Walking the Border

by Ian Crofton

  James was referring to the Stewart dynasty, which had come to the throne through the marriage of Walter Stewart to Marjorie, daughter of Robert the Bruce. He was right about the way the dynasty would come to an end, but wrong about the chronology. His daughter grew up to be Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Stewart descendants continued to rule Scotland, and then the whole of Great Britain, until the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Ironically, the last Stuart monarch was the first monarch of the United Kingdom, the Scottish Parliament having voted itself out of existence seven years before. After Anne, the UK was to be ruled by the man the Scots called ‘the wee wee German lairdie’: the lacklustre Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover and Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. We’re still stuck with his descendants.

  James’s despair sapped the life out of him. On 14th December 1542, at Falkland Palace, he died. He was only thirty.

  Back on the road, next to a plantation of young willow, a man drove past in a tractor, the first person I’d seen since leaving Gretna. I gave a wave. I didn’t get a wave back. Maybe it was the farmer who’d strung up the dead moles on the barbed wire.

  At Corries Mill there was a man working in the garden of a bungalow. I asked him if he was a landscape gardener.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m a builder. I’m just tidying up after the job like.’ His accent was Scottish, but that ‘like’ was pure Geordie. His face was weather-worn, his smile infectious. ‘I’m just tidying up, lad, like.’

  I asked him what he felt about the Border, just along the road.

  ‘No one bothers about the Border, do they, eh?’ he said. ‘A load of nonsense.’

  I asked him whether he considered himself Scottish or English, or just a Borderer.

  ‘A reiver,’ he said. ‘We’re reivers in this area.’

  The reivers (from reive, ‘to carry off by force’) were the armed and mounted raiders who until the early seventeenth century preyed upon their neighbours, no matter which side of the Border, stealing cattle and sheep, burning houses and slaughtering any who resisted them. When the larder was low, it was said, the womenfolk would serve up a dish of spurs, hinting to their menfolk that it was time once more to saddle their horses and ride off into the night.

  It wasn’t war. War is the exception to peace. The reiving went on all the time, whatever the state of relations between the kingdoms of Scotland and England. It was just the way life was. If you lived on the Borders, you were a reiver. There was no other choice. You took what you could get. You took what was coming to you. There was an old rhyme that summed it up:

  The good old rule sufficeth them,

  The simple plan,

  That they should take, who have the power

  And they should keep who can.

  There were reiving families on both sides of the Border, often allied to each other by blood or marriage, their loyalty being more to kin than crown. Many Borderers to this day have a similar suspicion of those in power in London or Edinburgh.

  ‘James VI of Scotland, James I of England,’ my friend continued, ‘he upset it all, like.’ James, who presided over the Union of the Crowns in 1603, set about ‘pacifying’ the area by force. Whole groups of clansmen were tried as one, and hanged as one. ‘Before that it was ok,’ said my friend. ‘That’s all gone now, of course.’

  I mentioned that James had renamed the Borders the Middle Shires of his new country of Britain.

  ‘Aye, that’s the way it bloody worked,’ my man said.

  I told him what I was doing, walking to Berwick, and remarked on what good walking weather it was.

  ‘Aye, it’s quite nice. Nice to be here in the country, innit? Once you get to town, everybody gets their head down.’

  I mentioned that I’d been chatting with my landlady in the guest house. He knew at once where I’d been staying. He knew Christine. I said it turned out she was from Penton, where I was heading. ‘She is, aye, she is,’ he said. I said I was going to be staying at the Bridge Inn at Penton, and he knew the people there too, Linda and her husband from Australia, where she’d lived for some years.

  I told him about my project, explained that although brought up in Scotland my parents weren’t Scottish and I’d been living in England for a long time.

  ‘You sound just like Tony Blair,’ he laughed.

  ‘I didn’t go to Fettes,’ I protested.

  ‘Aye, godsake, eh?’ he laughed. ‘That’s bloody awful.’

  Then we got on to the serious business of a weather conversation.

  ‘There’s a wee shower coomin’,’ he said. ‘Won’t be much, I don’t think. Too much wind blowin’.’

  I knew my cue. ‘There were a few spots earlier,’ I offered. ‘Not worth bothering about. This amount of wind is nice cos it keeps you cool for walking.’

  I told him of the days walking ahead of me. I said it was ok so far, my feet were standing up to it. But there was a long way to go.

  ‘Godsake, eh?’ he laughed. ‘Eh man, aye ye’ll get the knack of it as you’re going. That’s the main thing, the feet.’

  We happily got back on to the weather. ‘I was sitting there yesterday,’ he said, ‘and there was bloody sleet and snow. Just enough to say how cold it was. It’s funny, last year we had two really hot weeks, you know, all the blossom came out on the trees, the fruit trees. The bloody frost came, and of course, that was them gone.’

  Some road menders came by. It was time for me to be gone too.

  ‘I’ll step on my way now,’ I said. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Good journey,’ he said.

  I crossed the Sark by the bridge below Corries Mill. There were no signs on either side to indicate I’d swapped countries. The man was right, the Border – in these parts at least – was an irrelevance. People just got on with their lives.

  Just across the river, the people at Sark Hall had other concerns. They’d put up several printed signs saying ‘NO TO WINDFARM’. One of the children had even produced a hand-painted version.

  The long straight road north to Englishtown, cutting off a corner of the Sark, palled after a while. I cheered myself up with a song:

  Forty dead moles on a barbed-wire fence

  Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

  After the long trudge on tarmac, I was relieved to come at last to Scots’ Dike. Though, as it turned out, relief was not the appropriate emotion.

  Scots’ Dike was built to end the long-standing and bloody disputes over the Debatable Lands. The term Debatable Lands was applied to various regions along the Border, but particularly the area between the Rivers Sark and Esk, bounded on the north by Tarras Moor, on the south by the sea, and encompassing the wastes of Solway Moss. Why anyone should want this wilderness is unclear. It was poor land, the abode of outlaws and brigands, who, according to a contemporary complaint, ‘makis quotidiane reiffis [forcible seizures, as in ‘reivers’] and oppressionis upon the pur’. In 1551 the Wardens of both countries made a chilling proclamation: ‘All English men and Scottish men are, and shall be, free to burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy all and every such person or persons, their bodies, buildings, goods and cattle as do remain or shall inhabit upon any part of the said Debatable Land, without any redress to be made for same.’

  Open season had been declared. That same year Lord Maxwell burnt every single dwelling-place in the Debatable Land, right down to the ground.

  The following year, 1552, the dispute over sovereignty was submitted to Monsieur D’Oysel, the French ambassador to Scotland. With Gallic rigour, D’Oysel drew a straight line on the map, from Craw’s Knowe on the Sark more or less due east to the Esk. In its uncompromising geometry, and its disregard for human geography, it was reminiscent of the European carve-up of Africa three centuries later. The three-mile line of the new frontier was marked by the Scots’ Dike, an earthwork consisting of two parallel ditches with the dug-out earth piled up in between. It was the first artificially created frontier in Europe since the time of the Romans.

  Not everything went smoothl
y during the construction. Two teams worked on the project, starting at either end. When they met in the middle, they found they hadn’t met at all. They were out of line with each other by twenty-one feet.

  It didn’t really matter, as the Scots’ Dike wasn’t intended as a fortification like Hadrian’s Wall, or a barrier like the Berlin Wall or the DMZ, but merely a marker. At each end there once stood a square stone bearing the arms of both Scotland and England, although these were long ago plundered for building material. I’d heard that there were a few surviving boundary stones along the length of the Dike, but that these were difficult to find in the undergrowth.

  It wasn’t quite the end of the debate over the Debatable Lands. A linguistic difference remained. The Scots called the line the Scots’ Dyke, a ‘dyke’ being a wall, while the English called it the Scots’ Dike, a ‘dike’ being, in England, a ditch. The Ordnance Survey opts for the English version.

  For Walter Scott, the line retained a symbolic and unifying significance:

  Ye ken Highlander and Lowlander, and Border-men, are a’ ae man’s bairns when you are over the Scots Dyke.

  In other words, once a Scot has gone south over the Border, all internal differences are forgotten.

  Leaving the road, I plunged into the long strip of woodland that covers the Dike. There was just the faintest of paths through the new spring grass, but it didn’t look like more than a couple of people had trodden it. There were primroses and ferns, some still curled up tight like a bishop’s crozier. There were also bog pools, so I had to tread carefully. I was surrounded by the peace of birdsong and dappled deciduous woodland. On my left, on the Scottish side, there was a dense line of conifers. I caught a glimpse of a roe deer’s scut as it darted into thicker woodland. Then I heard it bark.

  The faint path would often disappear entirely. The going was getting tougher. Above me a buzzard called continually, a plaintive sound among the whispering of the treetops in the wind.

  Every now and again I had to scramble over a barbed-wire fence. At one point I crossed a wide clearing dotted with sheep and trees. The clearing wasn’t marked on the map. At another point I thought I’d actually found a remnant of the Dike. Leaning over some barbed wire, I could see a ditch parallel to the fence, and then a low ridge covered in grass and birch trees and reeds. Beyond that it looked like there was another ditch.

  Much of the actual Dike was destroyed by forestry work a hundred years or so ago. A temporary railway line was built, partly along the line of the Dike, and a locomotive used to pull out the trees. As it pulled out the trees it pulled out the roots, and with the roots it pulled out a lot of the earth of the Dike.

  Out of the wind I could enjoy the warmth of the sunshine. It actually felt like late May for once. Another deer flicked across my path before disappearing into the dark of the conifer plantation. Back in deciduous woodland I was faced with a mossy bog, so I made my way cautiously south to the field edge. I didn’t want to be sucked into a quagmire. Nobody’d know where I’d gone. I began to sing again, ‘Forty dead moles on a piece of barbed wire . . .’ It was as well I was on my own – although the sheep in the field on the English side did give me a funny look. I asked them what they thought of it so far. Baa, one said.

  The field edge proved to be no easier to negotiate. There was a line of old pollarded beeches, twisted into strange shapes. Once upon a time they’d been a hedge, I supposed. I had to scramble over the gnarled roots of one tree, jump across the marsh to the roots round the next tree, then jump over another bit of marsh to another bit of root. I recorded myself as I attempted this obstacle course: ‘Oooh dear, squelch squelch, woo-er, oop, er, oooh. Whoo – up. Hip hop. Phew. Sigh.’ In the field to the south four hares stood up and stared at me. And they call us mad, they said.

  I came to a shallow stream, the Beck Burn. The name is something of a tautology, yoking the Scots and Cumbrian words for the same thing. I splashed towards the violets on the far side and crossed another barbed-wire fence, straight into a bog. So I cut back to the old beech hedge, jumping from tussock to tussock, swinging on gnarly branches. This was turning out to be not so much a walk as a replay of Pirates of the Caribbean. All I was missing was the bandana.

  The bog was unremitting, and to add insult to injury some farmer had put a double line of barbed-wire fences in my way. Sometimes, I told my Dictaphone, I think the farmers are just trying to piss me off. Why on earth would they put barbed-wire fences through a bloody great bog?

  My spirits rose a little when I found – at last – one of the rumoured boundary stones. It was barely two feet tall, with straight sides and a rounded top, covered in moss. There was something engraved on the Scottish side. It might have been a date, 1701? Or perhaps some letters . . . M, O, L possibly. The light was bad, the stone eroded, the meaning uncertain. Further along, I found more boundary stones. One stood by a ditch that must have been part of the Dike. It was bound in barbed wire. Another had been recruited as a gatepost, with two iron brackets hammered into it to serve as hinges. There was no sign of a gate, or even of the other gatepost. Nearby a scattering of feathers lay across the ground. Some bits of wing, a lot of down. Presumably a pigeon hit by a peregrine at speed.

  After a while I came to a defile cutting across my route. This was the valley of the Glinger Burn, about 150 feet deep. I slithered down the steep slope, my rucksack catching on overhead branches.

  It was worth the effort. The bottom of the valley through which the Glinger trickled was a carpet of bluebells dotted with moss-covered birches. And there was a wooden footbridge across the burn. Who knows when it had last been walked across, but at least it wasn’t rotten. I leant against a birch tree, brewed myself a cup of tea and munched on oatcakes and cheese.

  Ahead the woods became confused. So did I. I needed to check my compass to keep me right. I’d almost been lured off in the wrong direction, towards Daffystonerigg. That would never have done.

  Passing through some geans in blossom, I came to a field full of reeds. The field turned out to be a very soft bog, so I clambered over another barbed-wire fence into the open woodland of what I presumed was Scotland. As I walked along I noticed there was a ditch on either side of me, green moss on the surface, black water underneath. I was on top of the Dike. For the first time on my walk, I was actually striding along with one foot in Scotland and the other in England.

  As I neared the end of the Dike, a pair of orange-tipped butterflies danced in the sun. There was a stile over the next fence – unusually helpful. Then another stile. This last one dropped me straight into a bramble thicket.

  As you emerge out of the woods, leaving Scots’ Dike behind you, there’s a kilted scarecrow in a garden with a Union Jack in each hand. Attached to the scarecrow there’s a long pole, and from the top of the pole flapped a Blue Saltire. We may be Britons, yes, the scarecrow says, but above all else we’re Scots.

  At the eastern end of Scots’ Dike the Border hits the A7, the main Edinburgh–Carlisle trunk road. After the green solitudes of the Dike I was ambushed by the stench of burnt petrol, black tarmac, white lines, the roar and whine of traffic.

  If you want to follow the Border precisely, you’d have to scamper across the carriageway dodging the lorries. Then you’d stumble over a rough field and splash into the Esk – just like Young Lochinvar. For, Scott tells us,

  He stayed not for brake, and he stopped not for stone,

  He swam the Esk river where ford there was none.

  Lochinvar took a short cut straight across the river, but if you wanted to follow the Border here you’d have to swim upstream with the salmon for half a mile or so. Then, like a faithless lover, the Border abandons the Esk and jinks eastward up the Liddel Water to Kershopefoot.

  If you wanted to stay dry, you could risk annihilation at the hands of the juggernauts and walk parallel to the Border north up the A7. After about half a mile, past Todhillwood and Newstead, you’d enter a cutting. People speeding by in cars and coaches would never know it
, but if you clambered up the eastern bank of the cutting, you’d see, between the road and the Esk, a faint mound in a field of rough grass. The place is known as Woodslee, or Withisleis, and is said to be the site of Kinmont Tower. Although the mound has never been excavated and the tower is long gone, the name lives on in the story of Kinmont Willie.

  William Armstrong of Kinmont was, to his enemies, the most feared of the ‘ryders and ill-doers upon the borders’. If there’d been charge sheets in those days, Armstrong would have had one as long as his arm. He was the hardman’s hardman, descended from the notorious reiver Sandy ‘Ill Will’ Armstrong. The Armstrongs had originated in Cumbria, but now their power base was in Liddesdale, on the Scottish side of the Border. Following in the family tradition, William Armstrong would ride out at the head of several hundred men – nicknamed ‘Kinmont’s Bairns’ – to seize great numbers of cattle and sheep, killing anyone who got in his way. He does not seem to have been too particular about which side of the Border he plundered.

  Armstrong had powerful friends. He had married a Graham, so allying himself with one of the great local families whose influence extended across both sides of the Border. He was also a tenant of Lord Maxwell, who more than once stood surety for him when he got into trouble. Furthermore, Armstrong had married his daughter to Thomas Carleton, constable to the Warden of the English West March.

  The powers-that-be in Scotland found they had their uses for this turbulent reiver, employing him in 1585 to ravage the town of Stirling, then in the hands of the upstart Earl of Arran. Such was Armstrong’s reputation for savagery that King James himself considered inflicting Armstrong and his men on the citizenry of Edinburgh in retaliation for their riotous behaviour in December 1596.