Returning to the western gate and the long vistas to the hills of the Ettrick Forest, it struck me that this deserted, overgrown and tumbledown place had a powerful sense of drama. A freshening west wind blustered my face and I saw what I thought was rain sheeting in from the south. What made the motte atmospheric, a place of spirits, was not the promontory itself but what it showed all who climbed it. Here is where the first farmers came to look up at the vault of Heaven, the life-giving, sheltering, angry and unforgiving sky, and to wonder what celestial forces made its moods. I shake my fist in frustration at the winds, cursing out loud the storms and the damage they cause. Perhaps my wiser ancestors came up from the valley to this high place to pray for sun, warmth and life.
3 February
In winter, my gaze is often drawn to the motte. Perhaps it is an ancestral instinct. Through the stands and shelter belts of leafless hardwood trees, I can see what a focus it once was in our little valley, like a castle on a hill. It lies about a mile west of our farm. Three wide fields straddle the ridge leading up to the promontory and its prominence was hidden by agricultural improvers. On the margins of each field, trees were planted and, after two hundred years, most stand tall, their leaves lush from spring to autumn. Some are specimens, saplings planted for their looks as well as shelter. Each year, when the winter frosts have barely abated, the first hardwood whose buds unfurl is a Corstorphine sycamore, its vivid, lime-green leaves forming part of the screen that hides the motte from its valley.
Four thousand years ago the landscape looked very different. After a period of advances and reverses documented by an analysis of ancient pollen, a continuous assault began on the Wildwood and the acreage of pasture expanded steadily. Evidence of wood-craft was dated to sometime around 2000 BC. With stone and flint, wood was a vital resource and trees were farmed by our ancestors. Coppicing, the cutting back of a central trunk to stimulate the regrowth of suckers around its base, was developed at that time. Preserved in anaerobic mud, the limbs of coppiced trees were used to make causeways over boggy ground or jetties into lochs like Hartwood. Our valley is now shaped and dominated by its woods and trees, but in 2000 BC it would have been much more open. And the motte would have been visible from all parts.
Four thousand summers ago, on the day of the solstice, a procession may have made its stately way up the central, spinal ridge of our valley, perhaps singing as they went. When they reached the promontory, they would have looked out over a landscape basking in the warmth of the longest day. On the hills above Hartwoodmyres their cows and calves, ewes and lambs would have grazed the sweet young grass, growing sleek on its succulent sugars, and below them green crops grew in small enclosures close to their huts.
The cultivation of land had led inevitably to a sense of owner-ship and in turn social hierarchies were established. The people of the valley would have processed up the ridge on command. The Lord of Hartwood, or at least a leader of some kind, probably a man who also assumed a priestly role, would perhaps have held a ceremony to begin the work of building his capital place, a fort and also a refuge for his people. It was in the time between planting and harvesting, when stock had been driven upcountry and the inbye fields were empty and recovering. It was a time when work could begin.
It is likely that several teams began to dig simultaneously around a perimeter marked out in a ceremony of some sort. With antler picks and baskets, they would have excavated ditches and piled the upcast on the summit of the bare promontory. Once the teams had linked their lengthening ditches into a completed oval shape, the work of building the palisade would have begun. A timber frame was rammed into the ground, essentially a cage into which any stones and the upcast would be piled. Once the rampart was complete, the builders would have brought cut timber to form the palisade or stockade itself. Larger tree trunks were made pointed at one end and rammed into the excavated earth before being braced and the gaps filled with shorter stakes cut from coppiced trees.
The western gateway was the weak point and the rampart was constructed so that an assault was funnelled through a narrowing entranceway before reaching the wooden gate. This small hillfort could have been completed in a single summer by work gangs of twenty or thirty people. The motte was the first building in our valley of which any trace remains and its creation gives a sense of how many people lived on its small farms. Perhaps there were sixty in total, taking account of children and those too old or infirm to work. Now, only half that number live in the old lordship of the motte.
No archaeology has ever been done on the promontory, only some surveys, but all of the conjecture above is constructed on solid foundations. In 1931 an unfinished hillfort in Hampshire was excavated so expertly that the way in which it was built and how long it took could be accurately recreated.
Once all was complete at the motte, no doubt another ceremony would have taken place at the head of our little valley. At the summer solstice, Maidie and I shall go back and make an offering to the shades of our shared past.
4 February
High places lift us up, bring us closer to the gods. We climb to leave behind the ruck of the world below us so that we can gaze on the majesty of Creation. When looming storm clouds, heavy with rain, collide, and thunder rumbles and lightning crackles, it is not difficult to imagine divine hands directing the heavens. The Greeks and Romans, rationalists both, believed that Zeus or Jupiter threw down thunderbolts, and Thunor, the Anglo-Saxon god of storms, gave his name to thunder. When he was angry, the god smote his anvil hard with a huge hammer and thunder boomed across the sky and lightning crackled.
Long before Zeus roared, it seems certain that our prehistoric ancestors looked upwards to find their gods. None of their names survive, their rites are mysterious, but the spectacular sites of their worship can still be seen in the landscape. Misleadingly called hillforts, hundreds were dug in the high places of early Britain. Many are too large to be defensible. Visible from the Deer Park, Eildon Hill North’s banks and ditches describe a circuit of a mile and have five gateways. It would have needed a garrison of thousands to man the ramparts. Other hillforts are overlooked by higher ridges from which missiles could rain down. Although some were fortified in times of war, especially during the Roman invasion after AD 43, the principal role of hillforts was religious. They were sky-temples. In a modest way, the motte was almost certainly a focus of worship for the people of the valley.
Modern thinking generally divides church and state, but in the past no such distinctions were made. Roman emperors were routinely deified and pharaohs and priest-kings ruled over some early societies. It seems likely that his people believed that the Lord of Hartwood knew the minds of the gods well, and at the motte I think that ceremonies took place at the turning points of the year: the first fruits of early spring when the ewes let down their milk, the ancient journey of transhumance at the beginning of summer, the harvest and the cull of animals before winter. It seems that fires blazed on the motte. Names remember those nights when flames rose in the darkness. Tinto Hill near the Clyde translates as the Fire Hill and Carntyne as the Fire Cairn, both places of ancient ceremony.
Roman consuls and generals rarely acted before their priests had interpreted the auguries in the sky. These often involved observing the flights of birds: their direction, number and when they took place. This is likely to have been another ancient practice and one best undertaken from the vantage point of high places. Interpretation was, of course, everything, but canny priests knew the migration patterns of different birds, and also had more rational, political means of judging the consequences of actions. The birds could have meant what the priests or the generals wanted them to mean.
5 February
Hunting in our valley has never ceased. Even after farming arrived six thousand years ago, it continued. It had to, for in the hungry month of February, when winter stores were running low, birds could be killed with an arrow – a cleaner death than being riddled with shotgun pellets. It is a continuity of sorts –
the pop of cartridges regularly punctuates our winter in the valley. The reality is that almost all hunting is now recreational and not born of necessity. I hate to see animals killed for sport, and although I am far from being a vegetarian, shot pheasants and partridges are not something I would eat. My squeamishness is reinforced by the danger of biting on a lead pellet and breaking a tooth.
6 February
At minus two overnight and the gauge climbing, it felt almost balmy as Maidie and I ambled up the track, able to lift our heads from watching out for ice patches. And when the first gunshot cracked in the still morning air, we both jumped and I instinctively cowered. But when I realised it was the sharp report of a rifle and not the crump of hunters’ shotguns, I understood what was happening. At Windy Gates a silver pick-up was parked and across the back seats there was an empty gun slip and a box of ammunition; high-velocity bullets, not cartridges. A marksman had come to shoot the young deer. My neighbour had told me a few days before Christmas that there were too many roe deer in the woods and that they would have to be culled. When it came to planting time, the hungry animals would make a real mess in a barley field full of succulent shoots.
But where was the marksman? The Old Boys and the mares were spooked but not panicked by the gunfire. I wondered if he had hidden himself in the Young Wood or the shorter trees of the New Wood beyond the grass park. I doubled back to Windy Gates and to my amazement saw the roe deer stag, showing himself in full view in the open field. He was sniffing something lying on the ground. It was the body of one of his children. When the marksman emerged from the fringes of the New Wood, the stag froze, and then raced downhill towards the Hartwoodburn and the safety of the trees.
Dressed in highly camouflaged kit, carrying a tripod and a rifle with a telescopic sight, the shooter began walking towards Windy Gates. At first he was very defensive, ‘I don’t want any conflict’ and ‘I stopped when I saw you.’ When I explained that I understood that the deer needed to be culled, he relaxed a little and explained to me that he’d gone behind the New Wood and through the upper part of the East Meadow so that he could position himself downwind.
Anxious to get on, he opened the field gate and drove to where the stag had been standing over the dead youngster and another carcass. There had been only three shots and I watched him drag by the back legs the two young deer he had killed over towards the pick-up, next to the fence at the New Wood. He bent over each carcass. I realised that he was gralloching them, gutting each one and throwing the innards, the liver, kidneys and lights into the dieback. There would be a feast for the foxes, the crows and any buzzards that could elbow their way in. The scent of the guts, the stench of death, would be in the air all morning.
When the marksman drove back to Windy Gates, I waited to ask him if and when he would be back. More relaxed, he gave me his mobile number and told me his name. He turned out to be far from a cold-hearted professional hunter. Liking deer, he was sad to have to kill them and, as I had seen earlier, he was sure I was going to give him a hard time. Perhaps others have. He told me he spent four months a year in Norway shearing sheep and in the Borders made a living as a stalker at the many pheasant shoots, as well as shooting deer. When he said goodbye and gripped the steering wheel, I noticed that he had dried blood around his fingernails and between his fingers.
7 February
When morning mist muffles the land, it seems to descend into the dark deeps of the world. Like reefs or wrecks, stands of trees loom out of the grey silence. Then, when the breeze shifts, in moments they disappear. Unseen, the sun climbs out of the east and, after a time, there is a patch of blue overhead, like the surface of the ocean seen by a diver swimming up to the light. In this waking dreamland, the breeze shifts once more and in the half-world I shiver at the wraiths swirling in the folds of the mist. Perhaps I felt a tap on my shoulder.
9 February
Last night history flooded back across millennia. After a long and steady downpour the Tile Field was drowning once more. Several ponds had formed on the lowest levels and over to the west a wide area was inundated. Five winters ago, we had a long period of intermittent rain and the ponding was so widespread that it was possible to see where the ancient margins of the loch were. I watched a flock of gulls feasting on the drowned worms.
10 February
The hills remember the past and the lowlands forget it. On the high ridges above Hartwoodmyres and Brownmoor in the south, the Ordnance Survey marks settlements, enclosures and forts, faint folds in the ground where banks and ditches were once dug by our prehistoric ancestors. They survive because they fall on the far side of an ancient frontier. For millennia, herdsmen have left the ground undisturbed, their beasts grazing, ewes making sheep-lawns amongst the gorse and the tough marsh grass, cows devouring even the roughest of pasture.
Our farm lies astride that frontier, the divide between herdsmen and ploughmen. When the brilliant Berwickshire blacksmith James Small invented the modern swing plough in the late eighteenth century, farmers could delve deeper, drain their fields and destroy almost all trace of ancient settlements. All that remained were the flints and other objects that the Mason brothers and Walter Elliot picked off the crests of the furrows.
Long before Small’s earth-breaking invention, this faultline in the landscape was evident and marked on maps. When the Lord of the Motte looked out from his ramparts over the hills in the west, he gazed at the wild land, the territory of the Hunters. A map made in the second century AD described a landscape established long before when it plotted a kindred known as the Selgovae. It is a Latinised name derived from the Celtic root-word seilg, which means ‘to hunt’. The settlements beyond Hartwoodmyres were the farmsteads of herdsmen who also hunted deer, wild boar and the giant feral cattle known as the aurochs, as well as packs of wolves and the solitary lynx that might prey on their flocks and herds.
All except the deer have gone, but the invisible frontier remains. Farming in the hills is still a much harsher life than ploughing the fertile fields of the Tweed Basin, but the old prejudices seem to have faded. When I was growing up in Kelso, time seemed to dance to a different rhythm for the shepherds who came into town for a Saturday night at the pub. A famous story tells of one who was seen standing, slightly unsteadily, at the bus stop at 9.30 p.m. for the 10 p.m. bus back up the valley. When told it would not come for half an hour, the old shepherd replied, ‘Aye, son, it won’t take me long to wait half an hour.’
11 February
The noises of the night were echoing around the valley. Out in the early dark with Maidie, we heard a hoolet call in the Hare Wood. ‘Owl’ in English, hoolet seems a more expressive name. My grannie used to make us laugh because she could hoot like a hoolet, and a rough transliteration might be hoolie-gooloooo-oo. Our hoolet’s call was answered from somewhere on the northern ridge behind us, perhaps the wood around the Haining Loch. They usually call to mark their hunting territory. I am not certain, but they might have been tawny owls.
In the moonless darkness, these calls seemed timeless, something that had been heard across millennia by our ancient predecessors. It struck me that the Scots lexicon for bird names might also be ancient; they are so different from the English versions and some of them are onomatopoeic. Whaups are curlews, yorlins are yellowhammers, bubbly jocks are turkeys – all names derived from their calls. Others seem descriptive: hoodie for a carrion crow, corbie for a raven, laverock for a lark. And some are just very different, like gled for a buzzard.
Breasting a horizon clear of clouds, the sun rose quickly and the hoolets fell silent, settling down for their daytime roost. On a very cold morning, the warmth was welcome. Wind, rain and cold killed our ancestors, seeping into their bones. It can be no surprise that across the Earth the sun was worshipped.
The weather governed lives until the Industrial Revolution and the coming of indoor work for most people, but it will surely govern us once more as climate change accelerates. A headline in today’s paper was profoundly al
arming. The insect population is being devastated by pesticides and other factors so extremely that it is declining by 2.5 per cent a year. If nothing is done, it will soon be too late to avoid a catastrophic descent towards what scientists are calling a sixth mass extinction event. Except it will be an extermination. And there is little or no political leadership that even recognises what is going on, never mind having the motivation to do something before it is too late.
12 February
With only sixteen days of February left to endure, I decided to risk going out with Maidie without a jacket, me not her. It was dry and overcast but absolutely still, and with three layers I was warm enough. Another first, another sign that the weather is improving and that there will be light at the end of the dark tunnel of winter.
We heard them before they appeared. Suddenly a flight of eight geese honked above us, having only just cleared the treetops of the New Wood. Flying in a wide circle, they seemed to be searching for something, and ten minutes later we saw what it was. Very high in the morning sky, a spectacular double chevron of hundreds of geese was moving almost due north over the Ettrick and towards the Lammermuirs. Despite the distance, we could hear them honking and Maidie sat down to watch the progress of an epic journey. The chevrons seemed fluid, constantly changing formation, joining up and then drifting apart. Perhaps the honking was important for communication, to keep the huge flock together as they moved fast. This must be one of the most beautiful, most breathtaking sights in the natural world. It might be another sign that winter is loosening its grip if these birds are moving north again.
The Secret History of Here Page 7