The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  My dad’s side of the family was a blank. Beyond and beside Bina, there was no one, no gaggle of aunts or uncles, no cousins, first or even far removed. The silence was only broken after my dad died on a snowy night in February 1986. Later, Mum told me that he had been an illegitimate child, much more of a stigma in 1916, especially in a small town. But very slowly, over time, the silence gave way to whispers of the past and recollections of relationships.

  Because that was a part of her life she told me something of, I knew that Bina was born at Cliftonhill in 1890, but it was a long time before I discovered that she herself had been the illegitimate daughter of Annie. No one then was alive who could tell me who my great-grandfather was. Two of Bina’s aunts were also unmarried and had no children that we knew of, and so the Moffat line, from my great-great-grandfather William, came down only through my grannie to my dad.

  When Bina died in 1971, I was away on a first long trip abroad, almost two months spent in Turkey, Greece and Italy with school and university friends. So as not to worry her, I had told my gran I was going to Torquay. When I came back, she wasn’t there. Bina had died without me, and I’d had no moment to say goodbye and tell her how much I loved her. There was not even a head-stone I could visit. I suspect my mum and dad could not afford to pay for one.

  That has always saddened me, and so yesterday I drove down to Kelso to see if I could at least find the lair where she is buried. It felt like time to do that. Having found no record online, I knocked on the door of Robertson’s Memorials, a monumental sculpture business handily placed next to the cemetery. The lady was very helpful and gave me a number to call at Scottish Borders Council. Also very helpful and thoughtful, another lady told me that Bina had been buried in section G1 near the entrance gates of the cemetery. That was a flickering memory from the autumn of 1971 when I came back from Torquay. On my return to Robertson’s Memorials the lady showed me a diagram so that I could see approximately where my grannie’s grave was and also gave me an email address for the council. It was much better than nothing.

  On my way back through the cemetery to my car, I stopped by my mum and dad’s grave. I go every winter to see them and the tears always come, sadness at the loss of them and the passage of all that time. I know that they lived good and decent lives, but neither ended well. Their last years were hard, and that is what makes me weep. My dad was felled by two strokes in quick succession when he was fifty-eight and he changed completely from a powerful, assertive man to a limping invalid with a withered arm. After he died at the age of seventy, my mum seemed to lose motivation and direction. I remember her staring into the fire, silent, constantly smoking. Perhaps she thought she had nothing to live for. She was unhappy at the end of her life.

  Looking at other headstones and recognising some of the names, I was stopped in my tracks by a headstone that remembered Andrew Hogarth. At the bottom, the name of his daughter had been added and she died in 2005. She was Robina Moffat Greig. That winded me. Robina Moffat was my gran’s full name. In a small town, a mere coincidence seemed highly unlikely, especially with two relatively uncommon names. Who was Robina Greig and what was her link to my grannie? Was there a blood connection?

  Once home, I emailed Scottish Borders Council and the lady came straight back with more information than I had bargained for. Not only did she pinpoint exactly where Bina was buried, she also added that Annie, my great-grandmother, and Isabella, my great-great-aunt, had been interred in the same lair in 1936 and 1928 respectively.

  My sisters and I want to commission a headstone to remember these women who made us. But before we ask the mason to carve the names, another mystery needs to be solved. On a headstone in Ednam Kirkyard, about four hundred yards from Cliftonhill Farm, William Moffat is buried with his wife, Margaret Jaffrey, and their daughter, Mary – and, it says, their ‘eldest daughter, Isabella, who died in 1931, aged 78’. Few people are buried twice. Who were these two Isabellas? No age is given for the Kelso burial, except that the records note she was the first to be buried in that lair. Having found my gran’s grave and cleared up one mystery, two more sprang to the surface.

  21 February

  The past never remains in the past. Bina’s memories, phrases, stories and the occasional unexplained, stray reference are slender threads in the darkness. Once, when we drove past a cottage in the village of Birgham, near Kelso, she remarked it was cousin Bella’s house, but did not respond to immediate questions about her, nor did she want to stop and knock on her door. However distant a relative she might be, she was still a relative, the only one my gran ever mentioned. Alive in the 1950s, she cannot have been either of the Isabellas buried at Kelso and Ednam, but perhaps she was named after one of these ghosts. The void remained, and no candles ever flickered again in that dimmest and most distant of pasts.

  In the morning mist, I searched the grass park by the Long Track for the grey shapes of grazing deer, hungry as they must have been even in this mild February. But since the marksman shot the two young ones I have not seen any show. Walking back to the farmhouse with visibility down to fifty yards, Maidie kept stopping to look behind her, back down the Long Track. But no one was following us.

  25 February

  A morning of contrasting senses. The air is filled with the sickly, sweet scent of silage drifting across from the cow byres at the farm and the sky is suffused with a gentle sunlight veiled by mist over Greenhill Heights. Yesterday evening I saw a roe deer hind, her white rump bobbing through the marsh grass in the Tile Field. Her camouflage is so perfect that it was only when she moved I saw her. The weather is very mild and grass is growing, tempting the pregnant does out of the cover of the woods.

  27 February

  The light is racing back. A pale dawn was quickly brightening and, for the first time this year, I could take the dogs out without a flashlight. After breakfast, Maidie and I climbed up to the vantage ridge to look at Creation. Winter sun changes the colours of Scotland as it warms the frosted fields from grey to green and lights the heather colours on Newark Hill. It will be another warm day, with temperatures up to sixty degrees Fahrenheit on the old scale, the one that means something to me. Human beings will bask again in the heat of a summer’s day. But those creatures that hibernate will be stirring; hedgehogs might emerge too early and be unable to find the food they desperately need after the long months of winter starvation.

  28 February

  A dense and persistent grey mist has enveloped the land. It telescopes time and distance as the track behind disappears and shapes loom out ahead of us. Maidie stops often, her ears pricked, her head turning this way and that. The world seems both to shrink and expand. Because the sights of the twenty-first century are hidden, but the sounds are audible, the everyday takes on a different quality. The clang of the tractor down at the cow byres becomes an echo across eighteen centuries. Beyond the small pool of the visible, the clangour of ancient, half-forgotten battles rings out.

  After the burning of the forts at Oakwood and Trimontium in AD 105, the warbands of the Selgovan kings rode east and south to raid Roman outposts. To contain these destructive incursions, army commanders at the legionary fortress at York concentrated large, thousand-strong units known as milliary cohorts in the west, around Carlisle. These were rapid reaction forces, a mix of cavalry and infantry, but they made little impression. By AD 115 to AD 120, it was clear that the warriors of the hill kindreds of the Selgovae, the Novantae in the east and the Brigantes in the south, were evading the cohorts, probably through their intimate knowledge of the hill trails, hidden valleys and the paths through the mosses and sykes of the upcountry. And when mist fell the Roman cohorts will have been at their most vulnerable.

  By 119, a radical solution had been decided on. The commander of the fort near Carlisle ordered the construction of a wall of turf. It ran from Bowness on Solway to Willowford in the Irthing Valley, not far from Haltwhistle. Three forward forts were built – at Birrens in Annandale, at Netherby, north of Carlisle,
and at Bewcastle in the eastern hills.

  But even that was not enough. In 122 the hill peoples heard the booming thud of distant drums. The Emperor of Rome had come. Hadrian ordered a radical and permanent solution to the troubles of the northern frontier. From the estuary of the River Tyne in the east, a stone wall would be built across the waist of Britain to link with the turf wall at Willowford ‘to separate the barbarians from the Romans’. It was the beginning of the idea of a distinction between the wild and savage north and the softer, more civilised south, between Scotland and England. The horse-riding warriors of the hill kindreds are the ancestors of the bands of Border Reivers who terrorised the countryside fourteen centuries later and who passed on their more peaceful traditions to those who ride the bounds of the common land around the towns of the Tweed Basin in the twenty-first century.

  Hadrian’s Wall was a vast, sprawling project that could not have failed to touch the lives of the people of our little valley. Its sheer scale sucked in resources from a very wide area. More than 3.7 million tonnes of stone were used, and for every ten men who worked on the wall itself, another ninety scoured the countryside for food and materials. To the north, the country of the barbarians excluded from the Empire, this process will not have been a peaceful negotiation, as Roman forage parties drove away their herds, appropriated their draught animals and emptied their granaries. Over five years of construction, thirty thousand carts and drivers were used, as well as six thousand oxen and fourteen thousand mules.

  When the great wall was completed, it looked very different from the barrier of grey stone that now seems to blend into the muted colours of the uplands. Hadrian’s Wall was originally white. Once the stonework was completed, masons covered it with a lime-based plaster thickened with hemp. That made an astonishing, highly visible belly-hollowing statement in the landscape. The gleaming ramparts could be seen for many miles as they snaked along the ridges and sills and across the river valleys. Rome had divided the holy island of Britain and the barbarians were to be left in no doubt about the magnitude of the power of the Empire.

  March

  1 March

  This is not only traditionally the first day of spring, it also feels like it. Cold and damp and dripping, Maidie and I walk out into another morning of mist. Pockets lie in hollows like patches of grey snow and gossamer scarves of mist whisper across the undulating fields north of Brownmoor. I noticed that the sucker shoots around the sycamore stumps in the Top Wood were budding and the dampness will persuade them to swell. With fewer deer to browse them, the suckers might grow tall enough this summer to be safe and become coppices.

  3 March

  After only a few hours’ fitful sleep and my head thick with a cold, I felt full of energy. It seemed like a good day to begin work in earnest on the year’s gardening. In the old conservatory converted into a greenhouse, I planted the seeds of two varieties of tomatoes in propagation trays and gave them a good soak. Then I cut down all of last year’s tomato plants and threw them on the muck heap.

  At the garden centre I bought four big bags of tomato compost. Once the propagated plants are potted on, I will move them to the bags and train their stems up cords attached to the roof beam of the conservatory. That at least worked well over the winter. For my outdoor raised beds, I bought Arran Pilot first earlies for one and Charlotte second earlies for the other. I grew spuds in both beds last year, so I should probably begin to rotate with other crops, like parsnips or carrots, but I have heaved in so much new muck and compost, and will add the tilthed molehill soil, that I think all will be well.

  I set out the seed potatoes in trays in the conservatory so that they chit, producing tuber shoots of at least an inch before I can plant them and use my dad’s old dibble. I found it in the Wood Barn at the bottom of a basket that had not been looked at for many years. His old wooden-hafted hammer was there, the tool he used to call ‘the Persuader’. I also have packets of carrot seeds, some lettuce, peppers and courgettes to propagate, but I will need to buy some more trays.

  4 March

  Last night thick flurries of snow blew in off the hills on a snell west wind and blanketed the land under a waxing moon. Split logs from the dwindling woodpile made the fire spark and crackle as draughts found their way through the crannies of the building and warm rugs were pulled tighter around the shoulders of those who stared into the yellow flames.

  Rumours had been repeated all winter, each titbit of news refreshed by travellers on the great road that led from the White Wall and threaded through the Cheviot Hills. Last summer the kindreds of the north had raided deep into Britannia, killing, raping and burning what they could not carry off in their skin boats. Called Picti, these painted warriors ignored the ramparts and the garrison of the White Wall and sailed around it, their light and fast seagoing curraghs easily outrunning the galleys of the British Fleet or sailing in shallows where Roman captains would have run aground. Like summer wasps, they flew from their nests in the north and stung the southern villas and towns again and again. Merchants from the villages outside the gates of the wall forts spoke of another invasion. Stores were being stockpiled and the southern legions would march north in the spring.

  As the snow fell and the Selgovan families huddled around their fires, sleeping fitfully, sometimes shivering awake as the wind whistled down the Ettrick Valley, an air of uncertainty swirled around the thatch of their roundhouses. For many generations, the fort at Oakwood had slowly decayed. The timber towers had been fired as soon as the legions marched south in 105, and all of the usable beams of the barracks’ blocks, the granaries and the principia building had been long robbed out by native scavengers. The rains and snows of a hundred winters had tumbled the turf walls until they were little more than mounds behind shallow ditches. But would the soldiers they knew as Y Rhufeiniwr, the Romans, march back up the valley and rebuild?

  With the death of Hadrian in 138, the native kings had heard that Antoninus Pius had succeeded to the imperial purple. Anxious for military success to bolster and legitimise his accession, ‘[he] defeated the Britons through the actions of the governor [of the province of Britannia], Lollius Urbicus, and, driving off the barbarians, built another wall of turf ’. The great depot at Trimontium was rebuilt and military traffic moved constantly up and down the country from the new wall to army command north at York. With the construction of the Antonine Wall between the Firths of Clyde and Forth, the people of our little valley found themselves inside the Roman Empire.

  At first light, Maidie and I went out to find that last night’s heavy snowfall had mostly melted, although behind Oakwood Fort the hills were still white.

  5 March

  Rain streaked with sleet slanted across the valley, driven by a fresh west wind, as I shivered in the half-light of early morning, out with the dogs to let them pee. None of them took long. After some unnaturally balmy days in late February, winter had swept back. Fortified by breakfast, Maidie and I walked out into the sleet, well waterproofed, the little dog wearing a snug coat. It struck me that we only went out in this filthy weather because we knew we could dry off when we returned. A dog walk was desirable, but scarcely essential. Until the very recent past, before inexpensive and effective waterproofs and central heating were available, no one with any sense would have gone out on such a morning.

  All that the people of the roundhouses had were animal pelts worn skin-side out and slathered with fat or resin to keep out the worst of the rain, at least for a while. They became known as oilskins. Woollen cloaks, tunics and leggings woven from combed wool will have retained some of the natural lanolin from the sheep or goats but that was a fragile and temporary waterproofing. In a short time, they would have been soaked through, heavy with cold rain.

  If it was absolutely necessary to go out in bad weather, then all that would dry clothes afterwards was the fire blazing in the central hearth of a roundhouse. And that will have taken a long time. It is very unlikely that our ancestors owned much of a wardrobe and
damp clothes were almost certainly the main reason for the widespread incidence of acute and early onset arthritis.

  Roundhouses could be snug enough if they had been well built. There were no windows and the main source of draughts was the door, usually placed in the east so that a morning sun might penetrate the gloom. Around the central hearth, the arrangement of space was radial, like the spokes of a wheel. The conical shape of the thatched roof had no space for a chimney. Where the ring of roof timbers met and were secured together, in the manner of a large tipi, any hole would have let in rain and snow, and so smoke from the fire had to seep out through the thatch. Especially on windless days this created an eye-watering interior, and in order that occupants could avoid the fug, seating around the hearth would have been low or non-existent. But the smoke that filled the upper part of the conical roof space had an important safety effect. As sparks flew upwards from the fire, the lack of carbon dioxide meant that they were extinguished before they could reach the thatch.

  In 1159 BC, a volcano in Iceland blew itself apart and a vast tonnage of dust and ash rocketed into the atmosphere. The eruption of Hekla changed the weather radically, as the sun was screened for several summers and cultivation collapsed. Pollen samples and dendrochronology show a run of very poor growing seasons, especially in the north-west of Scotland and northern Ireland. How far south the effect of Hekla reached is uncertain, but some historians believe that there was famine and disruptive migration, as agriculture failed across a wide area, and that the effects lasted for many centuries. The impression is that dark times descended in the first millennium BC. It may be that the Romans invaded a land only recently recovered from a destructive spasm of climate change.