Walking the Border

by Ian Crofton

  Which is what I did, one foot in Scotland, the other in England, one foot among blaeberries, the other treading on bilberries – the same plant, with the same delicate pink bell-like flowers, but with different names on either side of the Border. If it had been August, I would have hunkered down and stuffed my face with the tart purple fruit.

  I was ridiculously happy to find, at last, one of the Border Stones that had been marked on the map as ‘BSs’ for some miles, but which had remained hidden in the heather. Here was a fine specimen of grey sandstone, part covered in white lichen. It had N on the English side, for Northumberland (the Duke, that is), and D on the other, for Douglas. Except that the D was reversed. Either the mason who’d carved it was illiterate, or he’d had an inbuilt anti-Caledonian bias, and thus saw fit to upend the dignity of the Scottish Earl by bouleversing his D.

  And so I made my way across Carter Fell. The going was certainly better than it had been down in the cleuchs, but there were still plenty of traps for the unwary – not only shake holes and old mineshafts, but also mosses, morasses, quagmires, all ready to suck you in and swallow you. If you’d put a foot wrong by one of these wobbling green horrors, you’d sink and sink and never be seen again.

  I shuddered. The bogs juddered, quaking with silent boggy laughter.

  I came at last to the trig point on Carter Fell, the first trig point on the walk so far. After that it was downhill, and the going got considerably better. In fact there was a grassy path, and as I strode down it towards Carter Bar and the A68 I could make out two Blue Saltires fluttering vigorously in the strong southerly wind. Beyond them, far away in the distance through the rain, at the other end of a long snaking line of hills, I could just make out the Cheviot itself. It still wore a big patch of snow on its southwestern flank.

  The car park when I got there was virtually empty. No one with any sense was going to stop here today to admire the view. But as I passed one solitary vehicle a man stepped out into the wind and the rain. He was Chinese, and his car had diplomatic plates. Inside I could make out a woman and a baby. I asked him if this was his first time in Scotland.

  ‘Ya,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ I asked inanely.

  ‘Really lovely. Fantastic.’ Clearly a diplomat. ‘You?’ he asked.

  I told him I came from Scotland, that I was walking the Border from the west coast to the east coast.

  ‘Alone?’ he said, with some concern in his voice – for both my safety and my sanity, perhaps.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Very good,’ he said encouragingly. He probably thought it best not to upset this maniac. Then he returned to the warm interior of his car.

  Then I saw my sister’s car. Inside were not only my sister Tricia but my brother-in-law Jem, and also my daughter Claire and son Archie, with whom I was to continue my walk over the Cheviots.

  That had been the plan. But I was half a day late, and the forecast for the two to three days it would take us to traverse the high Cheviot was not good. There was going to have to be some kind of rethink. That night we should have been camped at the Roman fort at Chew Green, several miles east along the main Cheviot ridge. We examined our options. There were some possible places to pitch a tent on the edges of the woodland on the Scottish side of the Border pass. I mulled over the prospect. I was wet and cold, it was still wet and cold and windy outside, and the following days were also supposed to be wet and cold and windy, at least up high where we would be.

  And then I remembered the words of Jean-Luc Godard. ‘A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end,’ he said. ‘But not necessarily in that order.’

  If that was true of a film, I thought, it could also be true of a walk.

  * On the Scottish side of the Border it is a cleuch, while on the English side it is a cleugh.

  SEVEN

  A TRUE PERAMBULATION BETWEEN THE KINGDOMS

  Kirk Yetholm to the Tweed

  The business on which they had met being opened, they elected six knights for England and six for Scotland, as jurors, to make a true perambulation between the kingdoms.

  – Hugh de Bolebec, letter to King Henry III of England, 13th October 1222

  Day Five: Tuesday, 28th May 2013 ‘There’s honesty. And white nettle in flower.’ I was pointing out the treasures of the hedgerow to my children. ‘Wild roses too – oh, and a little white cranesbill.’

  ‘Yah, white nettle in flower. Ooooh, and wild roses!’ Claire was on my case. ‘And oh oh ooooooh an itsy little white cranesbill!’

  It is better, I thought to myself, to travel alone.

  ‘My weary eyes cross the fields of lemon-yellow rape!’ Claire was on one. ‘And I behold – BEHO-O-OLD – the li-mi-nality of my Aye-den-titty.’

  You can tell she’s been studying anthropology.

  ‘Am I Scottish?’ she continued. ‘Am I English? Am I YA-HA-HA-HA . . .’

  BANG. There was a loud bang. We all jumped in the air.

  ‘Fuckzat?’ Archie enquired.

  We were, bizarrely, approaching England from the south. This is what happens when you walk north along the road from Kirk Yetholm.

  Perhaps the Border guards were jittery.

  BANG. Again.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. It was my turn to swear. Then I realised what it was. ‘It’s a bird scarer.’

  ‘A people scarer more like,’ Claire said.

  ‘Let’s assume it’s a bird scarer,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve broken out in a sweat,’ Claire said.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t expecting that,’ I said.

  ‘Neither were the birds,’ Claire said.

  ‘Were there any birds?’ Archie asked.

  ‘They’re dead or flown, Archie,’ I said. ‘Dead or flown.’

  ‘Dead or flown, Archie,’ Claire repeated.

  Merciless they are, merciless.

  ‘I had to do an experiment to scare birds, how to quantify it,’ Archie told us. He’s studying ecology. ‘My plan was to put some birds in a cage and put a thousand cups of seed on the ground, so you could then work out how close they would dare to go near a model, a human or a predator.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t do as well as I should’ve.’ His tone was becoming indignant. ‘I was like – There’s no flaws in this!’ He laughed. He takes his studies very seriously.

  The previous evening, as we’d huddled on Carter Bar with the wind rocking the car and rain spattering the windscreen, we’d come to a decision. We’d leapfrog the eastern Cheviots, save them for more clement weather, and instead take Tricia’s offer of a lift to Kirk Yetholm, the village that nestles at the northeastern end of the Border hills. There was a hostel there, and a pub, both well-known and welcome to those finishing the Pennine Way. From here we would walk the low-level section of the Border to Coldstream, rather than committing ourselves to a multi-day high-level traverse in worsening weather.

  So there we were, under dry grey skies, walking along the wide strath of the Bowmont Water between low, nubbly hills. The hills were covered in grass and gorse and patches of woodland. The hedges either side of the little road were mostly hawthorn, the hedgerows dominated by cow parsley.

  We were, as I said, doing an unusual thing to be doing in Scotland. We were walking north towards England.

  ScreeeeeeeROOOOOOAAAaaaaaaarrr. A fighter jet flew low overhead, at one moment in Scottish airspace, the next over England. The jet, a Tornado or a Typhoon, was followed by another, swooping up the valley towards the Cheviots. With such metallic angels looking over us, how could we come to harm?

  A John Lewis van drove past. Civilisation was being kept safe for shopping.

  This is the posh end of the Borders. The fertile alluvial soils of the Merse – the lowlands either side of the lower Tweed – have made its farmers rich. And the area is close enough to Edinburgh and maybe Newcastle to provide rural havens for those who’ve made their fortunes in property or finance or law.

  We got our first taste of this wealth at Venchen Old Tol
l, just short of the Border. Behind the old toll cottage, away from the road, the owner has attached a substantial new house, designed in the local vernacular. The two windows and door of the old toll cottage itself, facing directly onto the B6352, have been bricked up – not with bricks, but with matching undressed stone. The place had turned its back on its original function. No pennies to be made these days on the B6352.

  A pair of SUVs were parked up on the driveway in front of the house, while in the paddock beyond two girls were jumping their ponies. We felt like vagabonds, stravaigers, sturdy beggars.

  The north end of the paddock where the girls jumped their ponies was the Border. It crosses the B6352 and cuts up the hillside alongside a drystone dike to a saddle between Bowmont Hill and Castle Hill, the one with an ancient settlement on its top, the other with an Iron Age fort.

  As if to remind us of the long-dead builders of these places and of our own mortality, the hillside by the Border wall was littered with the ruins of animals: the skull, spine and pelvis of a sheep; a still fresh stoat curled up in death, the black tip of its tail touching its gaping snout. The fur on its belly was a warm yellow.

  A sign on the electricity pole said DANGER OF DEATH. Against a yellow background, within a black triangle, a prone man was suffering what looked like a lightning strike.

  Crossing the saddle between Bowmont Hill and Castle Hill, we descended towards Wideopen Moor. A herd of cows – heifers or bullocks, I don’t remember, but they were young and daft and saw us as predators – locked into formation and, heads down, crowded in on us.

  I raised my arms, Archie raised his, Claire hers, we strode towards them waving our arms and shouting ‘Go on! Go on! Go on!’ in as masterly a manner as we could manage. They flicked their long-lashed eyes, seemed to calculate, panic. Then backed off. Oh – them, they maybe said. Those humans. Best back off.

  When I was young we never worried about cows, only bulls. But now you hear about walkers butted over and knelt on till their ribs crack and their hearts burst.

  The herd dispersed. We let go our held-in breath, strode down by the old hawthorn hedge between a field of fodder on one side and rough plough on the other.

  The Border fence was black with flies hanging along every wire, twitching. They were in pairs, each one clasped onto the back of another. They were fornicating. Not only the wires but the air was thick with them, paired up on the wing, their long legs trailing. In the midst of death we were in life.

  But death still stalked us: the fused vertebrae of a bird; another sheep skull; and then, close by, an amorphous blob of sinew, tendon and tight white curls. We couldn’t classify it beyond: Animal, Part of, Dead.

  Oblivious to the transitoriness of existence, or perhaps only too well aware of it, the flies swarmed on in a fervour of copulation.

  The countryside we were walking through could have been many places in Britain: a gently rolling landscape of fields dotted with coppices of broadleaves and conifers, some marked on the map as fox coverts. There were nettle-filled ditches, unnamed burns, stone walls, electric fences. There was silage, rape, barley, pasture, soft brown plough. Blue speedwell and yellow and purple heartsease dotted the field edges, and in the hedgerows wild cherry and blackthorn were in flower. A heady scent of coconut came off the golden gorse as the day grew warm and humid. The sun glowed hazily behind burnished cloud.

  We followed the Border along walls, dodged it when it plunged along an overgrown ditch or through a particularly dense covert. Past Hoselaw Mains, between Pressen Hill and Hazelcleugh, the Border briefly follows the B6396, before turning right down a minor road and then wandering off again through the fields towards Duke’s Strip and Nottylees.

  This whole stretch of the Border, from White Law to the Tweed, was for many centuries ill-defined. Unlike the ‘natural’ barriers provided by the Sark, the Liddel, the Kershope Burn, the Cheviot Hills and the Tweed, there were no clear frontier lines. These were the eastern Debateable Lands. And, as this was fertile ground and thus more desirable than the mires of the Debatable Lands of the west, much blood was shed over them.

  Through the Middle Ages the line wandered to and fro. One year the local Scots would cross what the English regarded as their frontier and plough the fields and sow their seed, and when the English saw this they would come and burn down the crops. And the next year there’d be English incursions into what the Scots regarded as Scotland, and the English would plough the fields and sow their seed, and the Scots would come and destroy the English crops.

  An early attempt to define the Border here was made in 1222, when Henry III ordered the Sheriff of Northumberland and the Bishop of Durham, together with Hugh de Bolebec, Richard de Umframville, Roger de Morlay and ‘such other discreet and loyal knights of the shire’ to meet the representatives of Scotland at Carham, and there agree how the march should be defined hereabouts. Appearing on behalf of the Scottish king were David de Lindesay, Justiciar of Lothian, and Patrick, Earl of Dunbar, together with many other knights. When the parties met, de Bolebec reported, they agreed to elect six knights on each side ‘as jurors, to make a true perambulation between the kingdoms’.

  De Bolebec recounted how the six English knights ‘with one assent proceeded by the right and ancient marches between the kingdoms’, while the Scottish knights ‘totally dissented and contradicted them’. So both sides then agreed to elect another twelve knights, six from each side, to join the first twelve in walking the marches. To no avail: the two sides differed as before.

  De Bolebec then took it upon himself to swear in another two dozen English, who on oath duly declared that the ‘true and ancient marches between the kingdoms’ were as follows: ‘from Tweed by the rivulet of Revedeneburne [Redden Burn], ascending towards the south as far as Tres Karras [unidentified], and from thence in a straight line ascending as far as Hoperichelawe [unidentified], and from thence in a straight line to Witelawe [White Law]’. But when the English party then determined to set off to ‘make the perambulation’, the Scottish representatives, ‘resisting with violence, hindered them by threats from so doing’. And so the debate over the Debatable Lands continued . . .

  As we meandered along stone walls and ditches and field boundaries, there was nothing bar the map to tell us that sometimes we were in Scotland, sometimes in England. Barley grew on either side, a lapwing danced its crazy aerial dance – dipping, curling, jerking one way then the other – oblivious of any line of demarcation.

  And so we came to the Carham Burn, the last leg of the Border before the Tweed. It may be just a change in nomenclature, but the minor stream called the Redden Burn mentioned by de Bolebec no longer forms part of the march between the two countries. The Redden Burn now dribbles into Hadden Stank, which in turn feeds into the Carham Burn just before the latter enters the Tweed.

  The banks of the Carham Burn – which is itself little more than a burbling brook – were lush with butterbur, red campion and apple blossom. At one point the burn enters a duck pond formed by a concrete dam. There weren’t any ducks. Then we saw hunters’ hides on the far side. Any duck daring to land on this small pond would be blasted out of the water.

  Although the Carham Burn is a delightful stream, worthy of an Augustan pastoral idyll, its confluence with the Tweed is an undignified affair. The flow stagnates to a standstill and the surface of the burn is sheeted in froth and scum and the debris of twigs, bottles and polystyrene food trays.

  But the Tweed itself is a mighty and fast-flowing river, with complex eddies and currents, its surface busy and troubled as it swept past us, like the White Rabbit in a panic, late for its rendezvous with the North Sea. The river has certainly evoked its share of poetical effusions:

  Delightful stream! tho’ now along thy shore,

  When spring returns in all her wonted pride,

  The shepherd’s distant pipe is heard no more,

  Yet here with pensive peace could I abide,

  Far from the stormy world’s tumultuous roar,


  To muse upon thy banks at eventide.

  Thus William Lisle Bowles, sonneteering in 1789. We too found ourselves musing upon the river’s banks at eventide, and brewed a cup of tea the better to aid our musings. The shepherd’s distant pipe remained unheard, but the world’s tumultuous roar was apparent in the form of a Fed-Ex van on the B6350.

  As it was indeed eventide, and there was still some way to walk to Coldstream, we eschewed the pathless banks of the Tweed for the tarmac joys of the Cornhill–Kelso road, running east in parallel to the river. It was a weary plod, past Carham, past Wark, both places redolent with history but now small, sleepy backwaters without even the benefit of a pub. On our right rose Gallows Knoll and Gallows Hill, the names attesting to the means by which power and ownership were once maintained in these parts.

  It’s been over a thousand years since Carham hit the headlines. In 1018 (or perhaps 1016) Malcolm II, king of Scots, allied with Owen the Bald, the last king of Strathclyde, defeated the Northumbrians under Earl Uhtred – ‘a young man of great energy most suited to war’ – at the Battle of Carham. Some said the Scots thereby gained Lothian, fixing the Border along the Tweed, although others believe Lothian was already de facto Scottish territory. The chronicler Simeon of Durham, in his Historia Ecclesiae Dunelmensis, gives a somewhat histrionic account:

  In the year of our Lord’s incarnation ten hundred and eighteen, while Cnut ruled the kingdom of the Angles, a comet appeared for thirty nights to the people of Northumbria, a terrible presage of the calamity by which that province was about to be desolated. For, shortly afterwards (that is, after thirty days) nearly the whole population, from the River Tees to the Tweed, and their borders, were cut down in a conflict in which they were engaged with a countless multitude of Scots at Carrun [Carham].

  Just across the Tweed, the village of Birgham is remembered as the place where the Treaty of Birgham was signed in 1290. Guaranteed (or imposed) by Edward I of England, the treaty sought to defuse the rival claims on the Scottish throne of the Bruces and the Balliols, and to support the claim of the late Alexander III’s granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway. Edward conceded the independence of Scotland on condition that Margaret married his son, the Prince of Wales. This plan unravelled when Margaret died on her voyage to Scotland. There followed decades of warfare, only ending when Scottish independence was won by force of arms at Bannockburn in 1314. Although quite in what sense Scotland became ‘independent’ from England is muddied by the fact that the victorious Robert the Bruce (aka Robert de Brus), like John Balliol (aka Johan de Bailliol) and the French-speaking Edward I himself and his son Edward II, were all of Norman lineage. Indeed, Bruce claimed descent from Henry I of England, son of William the Conqueror, and had extensive estates in England as well as Scotland. So the ‘Scottish Wars of Independence’ can be interpreted as little more than a dynastic squabble among different families of Anglo-Norman adventurers.