by Ian Crofton
Back at Penton the trials may not have been world class, but the spectators all took an expert interest in the proceedings. There was a constant quiet murmur as they marked the finer points of the performance. ‘Mind over matter,’ one said. ‘The better dogs are showing ’em how to do it,’ said another.
There was all to play for: the Robertson Cup for the Highest Pointed Lady Handler; the Joss Nixon Memorial Cup for Best Out-Bye Work; the Thomson McKnight Memorial Cup for Best Penning. ‘All Trophies,’ the programme declared, ‘are Perpetual.’ There was an Open Trial, a Local Trial and a Novice Trial.
And then the programme listed the names of the handlers and, more importantly, their dogs. Among the humans there were Marshalls, Mundells, Helliwells, Armstrongs, Tods, Grahams, Longtons, Billinghams, McDiarmids. And among the dogs were Sel, Jess, Cap, Craig, Jock, Rex, Tweed, Taff, Mirk, Lad, Meg, Dale, Spot, Flint, Tarn, Peg, Bess and Moss – names woven out of the Border landscape, its rock and moor.
I could have spent all day at the trials, the people there were so friendly and hospitable. But I’d barely started my day’s walk, and there was far to go – past Peter’s Crook and Hog Wash, Harelawslack and Hudd’s Hole, Bendal Pool and Pudding Crook, up the river to Kershopefoot. And then up the Kershope Burn into the dark heart of the Kershope Forest. So I couldn’t wait for the lunch break at the trials, when the programme promised that ‘a stick, kindly donated by George Smithson, will be auctioned’.
I walked along the minor road for a while, parallel to the Liddel, and then rejoined the Waverley Line. There was a rotting broken gate with a rotting broken sign that said:
STRICTLY PRIVATE
NO LIC
ACC SS
The next sign contradicted the first. ‘Public Footpath’ it said.
Then I was confronted with a gate across the line with yet another sign, this one hand-painted on an aluminium sheet:
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO TRESPASSERS
BY OR
I climbed over the gate and went on my way. Apparently ‘trespass’ in English law means the ‘unjustifiable interference with land which is in the immediate and exclusive possession of another’. I couldn’t see how I was interfering with the land, either justifiably or unjustifiably. I was barely leaving a footprint, let alone mining for copper or coal, or building a retail outlet. I did think about holding a one-man all-night rave, but quickly abandoned the idea. That might open me up to criminal prosecution.
There was a good track along this private bit of the line. Young trees on either side gave me dappled shade. Again the only sound was bird-song. A woodpecker drummed. After a while, I heard distant bleating. Somewhere nearby, if I was not mistaken, the fleecy race was massing. Then, up on the hillside, I made out a farmer rounding up his flock on his quad bike. As my informant at the trials had lamented, gone were the hard-learnt whistles and calls, gone was the tight bond between human and dog, gone the fierce concentration of dog on sheep.
I wondered whether the quad-biker would come my way and ask me whether I was indulging in any unjustified interference. I was fairly sure I wasn’t, but prepared my daft laddie defence just in case.
After a while the sense of property began to dissipate. The dry-stone wall by the side of the line relaxed then crumbled. Its flanks were grown over with moss. In one place, the limb of an old ash had crashed down and ruptured it. No one round here seemed too concerned with marking boundaries with barriers. The stones were, in their own time, reassuming their place in the earth.
As I walked northeastward above the wooded defile of the Liddel, past Fowlsnest Pool, Tom Bell’s Linn, Atterson’s Crook and Hagg Sike, the landscape began to change. The space around me was expanding. Now there were open vistas towards bare hills, the grass still winter-bleached. The sheep too were changing to match the landscape, and the lowland varieties were giving way to the black-faced hill breed.
A curlew called. It had left its winter shores and was now searching for a nest site up on the moors.
One sure sign that I was approaching the uplands was the fact that I was now walking through what the map marked as ‘Access Land’. This is the label given in England to certain designated areas – such as hills, moors and heaths – where you are allowed to walk wherever you like, even where no rights of way are marked. In Scotland, of course, the default position is that you can walk pretty much anywhere you damn well please, as long as you’re not trampling down a farmer’s crops or taking a short cut across someone’s garden. Or mounting some kind of protest inside the perimeter fence at Faslane, or any other ‘prohibited place within the meaning of the Official Secrets Act’.
Although I was approaching the hills, I was still in the midst of a working landscape. Swathes of conifers draped the distant moors, and over the river the top of Greena Hill had been hacked away by the quarrymen. The map marked a disused kiln, so I suppose they were quarrying limestone – not a common rock in Scotland, but not unknown. That night, as it turned out, I was to camp beside a burn called Limy Sike.
I arrived quite suddenly at Kershopefoot. It’s always pleasing to arrive somewhere before you expect to. Kershopefoot is more a scattering of houses than a village, although it does have a post office. There is a small road bridge over the Liddel into Scotland, and here the Border leaves the Liddel to follow the Kershope Burn for some miles into the hills. Next to the confluence, on the English side, there’s a meadow of rough grasses and butterbur, dotted with alder and willow. It was here, at Dayholm of Kershope, that the Wardens of the Western March met on that fateful Truce Day in 1596 when the English seized Kinmont Willie. This meadow marked the eastern end of the Western March and the beginning of the Middle March. It was a common spot for meetings on Truce Days, and disputes between individuals on either side of the Border could be resolved here by single combat – hence the meadow’s alternative name, the Tourney Holm (from Old French tourneier, ‘tournament’, and Old Norse holmr, ‘river meadow’). The man who ended up dead on the ground at the end of the tourney was, according to popular opinion, clearly the guilty one. Everybody else seems to have enjoyed a good time, and pedlars and vendors would come from many miles around to sell their wares, turning the occasion into a sort of fair.
There were occasional outbreaks of unpleasantness, however, such as the Truce Day in 1508 at Tourney Holme when Sir Robert Kerr, the Scottish Warden of the Middle March, was murdered by three Englishmen called Lilburn, Starhead and John Heron of Ford, known as ‘the Bastard’. After the murder they fled, but Lilburn was quickly taken, and the English handed over Heron’s legitimate brother, Sir William Heron, to answer for the sins of the Bastard. Starhead, meanwhile, had ridden all the way south to York. Here, in the course of time, a party of Kerrs caught up with him. They took his severed head home as a trophy.
Close by to the Tourney Holm I came across the following curious sign on a gate:
This site contains
confined spaces
Check register for
confined spaces
It was another place I wasn’t allowed to go, for reasons I failed to fathom.
A sign on another gate proclaimed:
Thieves beware!
You Are Now Entering
A Cumbrian Farmwatch
& Smartwater Area
It was clear that, although remote, Kershopefoot was still prone to lawlessness. The traditions of the reivers have not, apparently, entirely died out.
The name Kershope – as in Kershopefoot, Kershope Burn, Kershope Forest, Kershopebridge, Scotch Kershope, English Kershope and Kershopehead – is from Anglo-Saxon coerse, ‘cress’, and hop, ‘secluded valley’. Inspired by the etymology, I hoped I might find some watercress along the banks of the burn to add to some fresh green to my evening meal.*
Just as you hardly notice you’ve arrived in Kershopefoot, you hardly notice that you’ve left it. It peters in, then peters out. There was a steep section of tarmac up past Kershope Mill, the steepest stretch of the walk so
far, but as soon as you’ve climbed up the hill you have to walk down the other side to pick up a forestry track – at first no more than a path – that leads up the English bank of the Kershope Burn, with Thief’s Cleugh on one side and Battle Hill on the other – names, like so many along the Border, that hint at stories that have long been forgotten.
I was now embarking on one of the wilder stretches of the Border, still as deserted as when Thomas Musgrave wrote in 1583 to his master, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s chief minister:
Kyrsopp is a small becke and descendes from the wast grounde called Kyrsopeheade. It devydes the realmes in a meare dyke untill it meat with Lyddall, and is from head unto foote without habitacion.
On the English side, row upon row of conifers marched southward and eastward, while on the Scottish side there was still open moorland. But just beyond Kershopebridge, where a minor road crosses the burn and the Border, the firs of the Newcastleton Forest crowd in from the Scottish side. This is the edge of one of the largest man-made conifer plantations in Europe, taking in not only the forests of Kershope and Newcastleton, but also those of Kielder, Wark and Wauchope.
I had feared that the next stretch up the track by the Kershope Burn would be unremittingly dull, hemmed in by tall walls of dark green monotony. But the Forestry Commission, conscious of their responsibilities towards public amenity (as they would no doubt put it), have cleared the ground for some way on either side of the track and the burn, and allowed the growth of scatterings of native woodland – birch, alder, willow and rowan. The amenity value of the place was attested by the tracks of horses and humans and mountain bikes, though after a car passed me at Kershopebridge I did not see another soul for the rest of the day.
After a while I crossed a concrete bridge into Scotland and came to a bifurcation in the track. One signpost said ‘Kielder via Bloody Bush’. The other said ‘Kielder via Scotch Knowe’. My route along the Border took in both Bloody Bush and Scotch Knowe, so this apparent paradox in the signage should perhaps have given me a warning. The signs pointed the sensible walker and cyclist along routes where there was a track, or at least a path. My route, I knew, dispensed with a path from this side of Scotch Knowe to Bloody Bush and beyond, and pitched me instead into the hell that is Hobbs’ Flow. But that was for another day.
A heron, tall and elegant, stood peering into a pool. It had its back to me but must have had a sense of my presence. With slow beats of those massive wings, it rose into the air and flapped further up the burn. Perhaps it was just looking for a change of fishing ground. Perhaps my presence was entirely irrelevant to its purpose.
At another point I came across a lamb bleating pitifully for its mother. The lamb was on the English side of the burn, the mother in Scotland. Then the mother realised I was just behind her and panicked back across the burn to her offspring. After a brief reunion, the mother settled down to chomp on a clump of primroses.
As the track climbed slowly and steadily into the hills, there were fewer and fewer leaves on the trees, sometimes barely the sign of a bud. The long cold spring had chilled the sap to a standstill. But now there was a touch of warmth in the sun, maybe the leaves would begin to unfurl. A red admiral flicked past me, the first I’d seen that year.
I came to another split in the track. This time the choice was between Scotch Kershope and English Kershope. The track by the former would keep me close to the Border. The track passing the latter would come to an abrupt end at Lazy Knowe, stranding me in a wilderness of spruce.
If I had taken the way by English Kershope, I might have come across, between the Wythes and Skelton Pike, a lonely weathered pillar called Davidson’s Monument. This was erected in 1852 to the memory of a ‘gamewatcher’ murdered by poachers on 8th November 1849. Thomas Davidson, father of eight children, had been ‘a steady and honest servant’ of Sir James Graham for some twenty years. That fatal morning he had set out from his home at Kettle Hall in the parish of Bewcastle on his usual rounds across the bleak moors. He never returned. A search was mounted, and two days later his body found. He had been strangled with his own neckerchief. There must have been some other injuries as well, as contemporary newspaper reports recount that he was found face down in a pool of his own blood. (After all, a Border murder without a pool of blood would hardly count as a Border murder.)
The inquest led to the arrest of three suspects. The first of these was James Hogg, who just three weeks prior to the murder had been fined for shooting without a game licence. Davidson had been the key witness against him. The poacher’s cousin Nicholas Hogg was also arrested, as was a young man called Andrew Turnbull. Three days after his arrest Turnbull hanged himself in his cell in Carlisle jail. On the wall beneath the window he had scrawled a message. ‘The two Hoggs are guilty. I am innocent. I will not come in the hands of man.’ The Hoggs appeared the following spring before the Cumberland assizes, but after a lengthy trial they were found not guilty. Soon afterwards, both emigrated.
Tempting though it was to visit Davidson’s Monument and pay my respects, it would take me on too big a diversion. So instead I took the track that led past Blaemount Rig and Thwartergill Head to Scotch Kershope.
There was no one in when I got there. A long, low, whitewashed cottage sits in a clearing, facing south over a pond surrounded by grass and scattered willows. There was a diving board. I might have been tempted had the day been a bit warmer. The only thing that spoilt the idyll was the dark line of conifers masking the near horizon. Somewhere on the other side of the conifers lay English Kershope.
When it was put on the market in 2012, the cottage had no mains electricity or gas. The estate agent made much of this, waxing lyrical about dinner by candlelight and Scrabble à deux by the open fire. ‘With no game centres or computers,’ the blurb continued, ‘children can learn how to have fun as they did a century ago.’ A year later, I noticed a satellite dish had been installed on the roof. There was, I assumed, a generator somewhere. I wondered whether the postman delivered here. Did the council come and pick up the rubbish? Or did the inhabitants make a weekly trip to Newcastleton or Canonbie, taking out their waste and bringing back their post?
Disappointed that I’d found no one at home, I continued on my way, quietly closing the gate behind me. I was tired and thirsty, and the dodgy vertebra in my neck was pinching on its nerve. As I plodded on, I kept an eye out for a slope or tree against which I could rest myself and my sack. But the ditches by the side of the track were freshly dug, slick with moist peat, filled with rust-patched water. Beyond them lay bog and scrubby willows.
I passed a line of poplars, about a hundred feet high. They looked out of place in the middle of this wilderness. The wind whispered through them the way the wind whispers through poplars the world over. Just beyond I found a big tussocky divot of earth by some dried-out moss. I gratefully sat down with my back against it. Up here the Kershope Burn had narrowed to no more than a few feet across. A couple of wary steps from stone to stone would take you from Scotland into England, and a couple more would take you back.
The burn burbled quietly as the shadows lengthened. A faint gossipy honking drew my eyes upward. There, overhead, flying in V-formation, two or three hundred geese beat northward to Svalbard. There they’d breed and feed and fatten through the end-to-end daylight of the short Arctic summer. I too was heading northward to feed, if not to breed or fatten. Luckily I only had to go as far as Scotch Knowe.
But first I had to pass Muckle Punder Cleugh, Cock Kaim, Ewe Brae, Yearning Flow and Havering Bog. My hopes were raised when I came upon a Forestry Commission sign saying ‘HAVERING’. I was making better progress than I’d thought. Havering Bog is, according to the map, just short of Scotch Knowe.
It turned out it was the Forestry Commission who were havering*. The place where the sign was didn’t match the topography on the map. I could see the defiles called Nether Castle Cleugh and Upper Castle Cleugh, not to mention Black Cleugh. These are only just past Kershopehead, a bothy hidden som
ewhere in the dense plantations on the English side. So my hopes had been raised only to be dashed. There was still some way to the true Havering Bog, some way before I could pitch my tent and eat and sleep. I was quite pleased. It was only five o’clock and I still had some spring in my step. I would make a little more progress before nightfall.
The shadows under the trees on the opposite bank were brightened by a cushion of wood anemones, in flower a month later up here than they had been in London. The delicate white flowers lifted my spirits.
After a while, the track turned right over a wooden footbridge into England, away from the Border line, heading for Kielder. This was the last bridge between Scotland and England until Yetholm Mains, on the far side of the Cheviot. From now on, more or less, the Border follows the watershed along the top of the Cheviot Hills, until it arrives at the fertile lowlands of the Berwickshire Merse. Before I reached the watershed, however, I still had to negotiate the upper reaches of the Kershope Burn without the benefit of either track or path.
The way was obstructed by mounds of moss, tussocks of yellow winter grass, low conifer branches. I had to cross the burn into England to avoid a steep bank dropping down between the forest edge and the water. Then I met a similar obstacle on the English side. The burn continued to narrow. There were stepping stones, but it wouldn’t be a place to slip out here on your own in the middle of nowhere. No one would ever know what had happened to you. Or at least not for quite some time. By then the crows would have had your eyes. Maybe your belly would have bloated and burst. Maybe your bones would have bleached.
I paid due attention to where I put my feet.
There were a few more burn and Border crossings before I reached Scotch Knowe. On my way I pondered on the old name of the place. I had in my mind it was ‘Lamasisk Ford’. That name didn’t appear on the OS map, though it cropped up in many historical documents I’d come across. It marked the meeting of three counties: Northumberland, Cumberland and Roxburghshire. I wondered into my Dictaphone what a Lamasisk might be. It sounded like a Basilisk, that ancient creature that could turn you to stone with its stare. Maybe the Lamasisk was a beast that lived in the burn, fasting for months until some unwary traveller came by. And then, oh my, the feasting. Beware the Lamasisk, my son, it’ll suck the living blood out o’ ye.