Walking the Border

by Ian Crofton

  Bradley’s reference to the ‘North British Railway’ alludes to the fact that ‘There is here a Lilliputian station displaying with laconic pathos on its narrow platform a name embalmed in Border song and story . . . Who uses it, I cannot imagine.’ Deadwater Station was a lonely spot on the forty-two-mile Border Counties Railway that ran from Hexham via Bellingham to Riccarton Junction, where it met the Waverley Line. One might ask why such a desolate place should ever have been deemed worthy of a station, but in fact Deadwater was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries something of a mecca for people suffering from ‘cutaneous and scrofulous complaints’, who would flock here to take the waters. Deadwater Well lies just north of the old station, and there was once a ‘Bathing House’, still in use in the later nineteenth century. But by the 1920s Deadwater was once more becoming a backwater, and the station mistress was only authorised to issue tickets for six stations down the line, and no further. Later, the station became unstaffed, and passengers wishing to join the 6.55 a.m. southbound train were requested to notify the station master at Riccarton Junction before 5.00 p.m. the previous evening. The station was closed to passengers in 1956, and completely closed in 1958. Now Deadwater has rediscovered that remoteness that my friend Jonathan relished so much that he came to live here.

  As I walked up the side of the Deadwater Burn, a wagtail danced above the water, its yellow breast catching the evening light. Above me a lark sang. I plodded due north up the hillside through a pathless tract of rough, reed-studded pasture, rich enough to support a handful of cattle. I could see them ahead of me. One of them was giving me a look. I hoped she had no malevolent intent. More likely she thought I was wrong in the head. This place was hardly fit for cows, let alone an unsturdy, hairless biped.

  As I approached my little copse at the top of the rig, leaving the cows far below me, I could see the trees were barely in leaf. There was just a slight downy dusting of green, no more than a hint of spring. The trees – mostly birch, some alder – were stunted, exposed as they were on their knoll to the prevailing westerlies. But this evening there was no wind. And I would be able to watch the sun as it set.

  It was now nearly eight o’clock, ten hours after I’d left Scotch Knowe. I wandered into the wood, looking for a spot on the greensward to pitch my tent and sleep. Branches and trunks twisted in all directions, draped in lichens, lit by a rosy light from the west. I felt I’d entered some old legend, probably involving gnomes and a pot of gold – or one of the Border equivalents of gnomes, such as fatlips, redcaps, or the brown man of the moors.

  I dined on pumpernickel and Portuguese sardines in a piquant tomato sauce, followed by rice and sweet-pepper sludge. For dessert there was a Snickers bar, accompanied by a glug or two from my very own pot of gold.

  Birds sang as the sun set. The sky dimmed through a lattice of winter-bare branches. With the sun gone, the wind rose a notch, bringing a chill. I’d put on all my clothes and a gnome-like woollen hat from Peru.

  Although tent and sleeping bag beckoned, I was reluctant to leave the boundless for the bounded. Out here the birds tossed fragments of phrases to and fro, daring each other to pick up the theme and play.

  In the distance, sheep conversed in the timeless way of sheep.

  I’m here, one said.

  I’m here too, said another.

  Where’s my mum, said a third.

  Over here, dear, the mother said.

  I’m here, one said.

  I’m here too, said another.

  Where’s my mum, said a . . .

  Ba. Baa. Baaaa.

  The rest of the world was inside, bordered by their four walls, watching the telly.

  I was in a magic wood that time had forgot, a thousand feet above the sea.

  SIX

  AMONGST THESE ENGLISH ALPS

  Peel Fell to Carter Bar

  . . . the North [Tyne] is out of Wheel Fell sprung

  Amongst these English Alps which as they run along

  England and Scotland here impartially divide.

  – Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622)

  Day Four: Monday, 27th May 2013 Today we call it Peel Fell. Michael Drayton called it ‘Wheel Fell’, while on an 1837 map of the Deadwater District it is marked as ‘Pearl Fell’. I was to find that Peel Fell was no pearl – more like the swine one should not cast pearls before. And I suspect that Michael Drayton had neither visited the Cheviot Hills nor the Alps, as the former are as rounded as the latter are spiky. But they do have this is common: uncompromising wildness.

  On Kielder-side the wind blaws wide;

  There sounds nae hunting horn

  That rings sae sweet as the winds that beat

  Round banks where Tyne is born.

  So wrote Swinburne in ‘A Jacobite’s Exile’. The wind was fair blawing wide when I poked my head out of the tent in the morning, and the clouds were shutting down the sky. The promised front had come. The wind was from the southwest, but it was distinctly chilly. I was in shelter on my greensward in the wood, but there was commotion in the tops of the trees. I ate my breakfast huddled in sleeping bag and hat.

  I was hoping I might race the rain eastward. But I knew there wasn’t going to be much racing today.

  I’d run out of water again, so stumbled down below the wood where the map marks four thin blue fingers. The ground was covered in reeds, and the patches in between had been trodden by cows. Out of the shelter of the wood I could feel the bite of the wind and wished I hadn’t left my gloves in the tent. Even the celandines had closed up against the cold. It was 27th May, Bank Holiday Monday.

  I couldn’t find any sign of running water, just a patch or two of oily-looking drip and drool. I looked further down, where the little fingers were supposed to join to form a head of water. I found the confluence, but it was no more than a bog that cows had shat in.

  At least it wasn’t a hot day. I would have to make it waterless over to the far side of Peel Fell, to Kielderstone Cleugh, down which I hoped a stream would run.

  By the time I’d broken camp the rain had arrived, though not much more than a drizzle. I’d put on all my waterproofs, hat, hood, gloves and over-gloves. At least the wind was behind me. ‘From here to the top of Peel Fell,’ writes Logan Mack, ‘is a long tramp over very rough ground . . . There is no pleasure to be had from it until the heavy tussocks are left behind and the higher reaches of the Fell attained.’

  The Border here follows a somewhat irregular line up the hill, in a northeasterly direction. On the English side were mature conifers, while on the Scottish side was a plantation of young birches. I crossed over a barbed-wire fence and followed the Border along the mossy top of a broken-down dyke. Here and there I had to divert into the bog or clear-felling either side to avoid a young self-sown spruce or a fallen fir. Some of the fallen trees had hauled up their roots as they fell. These roots were draped with mosses, giving them the look of giant, hairy spiders.

  When at last I emerged onto the open hillside, I was surprised to find a path. There was a sign. ‘Kielderstane Walk’ it said. It was going my way. It was a good honest hill path and it gave me a good honest uphill slog.

  And so I came to Jenny Storie’s Stone, a cuneiform buttress of Northumberland sandstone jutting out of the rim of the Peel Fell plateau. If I hadn’t been alone, if it hadn’t been raining, and if I’d had my rock boots with me, I would have tried a few of the tempting lines up the front face, using water-worn pockets and shapely horizontal breaks. Northumbrian sandstone is a delight to climb. But I was alone, it was raining, and I didn’t have my rock boots, so I let Jenny Storie’s Stone well alone.

  I never did find out who Jenny Storie was. She still keeps her secret. But on a night of full moon I can imagine you might hear her here, wailing for her demon lover . . .

  Peel Fell, at just under 2,000 feet, is the highest point in the western Cheviots. Just where its summit is wouldn’t be easy to tell if there wasn’t a cairn to mark the spot in the middle of a flat expa
nse of peat hags. The tops of the hags are festooned with moss and heather, and here and there you find the stumps of an old Border fence. The going’s not as easy as Logan Mack would have you believe, but it’s not in the Hobbs’ Flow league of awfulness.

  Nestled amongst the hags I came across a little lochan, its surface whipped by cat’s paws in the strengthening wind. It was now blowing from the southeast, but it felt like it had whistled in from Siberia. I had heard that after the first front passed another front, a cold one, was going to be moving down the country. It had arrived.

  I found my burn sooner than expected, on the near side of the Kielder Stone. There were no sheep up here amongst the heather, so I didn’t bother with sterilising tablets. A bit of grouse dropping never did anybody any harm, I told myself as I swallowed mouthful after mouthful. Go back go back go back, said the grouse.

  If you’re approaching via Peel Fell, you come to the Kielder Stone from above. From this viewpoint it looks like a huge table, part covered with a cloth of moss and heather. It is in fact a gigantic block of Northumbrian sandstone, 26 feet high, 133 feet in circumference and weighing perhaps 1,400 tons (Logan Mack measured it). The sides are generally sheer or overhanging, though they are replete with all the wonderful features you find in Northumbrian sandstone – little pockets, vertical cracks, nubbled walls, flakes of finely layered horizontal strata, jutting noses, water-worn grooves. Again, if the sun had been shining, and I’d had my rock boots, and didn’t have ground to cover, I’d have had a happy time bouldering here. There’s a soft landing in mossy bog if you fall.

  ‘The eastern face of the rock is certainly unclimbable,’ Logan Mack opines, ‘and to the ordinary individual so are the other three, but to the skilled mountaineer the north-west corner presents no great difficulty.’ As if to prove his point, he includes a photograph of himself and his friends posed halfway up the Stone.

  He also recounts the story of ‘some foolhardy lads and lasses’ who managed to make their way to the summit, but then found they could not descend. One of the more timorous members of the party, who had remained earthbound, walked several miles to raise the alarm, and returned with a group of rescuers carrying a ladder. Perhaps the stranded youngsters had tempted fate by walking round the Stone three times widdershins (contrary to the direction of the sun), which is said to bring ill fortune.

  Apart from this tale, the Kielder Stone remains silent about its history, although it bears the inscribed initials of some of its more self-promoting visitors. If ‘PS’ and ‘AC’ are reading this, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

  Such an obvious feature would have provided an important signpost in these featureless wastes, and a rallying point for countless raiding parties. As such, it will no doubt have seen its fair share of bloodshed. It certainly inspired the imagination of Dr John Leyden, whose poem ‘The Cout of Keeldar’, is included in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The eponymous Cout rashly ventures on a hunting expedition into Liddesdale, incurring the wrath of William, Lord Soulis, the vicious warlock of Hermitage Castle (who could only be killed, Leyden tells us in another poem, if he was wrapped in lead sheeting and boiled alive):

  And onward, onward, hound and horse

  Young Keeldar’s band have gone;

  And soon they wheel, in rapid course,

  Around the Keeldar Stone.

  Green vervain round its base did creep,

  A powerful seed that bore;

  And oft, of yore its channels deep

  Were stain’d with human gore.

  And still, when blood-drops, clotted thin,

  Hang the grey moss upon,

  The spirit murmurs from within,

  And shakes the rocking-stone.

  The only murmuring I could hear was the wind, while the rain had washed all trace of blood and gore from the rock (which, contra Leyden, does not in fact rock).

  The Kielder Stone is perhaps the most prominent landmark anywhere along the Border, which now runs straight through it. It wasn’t always thus; these wastes were long disputed between the Earls (later Dukes) of Northumberland and the Earls of Douglas. It seems that whichever bits of land each of them decided belonged to their own private estate determined the territorial claims of their respective nations. It wasn’t until 11th May 1778 that the lawyers put the matter to arbitration and fixed the line of the Border between Peel Fell and Carter Fell. I was to find that this line was anything but logical. In fact it was to prove exasperating, exhausting, soul-sapping. Definitely the result of horse-trading on the part of a bunch of well-feed and unscrupulous lawyers.

  I’d had my first slip of the day walking down to the Kielder Stone. After ending up on my backside I’d turned round to examine the spot, expecting to find skidmarks in a patch of peat. But there was nothing to be seen but steep grass, slippery as ice in the wet. After that I made a special effort to dig my heels in on the downhills, and the edges of my boots horizontally into the slope on the ups. But it was far from the last slip of the day.

  It was just after noon when I left the Kielder Stone. According to my original schedule I should have been at Carter Bar by now. I thought it might take me another couple of hours to reach the A68. As it turned out, I was not to reach the road till five o’clock, averaging something like one mile an hour. These Border miles are triple-strength.

  After the Kielder Stone the Border jerks crazily about through a nightmare of cleuchs* and sikes. The heather on these fells is so dense and deep you could call it scrub. These were not the manicured heather moors of the grouse shoots. The Border line is marked by the rotten stubs of fence posts. First they take you across Wylie’s Sike, then over Haggie Knowe, down again to the junction of the Green Needle and the Black Needle. Neither of these two feeders of the Scaup Burn reflected their names; both were peat brown, readying themselves for the spate to come.

  Stumbling up the east bank of the Black Needle I had to contour the flank of the heather-black hill called the Trouting. Despite the wind and the rain I sweated with the effort. I’d take a step up, then my foot, hidden somewhere deep in the heather, would slip sideways. Or my ankle would get caught in an unseen hole. In places it was two steps forward, one step back. Or even two steps back. It was harder than breaking trail through deep snow in the winter hills. I thought of the line in King Lear:

  The worst is not

  So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

  But I’d pretty much plumbed my own personal depths. Even a bank of primroses above the Black Needle failed to rouse my spirits.

  I was not the first – nor, I suspect, the last – to curse these almost impassable fells. ‘If I were further from the tempestuousness of the Cheviot Hills,’ wrote Peregrine Bertie, Thirteenth Baron Willoughby de Eresby, ‘and were once retired from this accursed country, whence the sun is so removed, I would not change my homeliest hermitage for the highest palace there.’ Bertie was Warden of the English East March, clearly not a job he enjoyed. He died of a cold in 1601.

  On a sunny day, with nowhere particular to go and no deadline, I would have loved to laze by these burns among the hills. As it was, I slumped briefly for a drink and a snack, conscious of the chill and the wet down my back, then plodded on.

  I tried to raise my spirits by moaning into my Dictaphone: Down Green Needle, up Black Needle, plunging down, gasping up another steep-sided cleuch. Deep heather, deep deep heather. No path. This is mad, totally illogical, this Border line marked by these rotting old posts. One I’ve just taken a photograph of has just been shat on by a moorland bird. Well done it.

  Who on earth designed this Border? There’s a far better route up there, you know, along the watershed, without all this dropping down, clambering up, only to drop down again.

  The Border kinked north, then southeast. Any fool could see that this was an entirely unnecessary deviation from the general north-easterly drift of the Border line. I was exasperated, so angry with the Border-makers that, to spite them, I cut the corner and slogge
d up deep heather onto Knox Knowe. So I missed out the source of the Black Needle and the stretch of featureless nothing called Duntae Edge, which Logan Mack describes as ‘the most evil piece of ground which I encountered on the Border from sea to sea’. I saved myself maybe 400 yards and, in the process, by walking this new bound, annexed an insignificant triangle of worthless land for Scotland.

  On Knox Knowe there were cloudberries in flower, a rare treat. At one point a snipe burst out of the ground beneath my feet, zigzagging away from any merlin that might be on its tail.

  Despite the wind and the rain, the cloud was still above the tops. Behind me dark grey ridges gave way to paler and paler grey shoulders, fading into the distance towards Deadwater Fell. To the north, peaking over the horizon, I could just make out the tops of the highest band of conifers in Wauchope Forest. Ahead of me I spotted the mobile mast on the side of Carter Fell. It still looked like a long, long way away. But I got a signal, phoned my sister, told her how very, very late I was going to be. I was apologetic. She was sympathetic. ‘Poor you,’ she said. Poor fool, more like. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine.’ Well, I was. Just cold and wet and late. But still able to put one foot in front of the other.