Walking the Border

by Ian Crofton

  A mile or two to the east of Birgham, on the English side of the Tweed, a stark mound butts up against the road. This is all that remains of a once powerful Border fortress, Wark Castle. It was built as a motte and bailey in the early twelfth century, and subsequently occupied by both Scots and English. It was demolished and rebuilt several times, the last time as an artillery platform in the reign of Henry VIII. There is a story that Edward III founded the Order of the Garter here, when he gallantly swept up the fallen garter of the Countess of Salisbury at a ball. Other accounts have this wardrobe malfunction happening at Calais.

  Beyond Wark the road, pressed between high hedges, crosses an extensive flat haugh (floodplain or water meadow) on the south side of the Tweed. Tired and footsore, we stuck out our thumbs in the hope of a lift the last few miles to Coldstream, but the SUVs and Jags and Audis (this is rich farming land) sped by, blinkers firmly in place. It was as well they did, otherwise we would have missed a magical evening.

  If you look closely enough at the OS map, you’ll see between Wark and Coldstream that the Border does something odd. For a few hundred yards it abandons the middle of the Tweed and comes ashore on the south side of the river, forming a little triangular enclave, the only piece of Scottish territory south of the Tweed between Carham and the sea. No name is given to this field on the OS 1:25000 map, but in old documents it’s called ‘Scotch Haugh’. It also has another name, ‘Ba Green’. There is a story that every year on this field the youths of Coldstream would play the youths of Wark at handba (a form of free-for-all football, with teams of unlimited size and little in the way of rules). If the Scots lads won, the field would be Scottish for the following year; if the English lads won, it would be English. But as Coldstream grew in size, and Wark remained no more than a hamlet, it became clear that the Coldstreamers, vastly outnumbering the Warkers, were winning every time. And so it was amicably agreed that the field should remain a part of Scotland in perpetuity.

  The fact that the Ba Green is north of the Border was an advantage to us weary walkers. It meant that Scottish access law applied, and this meant we could wild camp there, as long as we kept off the enclosed land. So we slipped into the field and walked its margin down towards the river. At the foot of the field there was a steep bank, overgrown with nettles and butterbur, and at the foot of the bank there was a hidden sandy flat, dotted with willows and with enough room for two small tents between the bank and the river. It would be a fine secluded place to camp, as long as it didn’t rain heavily overnight over all the hills that feed the streams that feed the Tweed, from the Manor and the Lyne to the Ettrick and the Yarrow and the Teviot. I hoped the forecast – that it would stay dry till morning – would still hold.

  Claire gathered pieces of driftwood for a fire while Archie and I pitched the tents. Archie began to sing ‘Old Man River’ as the Tweed rushed by, only a few feet away. It turned out he’d been under the impression that it was the River Twee. ‘I did wonder,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look at all twee.’ Claire asked what it would be like to swim in. I thought it would be fine as long as you were prepared to be swept downstream at a rate of knots and not make landfall for a mile or two.

  As the fire crackled and the sun set behind silhouetted willow branches, we ate an improvised supper of whatever we had in our packs. We’d intended to dine in Coldstream, either at the Bangla sit-in or the Italian chip shop, but happily made do with oatcakes, fish paste and some gritty powdered soup. The highlight was the pepper roasting on an open fire. Thinking of the chestnuts in ‘White Christmas’, I felt another song coming on, and launched into my best Bing Crosby impersonation. But even my best was not good enough for Claire. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘You sound like you’re actually mental.’

  She could have been right.

  Day Six (part – the first): Wednesday, 29th May 2013 I couldn’t hear any rain on the tent when I woke the next morning. But when I put my hand out I could feel the fine drizzle the Scots call smirr. At the other end of the Border this is called a Liddesdale drow, a meteorological phenomenon that is said to ‘drench an Englishman to the skin’.

  We broke camp and packed before the forecast downpours should arrive. Breakfast could wait till Coldstream.

  It turned out to be a long, hungry tramp along the B6350 as Range Rovers and timber lorries roared past. By the time we came to Cornhill, the village across the Tweed from Coldstream, the rain had begun in earnest.

  I paused by the war memorial. It listed thirteen men from this small parish who had perished in the ‘Great European War’ – Johnsons, Elliots, Dalgleishes, Aflecks, Jeffreys, Lauries, Reids, Humes. Four more names from the ‘Great World War, 1939 to 1945’ were inscribed on the side. I was to note that even the smallest villages along the Border had their own memorials, their own long lists of the dead.

  The sight of Coldstream Bridge was a welcome one – as it no doubt had been to its first users on its opening in 1766. Before that the only way to cross here was to ford the ‘cold stream’ of the Tweed. As it was the lowest point on the river where this was possible, the crossing was used by many armies, from that of Edward I in 1295 to General Monck in 1660.

  The crossing maintained its strategic importance. At the outbreak of the Second World War Coldstream Council dismantled the plaque previously placed at the Border line in the middle of the bridge. This plaque, to welcome returning Scots, was inscribed with a line from Sir Walter Scott: ‘Oh Scotia, my dear, my native land!’ It was removed in case it should provide vital geographical information to any German parachutist landing nearby.

  But Coldstream has no shortage of signage. First, on the Scottish end of the bridge the old toll house has a slab indicating that the place was once a rival destination to Gretna for runaway couples from England:

  MARRIAGE HOUSE

  WEDDINGS CONDUCTED

  HERE UNTIL 1856

  Then there’s the big brown ‘Scotland Welcomes You’ sign. Then there’s a rowing boat on the side of the road planted with pansies above which there’s a sign on the wall:

  Coldstream Gateway Association

  welcomes you to

  COLDSTREAM

  IN BLOOM

  The welcoming is far from over:

  Welcome to

  Scottish Borders

  is followed by

  Welcome to

  Coldstream

  Home of the Regiment

  The First True Border Toon.

  When you reach the Robert Burns Lay-by, all welcomed-out, there’s an exhaustive interpretation board that supplies you with a detailed account of Burns’s visit to Coldstream on Monday, 7th May 1787. Here he made his first foray into England and, according to his companion Robert Ainslie, on reaching the further shore he doffed his hat, knelt down on the road and recited the last two verses of ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’. Apparently this little piece of theatre was intended as a homage to Scotia, his dear, his native land. Rather like a court circular, the interpretation board tells us that the poet then returned to Coldstream, where he had lunch with a farmer called Mr Foreman. They discussed Voltaire. He then took tea with the local gentry in the persons of Mr and Mrs Patrick Bryden at Lennel House, and was ‘extremely flattered’ by his reception.

  Beyond the lay-by there’s a fine viewpoint looking down on the Tweed. This is the head of Nun’s Walk, and there is a new wooden shelter for those, like me, anxious to get in out of the rain while admiring the view. A couple of elderly gentlemen were in residence. We fell to talking. I told them about my Border project, and my book.

  ‘Do you know why it’s called Coldstream?’ one asked me. He spoke with a precise and careful Border accent, just Scottish, but sometimes with a Geordie inflection. ‘It was General Monck brought the troops over, and they said it was a cold stream. That’s the story. They crossed from over there. You’re writing your book. You’d better put that in.’

  I said I would.

  ‘Have you been to Flodden?’ he asked me. ‘This is the 500th a
nniversary of the battle. In August there’s going to be 500 horses riding out there from the town. And the Guards’ll be there too. They’ll get the freedom of the Toon.’ He stressed the word for comic effect. ‘They get it every year.’

  He was a font of local knowledge. ‘If you stand here,’ he says, ‘you’ll get two chapters of your book.’

  ‘That’s why I’m lingering,’ I tell him.

  ‘You’d better not linger, your sister’s looking for you.’ He was right. He’d heard me talk to her on my mobile. We had a rendezvous.

  ‘Come back in August,’ he said. ‘There’ll be a lot of people here.’

  I walked on through the rain along the high street. I stopped to buy a local paper, and asked the newsagent where she was from. ‘Northumbria,’ she said. I asked whether she felt English. Or was she more Scottish now she lived and worked in Coldstream?

  ‘We’re all reivers,’ she said.

  I asked her if she thought the bridge was significant.

  ‘I find it a bit odd, all this “Let’s have Scottish independence”,’ she said. ‘I’ve a feeling that the Borders are going to say you can do what you want but we’re just going to be the Borders.’

  It turned out she’d looked into her family history. ‘Many generations ago it was Armstrongs, they were all over, they were quite a nasty lot. Then there were Scotts, Inneses from further up the east coast of Scotland, Bowlums and Ingrams from Northumberland.’

  ‘You know what it was like,’ she continued. ‘They used to fight with each other. It didn’t matter which side of the Border they came from. I don’t think there was much to choose between any of them. They were all reivers. Like we are today. We’ve just given up on the fighting.’

  EIGHT

  GREY WAVING HILLS

  Carter Bar to Chew Green

  I beheld a mere succession of grey waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach . . .

  – Washington Irving, quoted in John Gibson Lockhart,

  Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837–8), vol. 2

  Day Six (part the second): Friday, 19th July 2013 In 1817 Washington Irving, the first notable author produced by the pubescent United States, visited Sir Walter Scott on his home turf. The great man took him on a ramble over the hills to admire the view. ‘I have brought you,’ Scott told his guest, ‘like the pilgrim in the Pilgrim’s Progress, to the top of the Delectable Mountains, that I may show you all the goodly regions hereabouts.’ Scott went on to point out the glories of his native land, from Lammermuir to Teviot, Ettrick, Yarrow and the Tweed, ‘names celebrated in Scottish song . . . most of which had recently received a romantic interest from his own pen’.

  Irving was singularly underwhelmed. ‘I gazed about me for a time with mute surprise,’ he wrote, ‘I may almost say, with disappointment.’ He elaborated:

  I beheld a mere succession of grey waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach, monotonous in their aspect, and so destitute of trees, that one could almost see a stout fly walking along their profile; and the far-famed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between bare hills, without a tree or thicket on its banks; and yet such had been the magic web of poetry and romance thrown over the whole, that it had a greater charm for me than the richest scenery I had beheld in England.

  Irving confesses that ‘I could not but help giving utterance to my thoughts.’ He goes on to record the great man’s response:

  Scott hummed for a moment to himself, and looked grave; he had no idea of having his muse complimented at the expense of his native hills. ‘It may be pertinacity,’ said he at length; ‘but to my eye, these grey hills, and all this wild border country, have beauties peculiar to themselves. I like the very nakedness of the land; it has something bold, and stern, and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my own honest grey hills; and if I did not see the heather, at least once a-year, I think I should die!’ The last words were said with an honest warmth, accompanied by a thump of the ground with his staff, by way of emphasis, that showed his heart was in his speech.

  Anyone who has stood at the top of Carter Bar on a clear day and gazed on the distant Eildon Hills in the north and then panned their eyes a quarter of the compass clockwise cannot fail to endorse Scott’s admiration for these ‘honest grey hills’. Looking east the sinuous crest of the Cheviot Hills unfolds before you, rounded ridge winding behind rounded ridge as the Border snakes towards the distant sea. The bright clear shades of the nearby hills give way to fainter and fainter hues, until land and sky are indistinguishable. Here it is possible, perhaps more than in any other spot in these islands, to count the seven receding horizons that in Norse myth foretell the end of the world.

  The litany of names suggests the long and lofty meandering the walker faces who sets off to follow the Border along this ridge: Wooplaw Edge, Arks Edge, Leap Hill, Fairwood Fell, Catcleuch Hill, Hungry Law, Hawkwillow Fell, Greyhound Law, Brownhart Law, Black Halls, Scraesburgh Fell, Broad Flow, Raeshaw Fell, Lamb Hill, Beefstand Hill, Mozie Law, Windy Gyle, King’s Seat, Auchope Cairn, the Schil, the Curr, Black Hag, White Law, Burnt Humbleton, Coldsmouth Hill.

  No road crosses the range after the A68 at Carter Bar. I would be entirely reliant on the contents of my rucksack. I estimated it would take me two and a half to three days to complete this leg, with two or three wild camps along the crest.

  My spirits were high as I cadged a lift south from Edinburgh. It was now late July, in the best summer in Britain for seven years. The Leader Water and the Jed could have been the Aveyron or the Dordogne in southern France. Mirages flickered above the hot black tarmac, the roadside grass was burnt yellow, the sky clear blue, the sun blazing.

  The Carter Bar where I was dropped off in the early afternoon was very different from the Carter Bar I’d last visited in cold wind and rain a few weeks before. Tourists spilt out of coaches, milled about in the sunshine, posed for their photographs beside the piper – a man canny enough to realise the punters preferred pop songs to pibrochs. The ice-cream vendor was doing a roaring trade.

  A quiet breeze combed the grasses of Wooplaw Edge, my first, gentle hill. I was grateful for the cooling it brought, as down in Jedburgh it had been uncomfortably hot – or what passes for uncomfortably hot in Scotland.

  There were thistles in flower both sides of the Border, alongside sedges, reeds and grasses – red, green, yellow, intermixed with white tufts of bog cotton. There was an intermittent path, broken up by tussocks, but the going was smoother than over the thick heather to the west of Carter Bar.

  Far to the northeast, nearly twenty miles away as the crow flies, I could make out the hazy whaleback of the Cheviot itself. The large snow patch I’d seen at the end of May had gone. The Cheviot didn’t look as far away as it was. In other ways it looked almost impossibly distant.

  To the north there was a lower line of shapely hills, patterned with fields in different shades of green. The fields alternated with strips of conifers, patches of yellow and orange mountain grasses, rich green bracken. Farm tracks wound between the hills, like roads in a children’s picture book.

  Redesdale to the south was more sombre, its moors clad in forestry. There was less sign of agriculture, no hint of habitation. Four centuries ago William Camden described this remote valley as ‘a dale too voide of inhabitants by reason of depredations’.

  In 1575, shortly before Camden embarked on Britannia, his massive topographical and historical survey of this island, the head of Redesdale witnessed one of these bloody ‘depredations’. This was the notorious Redeswire Fray*, celebrated in a famous Border ballad, ‘The Raid of the Reidswire’:

  The seventh of July, the suith to say,

  At the Reidswire the tryst was set;

  Our wardens they affixed the day,

  And, as they promised, so they met . . .

  It was meant to be a Truce Day on the
Middle March. The Scottish Warden, Sir William Kerr of Cessford, sent his deputy, Sir John Carmichael, Keeper of Liddesdale, to Carter Bar to discuss matters of mutual interest with the English Warden, ‘Old’ Sir John Forster. Forster was accompanied by his deputy, Sir George Heron of Ford.

  All went amicably enough until they came to an item on the agenda concerning one ‘Farnstein’ (thought to be Harry Robson of Falstone). This man had been accused of some misdemeanour by the Scots and at a previous meeting the English had agreed to hand him over. But on this Truce Day there was no sign of ‘Farnstein’. Despite the fact that Forster promised to produce the accused at the next Truce Day, Carmichael stood on his dignity and, in so standing, lost his temper. As the ballad has it:

  To deal with proud men is but pain;

  For either must ye fight or flee,