by Ian Crofton
I might have done better washing the sleep from my eyes over the hill to the south. There’s a burn there that goes by the name of Fool Sike.
After such a night, the day’s walking felt flat and grey. ‘This section,’ writes Logan Mack, ‘may lay claim to be the most desolate of the whole Border Line.’ The going is easier these days. Much of the path over the boggier stretches of the Pennine Way is now paved with flagstones that became surplus to requirements when hundreds of mills and factories across the north of England closed down during the 1980s.
North of Chew Green I followed Dere Street/Gemelspeth into Scotland for a hundred yards or so, then back into England for a few hundred yards. At this re-entry into England there was a sign reminding me that access laws in England are different from those in Scotland. I was told to keep to the marked paths. Still walking north, I followed Dere Street/Gemelspeth back into Scotland, where it parts from the Pennine Way. In the Middle Ages, Gemelspath was one of those places agreed by the Wardens of the Middle March for Borderers to settle their differences by single combat.
I left Dere Street at Blackhall Hill and followed the Border over Scraesburgh Fell and Broad Flow. After Hobbs’ Flow I was suspicious of any ground with ‘Flow’ in its name. Broad Flow turned out to be rough and tussocky, full of bog cotton waving in the breeze, but the yellow mosses in between the tussocks had been dried up by weeks of hot weather. As I crunched through the Flow meadow pipits flew ahead of me, calling in alarm. They must have had nests nearby, perhaps with the year’s second brood.
It was worth making the tougher diversion from the Pennine Way along the Border over Raeshaw Fell. On this hill, also known as Rushy Fell, there is a spectacular earthwork in the form of a long rampart. I thought initially it must be Iron Age. But rather than forming a circle round a hillfort, the rampart is linear, extending in a more or less straight line for some two-thirds of a mile. Logan Mack avers that it was constructed in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries to mark the Border. If so, like Scots’ Dike, its function was more symbolic than military.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was to meet more people on the Pennine Way section than on any other part of my Border walk. It was probably as well, otherwise I might have stayed away with the fairies.
The first mortals I’d met on waking were a couple from Australia, walking in the opposite direction. They were in their sixties, he unfit but willing, she fit as a whippet and with short-cropped hair and a diamond stud in her nose. ‘She’s the walker,’ he told me. ‘She’s doing the whole Pennine Way. I’m just doing this bit cos it’s downhill.’ I wondered why they’d come all the way from Australia to walk these desolate moors. ‘Someone sent me a magazine article,’ she told me. ‘I was captivated. There’s nothing like this in Oz.’ Ironically, it had been so hot the last few days they’d been setting off at four-thirty in the morning and finishing at two in the afternoon, spending the remainder of the way resting in the shade.
It was still chill and misty when I stopped for lunch at the mountain refuge hut on Yearning Saddle, beneath Lamb Hill. Through the afternoon, as I made my way over Beefstand Hill, Mozie Law, Plea Knowe and Foul Step, the sky cleared and the sun came out over Scotland. But on the other side Northumberland was still swathed in a bank of cloud. A couple I met from Consett told me it had been raining that morning when they’d left. They said on the other side of Windy Gyle the ridge and the tops were all in mist.
I was lucky, though. I took the sun with me. The mists parted, and by the time I reached Windy Gyle – the highest point on the Border before the broad shoulder of the Cheviot itself is reached – all the hills roundabout were bathed in sunshine. Windy Gyle belied both parts of its name: Gyle comes from Old Norse gil, a ravine, but the hill itself is a rounded lump; and today it was not so much windy as gently caressed by a balmy breeze.
Windy Gyle has one of the largest summit cairns I’ve ever seen. It isn’t just the result of generations of walkers each adding their own individual stone to the pile. It goes back long before people walked for pleasure, probably to the Bronze Age. It must have been a mighty chieftain who could command such a burial mound for his mortal remains. We do not know who he, or she, was. But the cairn today is known as Russell’s Cairn.
Unlike the Phillip of Phillip’s Cross, we know all about the Russell of Russell’s Cairn. He was Lord Francis Russell, a local magnate who on 27th July 1585 accompanied his father-in-law, Sir John Forster of Bamborough, to a Truce Day at the pass on the Border called Hexpethgate, about half a mile northeast of Windy Gyle. Forster was the English Warden of the Middle March, while on this Truce Day his Scottish counterpart was Sir Thomas Kerr of Ferniehurst. It was only ten years since the Redeswire Fray, at which Russell had been present, and both parties arrived mob-handed and armed to the teeth. The English account of the day, written by Forster himself, describes the Scots as ‘standinge ranged in order of battell with ensigne pensell fyfe and drumes’. No doubt the English would have put on a similar martial display, for there were always unsettled scores in the backs of the minds of all those present on such days.
Nevertheless, according to their duties, the two Wardens sat down to their task, working their way through the agenda. Then, somewhere off to the side, there was a kerfuffle. An English youth had been accused of stealing a pair of spurs, and voices were raised. Sounds of the disturbance reached the negotiators, and Russell marched off to investigate. The next thing anybody knew he had been ‘cruelly slaine with a shot’. All hell broke loose and, according to Forster’s report,
. . . divers gentlemen of Scotland, with their footmen and horsemen and their whole force followed, and maintained the chardge fower miles unto the realme of England, and toke sundry prisoners and horses, and carried them into Scotland, which they deny to redeliver againe.
Today there is nothing to remind you of this violent past apart from the name. The yells have long faded into silence, the blood seeped deep into the ground.
Other names nearby also tell of lawless times. On the Scottish side of Hexpethgate there’s the burn called Thief’s Slack, while on the English side there’s not just one but two Murder Cleughs, one by Trows Plantation, the other by Davidson’s Burn. At the first of these there is a stone stating simply that ‘Here in 1610 Robert Lumsden killed Isabella Sudden’. The victim and perpetrator involved in the second Murder Cleugh are unrecorded. All I found on the Border path itself was a dead shrew.
By now glorious afternoon was turning into glorious evening. There was no water to be had on the ridge, though I spotted a flat spot to pitch the tent at Hexpethgate. I hoped I might find water a little further on, at the head of Buttroads Sike.
The search for water in Buttroads Sike turned out to be a wild goose chase. The course of the sike was plain – a wide grassy hollow flowing down the hillside in between banks of heather into the forestry below. I plunged into the long lush grasses, hoping for a squelch. All I got was a crunch. The sike was dry. I strode on down the hill, full of thirst, ears alert for a trickle. No trickle came. Sometimes I staggered down the bed of the sike, struggling with tussocks of sedges and reeds. Sometimes I took to the heather-thick flanks, ducking under the low branches of sitka spruce.
A track cut across the sike, but the culvert underneath it was dry. I had a choice. I could either descend further, to Davidson’s Burn – on the assumption that a burn might be a bigger, wetter beast than a sike – or cut back along the track to the southwest, parallel to the Border, in the opposite direction to my journey, and hope that one of the four further sikes that cut across the track might be running.
The first sike was unnamed. And dry. The second sike was Tod Sike – the fox’s stream – but there was neither fox nor stream. The third sike ran down Outer Hare Cleugh.
I heard a tinkling, peered over the edge of the track and spotted a length of yellow corrugated piping. Out of the pipe’s mouth dribbled a trickle of water. The fourth sike could wait. I scrambled down the steep bank, thinking this is no place t
o turn an ankle, crouched under the spout and let the water splash on my face, my neck, my mouth, then filled my bottles.
Although Outer Hare Cleugh is marked on the 1:25000 map, Inner Hare Cleugh – presumably the next sike on – gets no mention. Perhaps the locals were anxious to keep its whereabouts secret. Long ago, Inner Hare Cleugh was the site of Rory’s Still, just one of many illicit stills making mountain dew in these hills. The name gives us a clue as to where the expertise came from. The eponymous Rory was probably originally Ruaridh, one of many Highlanders who slipped away from the retreating Jacobite army in 1746 to pursue their traditional skills in the Southern Uplands.
I could have camped down there in the forest. But, in shade and shelter, it would have been midge hell – or rather heaven for midges, hell for humans. The alternative was to continue southwest along the track until I met a path leading back up to the ridge. I’d noted a good spot to pitch the tent up there at Hexpethgate, in the sun and the breeze. If I took this course I would have walked an extra couple of miles to get to the place I’d been a couple of hours back. But at least I’d be watered and midge-free.
It was a good path back up to Hexpethgate, along the line of the medieval road called Clennell Street. Clennell Street starts at Alwinton in Northumberland and continues over the hills into Scotland, down to the farm at Cocklawfoot. Although today the only public road over the Cheviots is the A68 at Carter Bar, Clennell Street is just one of the many old trade routes that once crossed the watershed. A document dating from 1543 lists a total of seventeen ‘ingates and passages forth of Scotland upon the Middle Marches’. In the space of just a few miles there’s five. Gemelspeth follows the Roman Dere Street. The road simply known as the Street (and on a 1775 map as ‘the Clattering Path’) crosses at Black Braes between Mozie Law and Windy Gyle. Clennell Street, up which I was toiling, crosses at Hexpethgate. Then, a little further east, there’s Salter’s Road (which joins Clennell Street just short of the Border) and Butt Roads. Salter’s Road was sometimes known as Thieves’ Road, while in 1829 Butt Roads was described as a ‘miserable track impassable in winter . . . frequented by smugglers and vagabonds of every description’. The smugglers would no doubt have done a roaring trade in the ‘innocent’ whisky distilled in these hills. They delivered their contraband to their customers in remote farmhouses in large stoneware bottles known as ‘grey hens’. Today the only traffic on these abandoned trade routes consists of honest walkers and mountain-bikers – and not many of those.
As I plodded up Clennell Street out of the dense conifers to the watershed, the reeds on either side were spattered with white gobs of cuckoo spit, outshining even the bog cotton. It had been an unexpected diversion, but on a walk such as this the unexpected is always welcome. Within reason.
Hexpethgate would not be the place to camp when Windy Gyle is windy. But on a calm July evening this exposed shoulder was perfect. All the hills were clear, bar the Cheviot itself, which was capped with a rosy beret of mist. The cloud bank still loomed over Northumberland, but to the north the sun set gloriously over Scotland. After supper I dug out my very own grey hen and raised a mug to Scotia, my dear, my native land.
TEN
MOSS-HAGS AND OOZY PEAT-FLATS
Skirting the Cheviot
. . . a desolate looking tract of treacherous moss-hags and oozy peat-flats, traversed by deep sykes and interspersed with black stagnant pools.
– William Weaver Tomlinson,
Comprehensive Guide to Northumberland
(1888)
Day Eight: Sunday, 21st July 2013 I was jerked out of sleep by the clang of metal on metal. Gates banged, gears clicked. Fit men panted, wheezed.
‘Hoch, a great hill climb!’ yelled one.
‘Fair got yer lungs pumpin’!’ bellowed another.
‘Hey Davy, whit’s fer breakfast?’
‘Who’s fer sausage and beans, eh?’
‘Whaur’s Wull?’
‘Ah’m here,’ puffed Wull. ‘Jeez-o!’
I prised my eyes open, peered at my watch. Seven-thirty on a Sunday morning and these guys had already peaked. I pulled my sleeping bag over my head, hid in my tent. The last thing I want to do at seven-thirty on any morning is engage in happy banter. I barely dared breathe. I didn’t want to be discovered, drawn into conversation. I’d be mocked as a sluggard and a sleepyhead.
‘Ok, wha’s leadin’?’
‘Dave, eh?’
‘It’s doonhill frae here.’
‘Nae fallin, mind yer speed.’
‘Oh kaaaaaaay!’
And with a clanking and a clattering, some grunting and some shouting, they hurtled off down Clennell Street into England. In a moment the noise was gone. But still my nerves jangled, my lungs pumped in sympathy.
I put on the tea and made my porridge.
The mist had crept in overnight, slinking northward over the Border from Redesdale, fingers reaching over the ridge. It had been a cold night, dreamless as far as I remember. The mist was already beginning to clear by the time I began to pack up. There was a fresh breeze. The flysheet flapped anxiously.
A couple of young women strode past in bandanas, shorts and leggings. They gave me a cheery greeting as I squatted in the door of my tent. I felt like a bleary-eyed dwarfie. They were Geordies, fit, glad and kind. They’d spent the night in the mountain refuge hut, been walking the Pennine Way for the past five years. Today they’d be completing it. I wished them well, said I doubted I’d catch them up. I’d be stopping to take lots of photos, I said, an old man’s excuse. I’d be burbling into my Dictaphone, I said, for this book I was writing. What’s more, I was, I confessed, a sluggard and a sleepyhead.
By a quarter past ten I’d sorted myself enough to set off. The fresh breeze kept it cool. The Cheviot was still in cloud.
July in the Highlands is the peak time for mountain flowers, but there was no great variety here on these more southerly hills. I found thyme, speedwell, little patches of cross-leaved heath, tormentil, a fruiting cloudberry, a few bog asphodels – but not the swathes you’d find in a Highland bog.
But the bog cotton spread in wild profusion across the moors, like snow in summer. It seems the Cheviot may be white in any season:
A snowstorm drifting down the Bowmont vale
A little hour ago made Cheviot white,
And left him glistening in his silver mail,
The day’s last champion in the lists with night.*
Happily, I was blessed with midsummer Cheviot white, of the fluffy variety.
This section of the Pennine Way is well paved. The flagstones make for rapid progress, but the hard surface jars the shins. Here and there across the bogs are signs of the old duckboards that the paving has replaced.
On top of a post of the Border fence – somewhere up by Randy’s Gap and King’s Seat – someone had planted an upside-down weather-beaten boot with a busted toe. It reminded me of me.
And so I made my slow way up the broad western shoulder of the Cheviot to the highest point on the Border, marked on the map as 743 metres (2,437 feet). You wouldn’t know it. All the ground hereabouts seems much the same height.
The only point of interest round here is a feature called the Hanging Stone. Somehow I failed to find it. I didn’t even find the False Hanging Stone. Given the violent nature of life along the Border, the origin of the name of this small outcrop is a surprising one. It was never the site of a gallows. Rather the name is said to commemorate a passing peddler who slipped here. His pack fell over the edge of the rock, but the strap caught round his neck and he was strangled to death by the weight of his own goods. In medieval times, the Hanging Stone was bang on the Border, and marked the divide between the Middle and Eastern Marches. Today it is unequivocally in England.
I was only thankful the Border doesn’t (and never did) divert northeast to the indistinct, mist-shrouded, peat-hagged summit plateau of the Cheviot itself, which, at 815 metres (2,673 feet), would require even more effort.
Whe
n Daniel Defoe made his ascent of the Cheviot in the 1720s, he was full of foreboding: ‘the height began to look really frightful, for, I must own, I wished myself down again’. At one point he refused to urge his horse further, fearing the summit would be a pinnacle, ‘and we should only have room enough to stand, with a precipice every way round us’. He was persuaded by his guide to continue: ‘he assured us there was room enough on the top of the hill to run a race, if we thought fit, and we need not fear anything of being blown off the precipice, as we had suggested’. His fears thus allayed, Defoe continued the ascent:
I must acknowledge I was agreeably surprised, when coming to the top of the hill I saw before me a smooth and with respect to what we expected a most pleasant plain, of at least half a mile in diameter, and in the middle of it a large pond . . .
In fact, something like a third of a square mile on the top of the Cheviot is much the same height. ‘Any spot within this area,’ writes Logan Mack, ‘may claim distinction to be the actual summit.’ Be that as it may, the Ordnance Survey have marked the place they believe is the very top with a trig point. This stands on top of a vast stone-built pile, itself resting on some kind of platform to prevent the whole thing sinking deep into the mire (apparently the fate of two previous pillars).
Other travellers have loathed the Cheviot, not for its horrid cragginess, but for its bogs. ‘The summit is a desolate looking tract of treacherous moss-hags and oozy peat-flats, traversed by deep sykes and interspersed with black stagnant pools,’ wrote William Weaver Tomlinson in 1888 in his Comprehensive Guide to Northumberland. Ten years later, the aptly named Edmund Bogg wrote of ‘a long bog trot over the proverbial swamps’ until he attained ‘the highest point of the cold bleak back of the mountain’*. More recently, I have met hardened mountaineers who have spoken of the peat hags of the Cheviot with nothing less than dread. Only the recent provision of a paved path has made the ascent of this hill something less than purgatory.