Walking the Border

by Ian Crofton

Or else no answer make again,

  But play the beast, and let them be.

  Mutual recriminations turned to hard words, and hard words turned to sharp deeds as a band of Fenwicks from the English party loosed off their arrows. The Scots – many of whom were drinking, playing dice or otherwise amusing themselves as their superiors saw to matters of state – were put on the back foot, and fled back over the pass into Scotland. Here they met a troop of Jeddart callants (men of Jedburgh), who were coming late to the meeting. The Jeddart callants put heart into the fleeing Scots, and retreat turned into advance:

  The swallow taill frae tackles flew,

  Five hundredth flain into a flight,

  But we had pestelets enew,

  And shot among them as we might.

  With help of God the game gaed right,

  Fra time the foremost of them fell;

  Then ower the knowe, without goodnight,

  They ran with mony a shout and yell.

  Heron was killed in the fray, and a number of English worthies captured. The Scots poured down into Redesdale, taking the opportunity to inflict another depredation. They returned home with several hundred head of English cattle.

  Like the freeing of Kinmont Willie two decades later, the Redeswire Fray threatened diplomatic relations between the two countries. On this occasion Regent Morton of Scotland and Queen Elizabeth of England were eager to smooth things over. Morton sent the English prisoners back with gifts of hawks, prompting some wag to observe that this was an exchange of ‘live hawks for dead Herons’. For their part, the English were aware that ‘Old’ Sir John was not entirely blameless, nor entirely trustworthy, having made alliances with various Scottish Border families who as a consequence were able to raid on the English side with impunity. Nevertheless, Sir John kept his job as Warden for another twenty years, by which time he was ninety-four and far gone in ‘imbecility and weakness’.

  Leaving behind Wooplaw Edge and the scene of the affray, I strode out towards Leap Hill and Fairwood Fell. On the Scottish side, stands of young Scots pine had been allowed enough space to spread into their natural shapes. Long grasses grew on the English side, grazed by sheep. In the distance I could see a herd of hardy cows. They must have been a tough breed to thrive on these uplands where the pasture is so poor one of the hills has earned the name of Hungry Law. So I came to Catcleuch Hill and its cairn marked on the map as Phillip’s Cross. But it is not a cross, and no one seems to know who Phillip was.

  By the time I reached Greyhound Law the grasses were growing on the Scottish side, and the conifer plantations to the south. When googling Greyhound Law to find out what, if any, connection it had with greyhounds, I found instead a scientific paper by H.F. Barron published in the Scottish Journal of Geology in 1989. Reading this I found that Greyhound Law has inspired its own poetry, albeit lacking any mention of hunting dogs or the chase:

  Six samples from the SE margin of the Greyhound Law Inlier on the southern slopes of the Cheviot Hills yielded diverse, moderately well preserved middle Silurian palynomorph assemblages. The taxa present suggest a mid- to late Sheinwoodian or earliest Homerian age . . . Thick-walled Leiosphaeridia, suggestive of deposition in a hemipelagic environment, are common in the assemblages and are associated with diverse non-sphaeromorph acritarchs . . .

  Such stuff is dense and incomprehensible and mesmerising – as dense and incomprehensible and mesmerising as the 400 or more million years that separate us from the making of these Border hills, built when the separate continental plates containing Scotland and England collided, squeezing the sediments of the disappearing ocean floor upward between them like a couple of bulldozers. I thought of the lines from Hugh MacDiarmid’s meditation ‘On a Raised Beach’:

  What happens to us

  Is irrelevant to the world’s geology

  But what happens to the world’s geology

  Is not irrelevant to us.

  As dense and incomprehensible and mesmerising is the 400 or more million years of evolution that separates us from the tiny organisms whose remnants made up the rocks beneath the turf on which I walked.

  Past Greyhound Law I came to the Heart’s Toe, a piece of flattish ridge between Crooked Hope and Hoggerel Cleugh. Here I disturbed a big bushy-tailed dog fox. He bounded away, leaping over the tussocks, looking back to make sure I wasn’t following. Then he darted into the trees on the English side. Maybe the hens are sweeter on that side of the Border.

  Past Ogre Hill and Grindstone Law I left the last of the forest behind and found myself surrounded in all directions by open moorland. At a junction of paths between Yard Shank and Coquet Head I joined the Pennine Way. This last section of Britain’s longest long-distance path, from Byrness across the Cheviots to Kirk Yetholm, is said to be one of the tougher sections of the route. For me, with its well-marked and often-paved path, its stiles and its signposts, it was to provide some of the easiest walking of the whole Border line.

  At the same time, I was entering a militarised landscape. I was now on the northern edge of the MoD’s Otterburn Ranges. On the map the edges of the Ranges are delineated by red triangles. On the ground there are frequent signs.

  Military Firing Range.

  Keep out when

  red flags or lights

  are displayed

  or barriers closed.

  Danger

  Do not touch

  any military debris.

  It may explode

  and kill you.

  The strange thing is, this has been a militarised landscape for millennia. Ahead of me lay Dere Street (Anglo-Saxon for ‘Roman road of the stags’), on which the legions marched north into Caledonia. It was built in the first century AD by Julius Agricola, the first Roman governor of Britain, and so predates Hadrian’s Wall.

  Just before Dere Street crosses the Cheviot watershed there is the site of a Roman fort, together with several overlapping camps and fortlets. Even a mile or so away I could make out the lines of ramparts, throwing shadows in the early evening light. It is a vast area, on sloping ground nearly 1,500 feet above the sea. The largest camp was intended to accommodate two legions plus auxiliaries, totalling 16,800 foot and 1,800 horse.

  Today the place is known as Chew Green, though it is more sheep-cropped moor than manicured lawn. In medieval times there was a settlement here called Kemelpethe – Dere Street in this section being known in former times as Gemelspath or Gamel’s Path. There is a tradition (possibly mistaken) that the Romans called Chew Green Ad Fines – ‘to the ends’ – indicating what a remote place they thought it was, and also suggesting that it marked the boundary of their imperium.

  This stretch of Dere Street is littered with Roman camps. Such defences were constructed even if the legion was stopping only for a single night. The men would dig a ditch and pile the earth up into a rampart, upon which they erected a palisade. To the north of Chew Green the next camp is at Pennymuir, and the most important fort beyond that is above the Tweed on top of the triple-peaked Eildon Hills, known as Trimontium to the Romans. To the south, across the high treeless moors that now form part of the MoD artillery ranges, there are several more camps before you reach Rochester, the hamlet on the A68 that has the remains of the Roman fort called Bremenium. From the scant records that remain, we know that at various times soldiers from all over the Empire were stationed here – Lingones from Burgundy in central Gaul, Dalmatians from what is now Croatia, Vardulians from the Basque country. This was ‘free movement of labour’, Roman style. Two thousand years ago the EU was the PR – the Pax Romana.

  For the antiquarian William Camden the whereabouts of Bremenium – mentioned in the first century AD by the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy – was uncertain, although he had a shrewd idea:

  May we not hence guesse that Bremenium, for which there hath beene made so long and great search, was here? Whereof Ptolomee hath made mention in this very site and position of the country, and from which Antonine the Emperour beginneth the first journey of Brit
aine, as from the utmost limit of the Romane Province in Britaine at that time. And the limites or Bounds of a Dominion were seas, great rivers, Mountaines, Desert lands and unpassable, such as be in this tract. Trenches also with their rampiers, walles, mounds of trees cut downe or plashed [stripped], and Castles especially built in places more suspected and daungerous than others, to all which there are to be seene remaines heere every where about. Certes, when the Barbarous nations, after they had broken through the wall of Antoninus Pius in Scotland, harried all over the country and laid all wast before them, and the wall of Hadrian lay neglected unto the time of Severus, we may well thinke that even heere was set downe the limit of the Roman Empire, and that from hence the old Itinerarie which goes about under the name of Antoninus beganne thus, A limite, that is, From the Bound.

  This was where I was to pitch my tent in the midst of the Roman camp at the one-time limit and bound of the Roman Empire, among ‘Mountaines, Desert lands and unpassable’.

  Then something strange happened. As I approached Chew Green a bright yellow light appeared in the eastern sky. It sank slowly to earth somewhere near the Roman camp. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. The light had a faint trail of smoke after it. I assumed it must have been a flare, but why you’d need to fire a flare in the bright seven o’clock sunshine of a July evening I have no idea. I hoped I wasn’t going to find myself in the midst of some military exercise. And if I was, was I about to be surrounded by a bunch of squaddies with blacked-up faces aiming their SA80s at me? Or would I find myself at the sharp end of a Roman pilum?

  There was neither squaddie nor legionary when I arrived at Chew Green. Only sheep. Scores of them. What Camden fails to mention, never having had to pitch a tent in the midst of Chew Green Roman Camp, is that the whole place has now become a vast sheep’s lavatory.

  There was poo everywhere. I plodded about, looking for a level spot, kicking great piles of the stuff off the close-cropped turf.

  Satisfied that I’d established a turd-free zone, I began to pitch the tent. Then, as I knelt down to peg it out, I felt a squelch beneath my knee. Not entirely turd-free, I noted, as I wiped something fresh, sloppy and green off my trousers with a handful of grass.

  After a while two Pennine Wayers passed by, heading for the mountain refuge between Raeshaw Fell and Lamb Hill. They still had some miles to go, but had a heads-down steely look about them, so I don’t doubt they made it. About an hour and a half later another walker turned up. He was slower, older, bigger-bellied. He stopped for a smoke. I offered him a dram. He said he would probably camp a mile or two up. Both parties were hoping to get to Kirk Yetholm the following day. That would be a hard, long walk. I preferred to take a bit more time.

  As the sun sank towards the western horizon I tried to make out the course of Dere Street on the hillside to the south. The low light picked out no single clear line. Instead, a whole network of small paths became apparent, meandering down over ridges and bumps towards the infant River Coquet and up to the old Roman camp where I sat.

  It was as if – in apparent contradiction to Roman military discipline and the rigid straightness of the Roman military road – each soldier, or each line of soldiers, had taken their own path, following the natural contours of the hill. There must have been thousands of them to make so many different paths.

  I tried to imagine them pouring down over the ridge some evening 1,800 years ago. Each man would be weary after a hard day’s march, weighed down with his helmet, body armour, shield, javelins, sword, dagger, food enough for a fortnight, wineskin, cooking pot and a pair of stakes for the palisade. Their spirits would have lifted at the sight of where they’d sleep, but their work for the day was not yet over. They’d still have to dig ditches, build ramparts, hammer in stakes.

  The military had not yet done with this landscape. Just to the east of Dere Street I could see a strip of fresh-laid tarmac cutting steeply up the hillside into the heart of the Otterburn Ranges. It links to the minor public road that ends at the head of Coquetdale. It’s not marked on the map.

  Every now and again I’d hear the distant swish of tyres. Then I’d see a landcruiser coming down the hill, this way and that. The first one was black. Then, some minutes later, a white one drove uphill in the opposite direction. For some hours these two vehicles patrolled up and down the road at irregular intervals. They might have been farmers. But would their sheep have needed such constant attention through a balmy July evening?

  As the light faded I heard a low distant growling. Two heavier vehicles, headlights blazing, came over the southern horizon. Then they drove slowly, very slowly down the road. I could hear every gear change, but couldn’t make out what they were until they came closer. Two large military trucks in convoy. I watched as their white headlights slowly approached, watched as their red tail-lights receded slowly, very slowly, down Coquetdale.

  In the east a martin darted under a yellow moon. Later, perhaps after the same fly, a bat flicked across the corner of my eye then disappeared into the dark.

  So there I was in the midsummer night with the ghosts of Basques, Burgundians and Slavs . . . Forsters, Fenwicks, Herons and Hawks . . . palynomorph assemblages, thick-walled Leiosphaeridia, non-sphaeromorph acritarchs . . .

  Lulled into sleep by the distant mournful bleating of sheep and the trickle of the Coquet burn, I dreamt my midsummer dream, as True Thomas once had done by the Eildon Tree . . .

  I was trying to follow the Border. I was among the Cheviots, but they were not the hills of daylight, but like all the hills in dreams there were unveilings of places and things and thoughts I thought I once knew but had forgotten, remembered, forgotten again. The Border, in my dream, was around here somewhere, intermittent, indeterminate, marked here and there on the map, going nowhere in particular.

  In a place that might be but isn’t there was a building on a shelf of the hill above a slope of pine trees, overlooking the Merse. This side of sleep I know this place is just grass and sedge. On the outside the building was a half-ruined concrete outhouse. I entered through a hole in the wall. The dark interior was lit by slits of light shining down from gaps in the roof. There were bright Eastern carpets on the floor, shelves lined with books, portraits of someone’s loved ones on the wall.

  I unhooked a picture, took some books from the shelves. Then I was aware of a voice. I’d be very grateful, the voice said, if you could return the things you’ve taken. Yes, I said, I’ll put them back. When I’d done, the voice said, You haven’t put everything back yet. I’m sorry, I said. There’s this and this. And when I’d put those things back I thought I felt the spirit of a thank you.

  There was someone there in the house with me. She was not a ghost but a flesh-and-blood young woman with pink punk hair. Or she might have been the ancient sorceress Circe on her island, in which case I wasn’t sure if I was to play Ulysses or one of his men transformed into a pig. Then it became clear that this ageless woman with the laughing eyes was none other than the Queen of Elfhame, come here from under the Eildon Hills. And, to borrow the words of an old Scots ballad, with her laughing eyes ‘she coost her glamourie ower me’.

  Later – it may have been seven seconds, seven days or seven years – the time came to leave. So I wandered in my loss through the summer hills along a track, oak and ash on one side, yellow grass and blackthorn on the other.

  I heard a noise, turned round. Three black Cadillacs with darkened windscreens sped towards me down the track.

  I waited for the impact. I was not to return to the world of mortals. At least, not without my memory banks wiped clean.

  * Named after the source of the River Rede in a swire, Old English for a hollow on top of a ridge.

  NINE

  THE BONNY ROAD

  Coquet Head to Clennell Street

  And see not ye that bonny road,

  Which winds about the fernie brae?

  That is the road to fair Elfhame,

  Where you and I this night maun gae.
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br />   – Anon., ‘The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer’

  Day Seven: Saturday, 20th July 2013 I woke up to the bleating of sheep and low cloud covering the slopes above the tent. There was a desperate rattling between the flysheet and the inner. It was a pair of craneflies waving their legs about, clamped tail to tail in a frenzy of coition.

  I was still half in my dream, in that strange world between sleep and waking where boundaries dissolve. Up here alone in the wilds the past was here and now. The Queen I’d visited in my dream had been all ages at once: girl-child full of laughter, young woman full of love, old woman full of wisdom. I too contained all my past and my future in this moment: infant, schoolboy, lover, father; bones, ashes, dust.

  Mixing with the denizens of Elfhame can be a risky business. In 1576 a woman called Bessie Dunlop was accused of witchcraft on this count. She had told her interrogators that she had met a group of gentlefolk, eight women and four men, who greeted her and asked her if she would go with them, but she declined. They were, it turned out, ‘the gude wights that winnit in the court of Elfame’. When she met them again, passing Restilrig Loch on the edge of Edinburgh, they were on horseback and ‘with mony a hideous rumble’ they rode hell-for-leather into the loch. They were, she said, ‘the gude wights that were riding in middle-eard’. These tales were enough to commit her to the flames. Her executioners could not accept that there was a third road, neither the narrow path of righteousness nor the braid braid path of wickedness. This third road was the ‘bonny road / Which winds about the fernie brae’:

  That is the road to fair Elfhame,

  Where you and I this night maun gae.

  Needing to clear my head, I stumbled down through thick reeds and bracken to the headwaters of the Coquet. It’s only a small burn here, but there was a peaty pool. I stripped off and ducked in. It did the trick.