by Ian Crofton
As I made my way back east along the Solway shore, I came across a couple of men mending a fence. I asked them whether they were trying to keep the English out or the sheep in. Good-humouredly, they told me that dogwalkers kept cutting the wire.
‘I’ll step over here, if that’s ok,’ I said, and did so.
‘Och, look, you’ve broken it,’ one man said. He had a big grin on his ruddy face.
‘Yup,’ I said. ‘I seem to have left some of my wool behind.’
They asked what I was doing. When I told them I was walking the Border, all they could say was ‘Christ!’ I said I was planning to get to Berwick in seven days’ time. They thought that would all depend on how many pubs I encountered. I told them that the following night I’d be at the Bridge Inn at Penton.
‘You’ll be heading for Penton, that’s where you’ll be heading.’ They clearly didn’t think much of my pronunciation.
After Penton, I said, there was a singular scarcity of pubs for quite some miles. I would have to rely on the malt whisky in my rucksack. They offered to share my bottle with me. I apologised, confessing I’d left it back at the guest house. They laughed. We left each other to it.
After a while I came to the mouth of the Sark, where the Border turns inland.
The tide was low, the river a dingy ditch about twenty yards wide, banked by mudflats stuck with pebbles. Along the middle of the dingy ditch ran the Border line. I was at the end of Scotland – the southwest edge of it, as far as England and Scotland are concerned. The wind was channelling down the ditch, setting up ripples that made the water look like it was flowing faster than it was. Upstream a line of pylons crossed the Border. I could hear the distant rumble of the motorway above the roar of the wind. The wind was cutting down from the northeast, so cold I could have done with gloves. And this was late May.
When I started to look, I found that even this bleak place had hints of beauty. Below the high-tide mark there was a striking edge to a sandbank. The sand had formed into the thinnest of strata, like mudstone, forming flakes and scallops, layer upon layer. Then a few yards further on an old tree trunk jutted out of the sand. It might once have been an ash, but now it was more like some prehistoric monster lurching from its lair, a knot hole for an eye, a root for a snout, the body scaly and green with algae.
A little further up the Sark, on the other side, a land drain trickled into the river. Next to it were piles of broken concrete, shoring up the sandy edge, tightly canalising the Sark to stop it flooding. Zigzagging across the river swam a goosander and her two chicks, oblivious of the Border. The mother was making a grunty noise that sounded like satisfaction. It was probably an alarm call. The boundaries between species was more important to her than the borders between nations.
A couple of hundred yards upriver stood the brick piers that once carried the narrow-gauge railway linking the different parts of HM Factory Gretna. Beyond I passed by the edge of Gretna itself, with rows and rows of bungalows and small council houses dating from the decades after 1945. There was no sign on this side of the village of the workers’ housing built in the First War.
My riverside path shortly turned away from Gretna towards Sark Bridge, an elegant structure of dressed red sandstone built by Thomas Telford in 1814 as part of the turnpike road running from Glasgow to Carlisle. Willows, teasels, butterbur, giant comfrey and wild roses lined the banks. The roses weren’t yet in bloom. I scrambled up some steps to the road and a large brown sign saying: ‘Scotland Welcomes You’. On the other side, a white sign said: ‘Welcome to England, Cumbria’.
In between was the Old Toll House, which claims in the past to have been the venue for some 10,000 weddings. Over the door there were two signs, one facing north, the other south:
LAST HOUSE
IN
SCOTLAND
MARRIAGE ROOM
FIRST HOUSE
IN
SCOTLAND
MARRIAGE ROOM
It’s now empty and lifeless, with that uniquely desperate feel of a tourist attraction that’s shut up shop. It’d maybe be happier if a bulldozer put it out of its misery.
At the ‘Scotland Welcomes You’ sign I met a couple of identically equipped, super-fit middle-aged cyclists who’d stopped to take photographs of each other. I asked them what it felt like to be in Scotland. The woman said she was ‘rather relieved’. They’d been cycling from Land’s End against headwinds all the way, and that day had been over Shap, the long high pass between the Pennines and the Lakeland Fells. ‘It’s a massive milestone,’ her partner added, clearly familiar with the tropes expected of interviewed sportsmen. ‘Lovely, fantastic to be out of England and into Scotland.’ They’d been on the go six days and were just halfway.
As they headed off to their B&B, a Ugandan couple emerged from a car to have their photograph taken by the Border sign. I hoped that Scotland would welcome them.
This evening amble, on Day Zero of my walk, was partly intended as a reconnoitre. I wasn’t sure whether I could walk under the motorway, or whether I’d have to make a diversion north and take the minor road that cuts under the M74 to Springfield. As it turned out, there was a good path under the motorway bridge, beside the Sark.
Stopping underneath the bridge, where the M6 transmutes into the M74, I was surrounded by sounds: muffled, echoing clangy roaring rumbling noises from above, as juggernaut after juggernaut crossed in either direction; and then below me, in contrast, the tinkling and clattering of the Sark as it runs across pebbled shallows. It was a strange experience, standing where the modern motorway cuts at right angles across the timeless river, where one country butts up against another. The river will go on tinkling and clattering towards the sea long after the motorway has shattered into sand, long after the very notion of borders has faded from human memory.
I ate that evening in the half-timbered Gretna Inn. It’s a friendly place, with a beautiful art nouveau stained-glass window in one of the interior doors, with the word TOILETS elegantly reversed in white out of a red background.
I sat in the lounge bar along with a scattering of other tourists, chatting with the barmaid about accents hereabouts. ‘Yeah, we don’t sound very Scottish, do we?’ she said. I’d certainly heard a lot of Cumbrian accents in Gretna, I said, and plenty of Geordie. But hers wasn’t either, it was something I couldn’t put my finger on – a touch of Scots, a touch of something more southern. I’d heard a similar accent in nearby Newcastleton, amidst other, more distinctively Scottish voices. My barmaid was aware of the nuances. ‘Yeah, my friend lives ten minutes away, over the Border,’ she told me. ‘She’s in England, I’m in Scotland, and our accents are totally different.’
When I told her I was walking the Border, her reaction was similar to that of the men mending the fence down by the shore. ‘God!’ she said. ‘Very good,’ she added.
I was oddly happy I had her approval.
From the public bar at the back I could hear the unlikely sounds of reggae and R&B. As the evening progressed the volume of the conversation back there increased, interspersed with shouts and yelps. That was where the locals drank. I should have joined them, it sounded good humoured enough, but I was tired, not sure my patter would be up to the mark.
Instead, I cast my eyes along the bookcase next to my table. I picked out The Charm of Birds, by Viscount Grey of Fallodon. Turning to the chapter on ‘May, the Month of Full Song’, I read: ‘In May we passed definitively from the bareness of winter to the luxury of summer.’ With a bitter northeast wind biting down the Sark, I wasn’t at all sure whether the luxury of summer was coming anytime soon.
As I sat reading, I recalled that Viscount Grey of Fallodon was none other than Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary on the outbreak of the First World War. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ he said on 3rd August 1914, as he looked out of his window at the Foreign Office. ‘We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ He knew by then his diplomacy had failed. The next day, Britain declare
d war on Germany.
And here I was, sitting in the middle of one of that conflict’s greatest factories of death, the vast munitions complex that was HM Factory Gretna.
On leaving office in 1916 Grey was elevated to the peerage and spent more and more time at his farm at Fallodon, in the Border county of Northumberland. There he indulged in his greatest passion, ornithology. The best-known photograph of him shows him with a robin sitting on his hat.
As I left the Gretna Inn, I was greeted by a forty-something Englishman with short-cropped hair. He was having a smoke at the door. He had a story to tell me, the one about the Englishman, the Asian and the Scottish pound note. ‘I almost got arrested in Mansfield,’ he said. ‘I was out drinking, wanted some cigarettes. Been working in Scotland, had Scottish pound notes. Went to a Paki shop. The man wouldn’t accept Scottish notes.’
He paused for effect.
‘You’ll take ’em, I said.’ It was clear from his tone of voice this had been no idle threat. ‘The police were called,’ he said. He gave a short, hoarse laugh. I wasn’t sure there was any good humour in it.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said, as if suddenly dismayed at his own behaviour. Then he crushed the stub of his filter tip under his heel and returned to his pint and his wife at the bar.
* Coined by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he visited the plant in 1917.
THREE
NO ONE BOTHERS ABOUT THE BORDER
Sark, Scots’ Dike and the Waverley Line
No one bothers about the Border, do they, eh? A load of nonsense.
– Builder at Corries Mill
Day One: Friday, 24th May 2013 Over breakfast I asked my landlady Christine about the range of English accents in Gretna. She attributed it to the workers brought in for the munitions factory in the First World War. ‘They came from all over the country,’ she told me. ‘I know it’s nearly a hundred years ago, but a lot of them stayed.’
I asked her whether any parts of the installation were still in use. She said they still stored munitions at Longtown. Eastriggs was closed three or four years ago. There was talk now about closing Longtown, maybe turning it into a mega-prison.
‘That’s nice,’ I said.
‘Yeah, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘But if it gives folk in the area jobs . . . Cos Longtown employs an awful lot of people.’
I asked what they did there.
‘To be honest, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘My ex-brother-in-law and my ex-father-in-law both used to work there, but I never asked them what they did.’
‘Well, you’re not allowed to ask,’ I suggested.
‘No.’
It turned out Christine comes from Penton – pronounced, as I was quickly discovering, Penton. There’s no actual village called Penton, it’s the name of an area on the English side of the Liddel Water, but everyone round here knows it. Her grandfather bought a farm there in the 1930s, and when he died he left it to her brother, missing out her father, though her father owned the stock and still farmed it. ‘It’s strange,’ she said. ‘Strange.’ It’s not good arable land, she told me, but the pasture’s not bad.
She’d been to junior school at Shank Hill, had to walk a mile and a half there in the morning and a mile and a half home in the afternoon. At the age of five. Nowadays, she says, parents take the car to pick up their kids from the junior school in Gretna, even if they live in the village.
As I hoisted my rucksack onto my back, I asked Christine what she thought the day would bring. I’d heard on the radio that the A1 had been closed, with eighty-mile-an-hour winds blowing lorries over. She hadn’t heard that but said she’d been wondering whether to put the washing out. Then she’d decided it would get wet before it got dry.
Whatever the weather, it was time to step out and begin my walk.
The wind was brisk and chill. Clouds scudded westward. As I made my way to the edge of the village I passed a billboard advertising a Rod Stewart Tribute Night the following evening at the ‘Blacksmiths Functions Venue Opposite Smiths Hotel’. I thought I’d give it a miss and walked on, alongside a ditch with a smell of dead animal. Ahead of me lay a field full of buttercups and ladysmock, and then the motorway.
Before long I rejoined the Sark where I’d left it the previous evening, babbling happily over little rapids and stones, one bank in England, the other in Scotland. The morning sun was bright, the wind so strong I had to put my head down into it – not something you often have to do at sea level. If this keeps up, I thought, it’s going to be a hard day’s walk. The wind was even stronger where it funnelled under the railway bridge carrying the West Coast Line north over the Sark to Glasgow. Spray blew off the surface of the water. Waves were racing faster than the current towards the sea. A grey wagtail squeaked in panic when it saw me. The bridge was built of sandstone, patched with grey brick. Shortly after I passed it, the Euston express hurtled by. I wondered what it would have sounded like underneath the arch.
At Quintinshill, just up the line from here, an accident took place that in the scale of the First World War was only a footnote to the larger tragedy. It was nevertheless Britain’s worst ever rail disaster. On 22nd May 1915 a train carrying soldiers of the Royal Scots south to embark for Gallipoli crashed into a stationary local train. One minute later a northbound express hit the wreckage. Fire broke out, and many who survived the initial impacts died in the subsequent blaze. In all, 226 people were killed and 246 injured. Following an inquiry and a court case, two signalmen were jailed for culpable homicide. The dead are buried in Rosebank Cemetery in Edinburgh. The Grim Reaper had gathered in his harvest early.
A little further on, a small road crosses the Sark, linking the peat works by Solway Moss to the sewage works at Springfield. I scrambled up a bank of stitchwort and wild roses to gain the road, and made a brief incursion into England. The welcome sign was fortified, flanked by castellated towers.
Back in Scotland I dropped down the other side of the road to join a farm track running parallel to the river. At first I walked by areas of hard standing and piles of gravel before emerging into a field. Along one side there was a barbed-wire fence strung with the desiccated bodies of thirty-two dead moles. I counted them. I wondered whether it was a warning to other moles not to cross this farmland. Or a warning to English people to keep away. Or to English moles who might think of resettling across the Border. Just look what we do to our own moles. Imagine what we might do to you.
The river meanders aimlessly through this flat land. Even with a map it’s difficult to know where you are, unless you pay very close attention. At one point I thought I was following up one of the Sark’s tributaries, the Black Sark, but it turned out to be a giant loop of the Sark itself. Where I could, I cut corners – after all, to stick precisely to the Border line here would mean wading up the middle of the river, which was never part of my plan.
At one point on my wild goose chase I trod in something brown and unpleasant. I wasn’t certain what it was, but it was deeply agricultural. I hoped it would dry up and the smell dissipate before I reached the Bridge Inn.
The river here has sandy banks. Sand martins were flying low over the water – although how they could catch any insects with that wind blowing I have no idea. Then the sandbanks gave way to tips of rubble, broken concrete, scattered plastic bags. The land I was walking through, though notionally agricultural, was more brownfield than greenfield. All around lay the detritus of human activity, although it was rarely clear what these activities might have been.
When I got to the Black Sark, I didn’t realise that I had. Then I came to a bridge. The only bridge near here goes over the Black Sark rather than the main stream, so I found myself again. The Black Sark lives up to its name. It’s dark and still, with the occasional lazy eddy.
I left the riverbank and strode north along the minor road with Newton Flow on one side and Black Brows on the other, to the pebble-dashed farm cottage of Westgillsyke and its big black slurry tanks, then on to the larger farm at Campingholm, between Cowg
arth Flow and Drownedcow Moss.
The hedgerows were full of bluebells, red campion, ferns, lady’s mantle and water avens. Over on the English side the green of pastoral farmland gave way to the brown of the peat cuttings of Solway Moss, extending for miles and miles to distant woodland. I’d heard that the peat workings were going to be abandoned. Good news for the local wildlife, no doubt, but bad news for local employment.
Somewhere beyond the peat workings and the distant woodland, near St Michael’s Well and Arthuret House, lay the site of the Battle of Solway Moss, fought on 24th November 1542. It was a disaster for the Scots.
There had been skirmishes along the Eastern March earlier in the year, and in October Henry VIII determined to ‘pacify’ the Border by sending an army to burn Kelso and destroy all the surrounding agricultural land. In November the Scots tried to relieve the pressure on them in the east by mounting an invasion of Cumberland in the west. They crossed the Border but were quickly routed at Solway Moss. Although few Scots were killed in battle, many drowned in the Moss, and many more were taken prisoner. As the remains of the Scottish army retreated up the wilds of Liddesdale, the inhabitants – famously unawed by royal authority – fell upon the stragglers, seized what goods they could and killed any man who resisted.
James V, aware of the fate of his father at Flodden, watched the battle from a safe distance – perhaps from Burnswark Hill north of Ecclefechan. The king fell into despair, a despair that deepened a few days later. The contemporary chronicler Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie picks up the story:
Be this, the post cam out of Linlighgow, showing the king good tidings, that the queen was deliverit. The king inquired whedder it was a man or woman. The messenger said it was ane fair dochter. He answered and said, ‘Fairwell, it cam with ane lass and it will pass with ane lass.’