desperate measures were required. There were rumours of a German army mobilising on the Danish frontier. Eriksen sent an urgent message to an old comrade who had retired to the town of Drøbak, just across the fjord from the fortress. Would the 78-year-old Andreas Anderssen take his uniform out of the wardrobe, dust it and himself down and rejoin the Norwegian army? A boat was sent and the old man, who had retired in 1927, landed on the island and immediately ordered a thorough inspection of the torpedo battery. It was then made ready for action. Having first served at the secret installation in 1909, he knew its workings intimately.

  On the late evening of 8 April, Col. Eriksen received a series of disturbing reports. A flotilla of unidentified warships had entered the Oslofjord. The fortress at the mouth of the fjord had fired warning shots but, in the gloaming, the dark outlines of at least six ships were able to force their way into the fjord and they were steaming northwards to Oscarsborg and beyond it to Oslo. From King Haakon, his government and the Norwegian Parliament, there had been no clear direction, no orders on how to deal with the momentous events that were unfolding as darkness fell. Col. Eriksen had very little reliable intelligence of any sort and no confirmation that the flotilla closing in on his fortress were German or Allied. And Norway was formally neutral.

  After a hurried conference with Lt Col. (retd) Anderssen, Eriksen gave orders to make ready. The artillery crews would stand to. All men with even the slightest experience were pressed into service on the ramparts. Cooks were woken and, with the young recruits helping, they and others manned the great guns.

  Just after 4 a.m. on 9 April, Col. Eriksen was told that his lookouts could make out the looming shape of a large battleship leading a flotilla of smaller vessels, at least one of which was heavily armed. All batteries were alerted, the breaches of their huge guns were loaded and Andreas Anderssen had torpedoes forward, ready to fire. As the unidentified ships steamed into range and Eriksen prepared to give the order to attack, he said, ‘Either I will be decorated or I will be court-martialled. Fire!’

  The cooks, the raw recruits and the few experienced NCOs and artillery officers did their job fearlessly and clinically. Shells slammed into the leading ship and it immediately caught fire. Anderssen’s deadly torpedoes slid silently under the dark waters of the fjord and scored direct hits. The large battleship blazed, doomed, and it passed close to the walls of the Oscarsborg Fortress. Bizarrely, the defenders thought they could hear men on the stricken ship singing. It was ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. A few minutes later Col. Eriksen received a delayed message that the flotilla had at last been identified as German. The leading ship was the battleship Blücher and it sank with all hands in the Oslofjord a little way to the north of Andreas Anderssen’s torpedo battery. Believing the waters to be mined, the rest of the flotilla turned about and fled south.

  This extraordinary episode was the first action of the war in Western Europe, the end of the eight-month hiatus popularly known as ‘the Phoney War’. Eriksen and Anderssen’s heroics allowed King Haakon, his government and his gold reserves to escape from Oslo and carry on resistance until June 1940 before Norway was forced to surrender. All the Dad’s Army of the Oscarsborg could do was delay the inevitable but, in that context, their conduct is even more admirable – because they knew that. Hitler’s empire expanded to include Denmark and Norway for brutal but sound strategic reasons. Occupation allowed direct access to Sweden’s iron ore reserves but, in the words of the directive authorising the invasion, there was another specific purpose: ‘to give our navy and air force a wider start-line against Britain’.

  Even the wildest optimists in the German High Command could never have anticipated the overrunning of the Netherlands and Belgium and the fall of France in a matter of a few days in the summer of 1940. The evacuation of the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from the beaches around Dunkirk may have been hailed as a miracle but, in terms of the loss of vital equipment, it was nothing less than a disaster. Most of the British army’s heavy artillery was abandoned – more than 1,000 field guns, 850 anti-tank guns and 600 tanks. Those divisions left at home had been compelled to hand over much of their heavy weaponry to the BEF and, when Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France collapsed with frightening speed, torn apart by Blitzkrieg and lightning-fast panzer division strikes, Britain was suddenly left defenceless. The eastern shores of the North Sea bristled with danger and, when the Battle of Britain began in July 1940, it was widely seen as a prelude to invasion.

  Stripped of most of their tanks and heavy guns, the army in Britain was not only weak and sparse, it lacked the German mobility that had defeated the French and encircled the BEF. In Scotland, such troops as were available were concentrated around the naval bases at Rosyth on the Forth, Invergordon on the Moray Firth and Scapa Flow in Orkney. A tiny garrison of between 5,000 and 10,000 men was all that was available to repel any landings along a 600 km coastline, from Alness, north of Inverness, all the way down to Grangemouth on the Forth. And, after the battalions assigned to protect naval bases were subtracted from this pitiful total, it meant that, in a cold reality, there were no soldiers to fight on the beaches as Churchill had exhorted them to do. In 1940, the Germans could have walked into Scotland unopposed.

  Strategists believed that, while an invasion would almost certainly target Southern England, a significant diversionary attack could be launched across the North Sea against Scotland, perhaps from bases in Norway. Ports such as Peterhead and Aberdeen could quickly funnel German troops into the east of the country and Moray and Aberdeenshire had several aerodromes and flat terrain suitable for glider and paratrooper assault. It was vital to contain an invasion in the north and prevent the Germans from reaching the cities and heavy industry of the Central Belt. But there were no soldiers and no guns to put up an effective resistance. Geography and history came to the rescue. Here is an extract from War Office records: ‘There is a bottleneck at Stonehaven. To make defence in this locality fully effective, there would have to be subsidiary posts on the road, Braemar–Devil’s Elbow and in the area Kingussie–Dalwhinnie to prevent an enemy turning movement to the west.’

  Deep in the dark green shade of Fetteresso Forest, overgrown on the sides of minor roads or scattered on remote mountainsides are the remains of Scotland’s response to the real and imminent threat of invasion. In the second half of 1940, what was known as ‘the Cowie Stop Line’ was hurriedly constructed and its story and its resonances are fascinating.

  At Stonehaven, the Highland massif almost reaches the North Sea. Only a narrow land corridor, much of it boggy and difficult until the drainage schemes of the 18th and 19th centuries, allow
s access between Aberdeenshire, the Moray coastlands to the north and Angus, the Mearns and Tayside to the south. In addition, there are high passes in the west through which an army might move – the Cairn o’ Mount road and the pass from Braemar down to Glenshee and Blairgowrie are the most travelled. On the latter route, at the Devil’s Elbow, where a notorious series of hairpin bends had to be negotiated on the road to Glenshee, ranks of concrete anti-tank cubes were strung out in long lines.

  The Cowie Water was chosen as the most critical and most formidable section of the stop line. It runs eastwards from the foothills of the mountains before falling into the sea at Stonehaven. While it was not deep or wide, the little river flowed in exactly the right place and its bank could be altered to make an effective obstacle for tanks. Men from 217 Pioneer Company, aided by Royal Engineers, cut away the southern bank along much of its length and raised it so that it presented a sheer face of around two metres in height. No tank could use its tracks to climb that or hope to bulldoze its way through the sold earth behind.

  Pillboxes designed to house Bren-gun crews were built at possible crossings and bridges and anti-tank cubes placed where the Cowie flowed through flatter terrain. Bridges were to be demolished and substantial steel and concrete roadblocks set up elsewhere. The town of Stonehaven itself was considered to be appropriate for the sort of intensive street fighting that can delay an advancing army. At 18 km in length the Cowie Stop Line is thought to be the most complete of many built in the early years of the Second World War. And, on the night of 7 September 1940, the people of Stonehaven and along the Cowie Water thought that it was about to be put to the test. The code word ‘Cromwell’ was issued, a warning that a German invasion was imminent. Church bells rang out an alarm in the town and many looked anxiously out to sea, searching the horizon for an enemy fleet.

  After 1945, the Cowie Stop Line was gradually forgotten, trees were planted by its steep banks and moss grew over the concrete cubes and the pillboxes. But it was not a unique monument to the strategic importance of this narrow neck of land, where the Highland Line almost reaches the sea.

  Malcolm’s Mount at Stonehaven was said to be the burial mound of the first king of Scots of that name. When archaeologists uncovered a cist, or stone-lined grave, in 1822, the tradition seemed to be confirmed. In fact, the burial was much older and could not have been that of the 10th-century king. But rare documentary evidence does insist that Malcolm I was killed in 954 by ‘the Men of the Mearns at Fetteresso, that is, in the Swordland’. The place-name of Fetteresso survives close to Malcolm’s Mount not only in the form Kirktown of Fetteresso but in other adjacent places. Swordland, or Claideom, was a wider label and it appears to have been attached to the narrow neck of land between the foothills of the Grampian ranges and the sea at Stonehaven. The name must have denoted, as it did in Ireland, an area of regular dispute, a place of conflict.

  The 10th-century chronicle that spoke of warfare in the Swordland also introduced another old place-name. The Mearns approximated to one of Scotland’s smaller and more ancient counties. Kincardineshire was swept into oblivion by the reorganisation of local authorities in 1975. Its county town and namesake of Kincardine disappeared much earlier, in the middle ages, and, by the 17th century, the administrative centre had settled on Stonehaven. But through all of these changes, the old name of the Mearns has stuck. Often it is twinned with another, as in Angus and the Mearns, and that hints at its meaning. It derives from the Old Welsh term maer, which means ‘a steward’. Thus the Mearns means ‘the Stewartry’, an area governed by an official appointed by someone of higher degree, probably a king. It may be that the Mearns, the Swordland, was a dependency of the kings of Angus, the rulers of the lands between the Tay and the Mounth.

  For famously fertile farming country, the major legacy of the Mearns is perhaps surprising. Two writers, separated by seven centuries, were born and raised within a few miles of each other. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell, wrote some of the greatest fiction ever published anywhere. Sunset Song and its sequels, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, appeared between 1932 and 1934. Mitchell’s compatriot from the Mearns was John of Fordun, a much less celebrated figure but very influential nonetheless.

  Born around 1360 at Fordoun in the rich farming district known as the Howe of the Mearns, John almost certainly went on to become a chaplain at St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen. His achievement was singular and innovative. Having gathered material from many sources, perhaps as far afield as Ireland and England, Fordun compiled the first continuous history of Scotland. In what became known as the Scotichronicon, he began by establishing a foundation legend of some originality and quickly brought the story up the death of David I in 1153. Fordun also collected research and this was converted into a narrative by the continuator of the Scotichronicon, a remarkable man called Walter Bower, the Abbot of the island community of Inchcolm in the middle of the 15th century.

  One of Fordun’s most fascinating passages concerns an early attempt at defining the distinctions between Highland and Lowland culture. Born close to the Highland Line and spending much of his adult life in Aberdeen, he was in a position to observe these closely: ‘The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech. For two languages are spoken amongst them, the Scottish [Gaelic] and the Teutonic [English]; the latter of which is the language of those who occupy the seaboard and the plains, while the race of Scottish speech inhabits the Highlands and outlying islands. The people of the coast are of domestic and civilised habits . . . The Highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed race, rude and independent.’

  Fordun set an enduring tone. His attitudes were repeated and embroidered by virtually every historian writing in Scots and Latin in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the apposition of Highland barbarism and Lowland civilisation became the conventional wisdom. By the 1580s, abuse had replaced condescension. Alexander Montgomerie was a poet at the court of the young James VI and he is chiefly remembered for an elaborate, ornamented allegory called The Cherrie and the Slae. In high contrast to its delicacies, here is the poet’s view of Highlanders:

  How the first Helandman

  Of God was maid,

  Of a horse turd,

  In Argyle,

  It is said.

  As a further means of distancing Lowland Scotland from Highland, an exchange of terms took place over the course of the first half of the 15th century. Fordun’s labelling of Gaelic as ‘Scottish’ was replaced by Erse or ‘Irish’, making a native language appear foreign. The transfer was completed when Teutonic or English came to be called ‘Scots’, making an imported dialect appear native. Such linguistic shifts are significant as they track swings in the balance of political power and cultural identity.

  On the ground, in the detail of everyday life, these changes were, in reality, much less dramatic, the division between Highland and Lowland much less graphic than Fordun would have had readers believe. The likelihood must be that he exaggerated division because he was attempting, as Scotland’s first great narrative historian, to give some order to the chaos of all the material he had assembled. But his overstatement of cultural difference is nonetheless surprising, given his upbringing in the Mearns. During Fordun’s own lifetime Gaelic was still spoken in the fertile farmlands of the Buchan, the most easterly of the Moray coastlands. Although undoubtedly in retreat, Gaelic was also still heard in the late 14th century in the Carse of Gowrie on the northern shores of the Firth of Tay, in West Fife and Kinross and in Strathearn. These are all areas of prime agricultural land, unquestionably parts of the Lowlands.

  Divisions were blurred even closer to Fordun’s birthplace. On Cat Law, a prominent hill north of Kirriemuir, there is a spring near the summit. In 1253, it was known as Tubernacoppech, a rendering of Tobar na Copaich, ‘the Well of the Dockens’. On a map of 1790, it is translated as ‘the Docken Well’. What this means is a long-term coexistence of Gaelic and English
in one locality, long enough for the Gaelic place-name to be correctly translated rather than replaced with a new name by incomers ignorant of or uninterested in the language.

  Elsewhere in the Lowlands of Scotland, place-names confirm a patchy linguistic picture with few stark divisions. Cothill or Cuthil is a version of comhdhail, the Gaelic word for ‘a formal meeting place’, ‘an assembly’. These were probably open-air courts where a judge – in Gaelic, a britheamh or brieve or, in Scots, a ‘doomster’ or ‘dempster’ – handed down judgements on cases presented to them. There are more than fifty Cothill or Cuthil place-names and seven of them can be found south of the Forth, in areas where Gaelic was never the dominant language.

  A fascinating remnant of the early centuries of Christianity is to be found on the map of Scotland, in the shape of three Dysarts. The largest is the town on the Fife coast and there are two others – one in Perthshire, one in Angus. The name comes from the Gaelic diseart, itself a rendering of ‘desert’. Early monasticism was much influenced by the teachings of the Desert Fathers, a group of ascetics who sought a solitary life of prayer and contemplation in the harsh deserts of Syria, ancient Palestine and Egypt. Their western admirers adopted the word as diseart, for a hermitage, and, having no deserts to surround them, they often chose sites by the sea or on riverbanks.

  English arrived in Scotland in two stages but the language it first displaced was not Gaelic but dialects of Old Welsh, the language spoken the length and breadth of Britain during the Roman occupation of the south and long afterwards. With the invasions of the Angles in the 7th and 8th centuries, the south-east of Scotland began to speak their early version of English. As their war bands seized the productive farms and estates of the lower Tweed Valley, Teviotdale, Lauderdale and East Lothian, they forced the adoption of their dominant tongue.