by Ian Crofton
If you were to float one of the old hulks rotting in what’s left of Annan’s harbour and sail it down the river to its mouth, and then let the ebbing tide take you out into the Solway Firth, you’d find yourself in the channel of the River Eden. At low tide there’d be bird-rich mudflats on either side. Drifting a mile or two westward, between Howgarth Scar and Cardurnock Flatts, you’d come to a point – a seemingly arbitrary point, at grid reference NY 152 631 – where the Ordnance Survey has marked the western end of the Anglo-Scottish Border.
Whoever decided the Border should start here – in an uncertain, chill seascape of shifting quicksands and treacherous currents, home to nothing but crabs and gulls and flounders – must have had a heightened sense of the ridiculous.
If, still aboard your hulk, you then dropped anchor and waited to weigh it until the tide turned, you’d float back up the channel of the River Eden for three or four miles until you could just make out, on the English shore, the small settlement of Bowness-on-Solway. This was the western terminus of Hadrian’s Wall, and is the closest the line of the ancient Roman frontier comes to the modern Border. Just north of the Border, on the edge of the mudflat called Gowkesk Rig, the Ordnance Survey marks an ‘Altar Stone’. But the OS does not specify to which god – Olympian or Christian or Druidic – this altar was dedicated.
Beyond Bowness, through the reach called Bowness Wath, the Border makes its way eastward up the Solway, abandoning – so the OS informs us – the ‘Channel of the River Eden’ for the ‘Channel of the River Esk’. On the south shore the settlements are few and far between. Port Carlisle, despite its grand name, is now little more than a pub. Then there’s the hamlet of Burgh by Sands, where in 1307 – in a medieval version of paper, scissors, stone – Edward I, Hammer of the Scots, finally succumbed to the scythe of the Grim Reaper. He was seen off, not by a sword on the field of battle, as he might have wished, but by the bloody flux.
To the north of Burgh by Sands lies Rockcliffe Marsh, a maze of channels and pools and salt sward whose features are so transient that only two have names: Near Gulf and its remoter neighbour Far Gulf. It is no place for humans, but a haven for gulls, waders and wildfowl. The northern tip of Rockcliffe Marsh is Sarkfoot Point. Just across the mud and water from here the Border is sucked inland by the mouth of the River Sark into the peatlands of Solway Moss.
Long before Chapelcross began its nuclear alchemy, the north shore of the Solway east of Annan was the site of another sinister industrial installation, a massive munitions plant that extended some nine miles from Dornock and Eastriggs in the west to Longtown, just over the Border, in the east. It was built in the wake of the crisis in 1915 when the British Expeditionary Force in France ran short of shells. The scandal almost toppled the government, and the immediate physical consequence was HM Factory Gretna, said to be the most extensive factory complex ever built. It was serviced by 125 miles of narrow-gauge railway lines, a water-treatment plant, a laundry that cleaned 6,000 items every day and catering facilities that produced 14,000 meals daily. Some 20,000 workers – the majority of them women – were brought in to labour here. They followed in the wake of the 10,000 navvies who had built the site – which included a number of new towns such as Eastriggs and Gretna to house the workers. To keep the workforce sober, the government nationalised all the pubs and breweries in the neighbourhood, as far as Carlisle. The site, codenamed Moorside, was carefully chosen, far from centres of population and out of reach of German raiders, whether coming by sea or by air.
HM Factory Gretna was built to make cordite, the propellant used to fire shells from big guns. Cordite is made by kneading nitroglycerine and gun-cotton together. The result was dubbed ‘the Devil’s porridge’*. This ‘low explosive’, produced in unprecedented quantities at Gretna, helped to industrialise death all along that most transient of borders, the shifting trench networks of the Western Front. There, in the mud of Flanders and Picardy, Lorraine and Champagne, Englishmen and Frenchmen and Scotsmen and Germans all mixed their blood and guts and bones together to make another kind of porridge, a shambles of meat in which it was impossible to allocate a national identity to any one cut.
Today, at Eastriggs and at Longtown, the OS marks neat row after neat row of buildings, set far apart from each other. These are the explosive stores – some of them still in use by the MoD. The world is, after all, still at war with itself.
When I went to see what I could see on the ground, it proved tricky to get even a glimpse. I drove close to the gates of both Longtown and Eastriggs, parked up, then approached on foot and pressed my face against the barbed-wire-topped perimeter fence. There were signs saying ‘MOD Property – Keep Out’ and ‘Guard Dogs on Patrol’. I dare say there was a camera somewhere that noted my registration number. I’ll no doubt be on a GCHQ database by now.
It was a fresh spring afternoon when I stepped off the train. The sun was shining, the wind blowing gently – ideal weather for a walk. With the rumple and whoosh of the M74 in the background, I followed signs for ‘Famous Blacksmith’s Shop Attractions’. I popped into the Gretna Hall Hotel and tried to engage the tartan-jacketed receptionist in conversation. I was going to ask him about the Border, and how he felt about it. He looked very uncomfortable. I suspect he didn’t like the look of my rucksack and boots. When some real guests turned up, he had the perfect excuse to attend to more pressing matters. I left him to it.
I needed to refine my approach, I realised. Not scare people.
I’m not sure I did much better in the Tourist Information Office. The uniformed young woman with a Cumbrian accent was friendly and helpful. But she found herself tongue-tied when I asked her what was the stupidest question she’d ever been asked. (Probably because she had, at that moment, just been asked it.) However, after a long pause and some blushing, the answer came: ‘Does the Loch Ness Monster live in Loch Lomond?’
I asked her what it was like travelling across the Border to work.
‘I don’t really notice,’ she said.
Had anyone ever told her to go back to England?
‘Not yet,’ she said.
I asked about the campsite marked on the map by the Old Toll House, just next to the motorway. She told me that the site no longer existed. When I passed by the Old Toll House later that afternoon there was a sign in the window saying ‘Site closed’. Behind, there was a field with a few abandoned caravans, tipped up at jaunty angles. The site was derelict. It looked like a tornado’d hit it. I was all for wild camping on the Solway shore, but the young woman in the Tourist Information Office told me that the tide’d likely take me away. But she gave me the address of a nearby guest house.
What Detroit once was for automobiles and Sheffield was for steel, Gretna is for weddings. The nuptial industry here predates plutonium, predates cordite, and has survived both. Gretna thrives on the wedding business. The signs say it all:
OVER 10000 MARRIAGES
PERFORMED IN THIS
MARRIAGE ROOM
ESTD 1830
GRETNA HALL HOTEL
& BLACKSMITH SHOP
“THE ORIGINAL MARRIAGE HOUSE”
Gretna
Registration
Office
GRETNA ONE STOP WEDDINGS
The Complete
Wedding Flower Service
The
Gretna Wedding Bureau
ROLLS ROYCE
WEDDING CAR
HIRE
The sign to the Courtship Maze (where getting together has never been harder) was placed next to another pointing to the Gretna Parish Cemetery.
It all started with an Act of Parliament of 1753 that was intended to put a stop to the clandestine marriage of minors in England – especially the marriages of young heiresses to unscrupulous rogues. Scotland had no such legislation, and a couple could marry there without a licence, banns or a presiding minister. All that was required to make a marriage legal was a declaration by the couple in front of witnesses. This latter role was taken on
with enthusiasm by various worthies in the village of Gretna and nearby Gretna Green, who would receive a handsome reward for their services. The blacksmith at Gretna Green appears to have pretty much abandoned the shoeing of horses for the tying of nuptial knots – the ceremony being performed over the smith’s anvil.
You might have thought the Marriage (Scotland) Act of 1939, with its abolition of marriage by declaration, would have put a stop to all these ‘owre-the-march marriages’. But in fact young English couples continued to elope north of the Border, as minors over the age of sixteen could still marry there without parental consent. This went on until 1969, when the legal age of majority was reduced from twenty-one to eighteen. Even this seems not to have done too much damage to the Gretna wedding industry, and couples with an appetite for such things still flock to Gretna to get hitched. There is much big hair and big frocks in evidence, trimmed out in tartan and lace.
In addition to attracting wedding business, Gretna has also cashed in on its history to bring in a wider range of tourists, whatever their marital status. In 1886 a local farmer called Hugh Mackie opened the ‘Famous Blacksmith’s Shop’, said to be one of Scotland’s first visitor attractions. The business has stayed in the family ever since. Expansion has been steady, and there is now a wide range of enticing retail offers, from whisky tastings in the Wee Big Shop (with its porcelain cats in kilts and its miniature brass anvils) to the Gretna Green Story Exhibition and the recently opened Courtship Maze.
Most of the visiting couples are middle-aged or older. I watched them in the open-air cafe, sipping coffee from plastic mugs, chewing on scones, few talking, most seemingly resigned to their lot. Perhaps they’d hoped the visit would kindle memories of tender kisses in the back row of the Scala. There was little evidence of this. Not even the large but perfunctorily executed sculpture of a naked couple chastely embracing appeared to elicit a response. Most preferred to avert their eyes. In the plaza there’s another sculpture, two giant forearms forming an arch as they clench their hands together. It reminded me of the crossed scimitars of Saddam Hussein’s triumphal arch in Baghdad.
If the Famous Blacksmith’s Shop doesn’t satisfy your appetite for shopping, then there’s always the Gretna Gateway Outlet Village. They’ve got a Costa.
In the early evening, dumping my rucksack in the guest house, I set out to explore. I found a little footpath leading through a small park on the south side of town. The path seemed to be heading towards the Solway. I was hoping it would take me to the Lochmaben Stone, the traditional marker of the western end of the Border, but soon I found the path was leading me east, in exactly the wrong direction. Through the hawthorn hedge on my right I caught glimpses of Skidaw and the northern Lakeland Fells. On the other side there was a deep ditch full of dead reeds.
In its own time the path turned south, and I came out onto the salt marsh on the edge of the estuary. Sheep were grazing on the grass above the mudflats. It’s said that lamb reared on salt marsh is particularly sweet. In the distance I could just make out lorries roaring north on the M6. Here, where the motorway crosses the Border on its causeway, there’s nothing to see but flat expanses. The peat bogs of Solway Moss extend far inland on one side, while the salt marshes and mudflats of the estuary spread out on the other. In this watery realm, one cannot believe that the Border could be anything but mutable.
A martin darted low over the water, after insects. I walked westward along the edge of the salt marsh dodging brackish pools. The greensward was dotted with sea pinks still in bud, waiting for the spring to warm up. The sea had washed some old tree trunks into twisted shapes, the wood swirled with yellows, blacks and greys. To the west, where the Solway widened out towards the Irish Sea, the skies were huge. Great balloons of cloud scudded overhead on the chill wind. There was a hint of blue on the far horizon, but most of the sea and the sky and the land I could see was grey. In the distance a curlew let out a plaintive crwee. It is a lonely spot, with barely a sign of the hand of man beyond a ragged barbed-wire fence. The sea and the sky dominate, the land just an afterthought.
These unfrequented reaches were once the haunt of smugglers. One of the most infamous was a Dutchman called Captain Yawkins, a man possessed of considerable daring and brilliant seamanship. On one occasion, it was said, he sailed his vessel directly between two Revenue cutters, so close that he could toss his hat onto the deck of one and his wig onto the deck of the other. Walter Scott fictionalised Yawkins as Dirk Hatteraick in Guy Mannering, while he appears under his own name in The Raiders, S.R. Crockett’s 1894 tale of smuggling and slit throats.
There is another literary connection with the Solway smugglers. In 1792 Robert Burns, realising that he could not make a living out of verse, joined the Dumfries or Third Port Division of the Revenue. Early that same spring, he was involved in a dramatic incident, as related by the Edinburgh Evening Courant on 8th March. The previous Wednesday, the Courant reported: ‘The revenue officers of Dumfries, assisted by a strong party of the Third Regiment of Dragoons, seized a large smuggling vessel at Sark Foot.’ Sarkfoot Point was just over the water from where I was standing, though it’s so flat there on the edge of Rockcliffe Marsh that it’s almost impossible to distinguish it from the sea. ‘Upon the officers and the military proceeding towards the vessel,’ the Courant continued, ‘which they did in martial and determined manner, over a broad space of deep water, the smugglers had the audacity to fire upon them from their swivel guns, loaded with grapeshot; but the vessel lay in such a situation as prevented their having a direction with effect.’
A more detailed account of the incident was left by another Revenue officer present that day, one Walter Crawford. A strong flowing current, Crawford reports, lay between the dragoons and the vessel, so they decided they needed boats in order to board her. But the locals had more sympathy with the smugglers than with the forces of law and order, and had holed every available boat along the coast. All the while there was constant fire of grapeshot and musketry from the vessel. With the tide ebbing, the Revenue officers decided to risk the quicksands on foot, Crawford leading one detachment of Dragoons, Quartermaster Manly a second, and Burns a third.
Our orders to the Military were to reserve their fire till within eight yards of the vessel, then to pour a volley and board her with sword and pistol. The vessel kept on firing, tho without any damage to us, as from the situation of the ship, they could not bring their great guns to bear on us, we in the mean time wading breast high, and in justice to the party under my command I must say with great alacrity; by the time we were within one hundred yards of the vessel, the crew gave up the cause, got over [the] side towards England, which shore was for a long, long way dry sand. As I still supposed that there were only country people they were putting ashore, and that the crew was keeping under cover to make a more vigorous immediate resistance, we marched up as first concerted, but found the vessel completely evacuated both of crew and every moveable on board, expect [sic] as per inventory, the smugglers as their last instance of vengeance having poured a six-pounder Carronade through her broadside. She proved to be the Rosamond of Plymouth, Alexander Patty Master, and about one hundred tons burthern, schooner rigged.
After repairs, the ship and what remained of its contents were put up for sale, and the proceeds divided among the excise officers. It is said that Burns dispatched four carronades from the Rosamond to the French Convention as an expression of his democratic sympathies.
Getting to the Lochmaben Stone was not as easy as I had anticipated. Although there is a signpost directing you along the shore, when you actually come to the field where the Stone squats there’s a barbed-wire entanglement in your way. But I managed to scramble over it and made my way up the field edge to the Stone itself.
The Lochmaben Stone is a ten-ton lump of granite over six feet high. It is pretty much all that is left of what was once supposed to be a ‘Druidical Stone Circle’ – although it’s actually much older than that, dating to 3000 BC, long before the Ce
lts and their druid-priests arrived in Britain. There were originally nine standing stones, arranged in an oval covering half an acre. But in the nineteenth century the tenant farmer at Old Graitney, intent on improving his land, had his men bury the stones in deep pits so they would no longer get in the way of ploughing and harvesting. The operation was interrupted by the arrival of Lord Mansfield, the landowner, who ordered them to stop work. Presumably he was something of an antiquary. And so the Lochmaben Stone itself was saved from an ignominious fate.
The Stone has long been a significant landmark. It was used as a navigation aid by Viking seamen – indeed, the name Solway is from Norse sula, ‘pillar’, and vath, ‘ford’ (while the word ‘firth’ itself is from fjord). The Loch element in Lochmaben Stone may be a corruption of cloch, Gaelic for ‘stone’. Indeed, the earliest recorded form of the name (from 1398) is Clochmabenstane, and the later ‘Loch-version may be borrowed from the small town of Lochmaben, between Lockerbie and Dumfries. The maben element is from the Celtic fertility god Mabon, whom the Romans called Maponus and made into a sort of British Apollo.
In the Middle Ages and early modern period the Stone was taken to mark the western end of the Border and so became a meeting place for the Wardens of the Western March from both the Scottish and English sides. Here on truce days the Wardens would discuss matters of mutual interest, exchange prisoners and attempt to control the endemic Border bloodletting. This was not always successful. In 1448, for example, an invading English army under Henry Percy, Second Earl of Northumberland, was resoundingly defeated between the Lochmaben Stone and the mouth of the Sark. The victorious Scots were commanded by Hugh Douglas, Earl of Ormonde, and Sir John Wallace of Craigie, Sheriff of Ayr. The English had made the mistake of making camp by the Lochmaben Stone, which was then in a tidal area. Some fifteen hundred Englishmen were killed in the battle, and a further five hundred drowned as they tried to flee. The encounter became known as the Battle of Lochmaben Stone, or the Battle of Sark. There is now nothing to mark the site of the battle, the first significant victory of the Scots over the English since Otterburn in 1388.