by Ian Crofton
Happily leaving the Cheviot to the English, I strode northwest down the slope to a more pronounced summit, that of Auchope Cairn. This fine viewpoint is marked, as the name might suggest, with a fine cairn – in fact, two fine cairns. These are not just higgledy-piggledy heaps, but carefully crafted drystone structures with vertical sides, much like chimney stacks. By the summit cairn I met the two young women who’d passed my tent earlier. They’d diverted to the Cheviot summit, otherwise I’d have never caught up with them. We sat down and ate our lunch, chatting and joking, with the long Border ridge extending before us towards Kirk Yetholm.
Auchope Cairn turned out to be a busy place this particular sunny Sunday. There were mountain-bikers, walkers, birdwatchers. One man in a baseball cap and football shirt asked me whether I’d seen any aircraft wreckage. He clutched a map, a GPS, a booklet, a camera. He had a way of speaking to someone over your left shoulder, someone who wasn’t there. I said I hadn’t seen anything like that, only some pallets of flagstones waiting to be laid, and a JCB abandoned for the weekend.
It turned out that the Cheviot has had its share of air crashes – seven during the Second World War alone – attracting a certain kind of enthusiast to search out the wreckage.
On 15th January 1942 a Wellington bomber, returning from a raid on Hamburg, overshot its base in Yorkshire. The radio was out, the navigation equipment not working, and in the blizzard conditions the pilot had no idea he was approaching high ground. Then he hit West Hill, the western shoulder of the Cheviot.
The fate of the Wellington might have remained a mystery had not three local shepherds noticed a smell of burning coming down from the plateau. They made their way up to the crash site, where they found three of the crew had been killed outright. Two more were fatally injured, and died the next day. Only one man survived.
Nearly three years later, on 16th December 1944, West Hill was again the site of a fatal accident. Lieutenant Kyle of the USAAF was piloting his nine-man B-17 Flying Fortress back from a raid on Ulm. The raid had been aborted due to the worsening weather, and as he tried to find his way back to his base in Cambridgeshire across the North Sea, Kyle was deceived by false navigation signals transmitted by the Luftwaffe. Although he didn’t know it, he was far to the north of where he should have been. In an attempt to get a visual fix on his whereabouts he took the B-17 under the cloud, only to find the snow-covered shoulder of the Cheviot dead ahead. Kyle managed a crash landing of sorts. The B-17 skidded across the bog, eventually coming to rest on West Hill. Two of his crew were killed in the crash. The rest of the crew – some of them badly injured – managed to scramble out of the wreckage. Kyle and two others who had escaped with minor injuries struggled down the hill to raise the alarm, while the remaining men took shelter in the lea of a peat hag.
Two local shepherds, John Dagg and Frank Moscrop, set out to look for survivors, together with Dagg’s dog Sheila. Sheila quartered the ground around the Cheviot’s featureless wastes, moving much more quickly than the men could. Then Dagg heard barking. Following the sound, Dagg found Sheila licking the face of Sergeant George P. Smith. The two shepherds helped the four airmen down the slopes to the safety of lower ground. Just as they reached shelter there was a series of thunderous explosions. The B-17’s entire bomb load had gone off.
Pilot George Kyle died, aged eighty-two, on 20th September 2005. He left a last wish that his ashes be scattered by Braydon Crag on West Hill, the site of the crash that had almost claimed his life six decades before.
The aircrew who survived these crashes were lucky not to perish in the bitter winter conditions of the high Cheviots. A number of walkers have not been so fortunate. The Stuart Lancaster Memorial Hut – a wooden shelter on the saddle below Auchope Cairn – is named after a man who perished in a snowstorm nearby.
More dramatic – if less well attested – deaths and disappearances are associated with the great chasm that divides West Hill from Auchope Cairn, just on the English side of the Border. This is the Hen Hole – also known as the Hell Hole – between whose crags the College Burn descends in a series of dramatic waterfalls. In this secluded, shady spot, a ‘snow egg’ sometimes persists into the summer.
The Hen Hole provides the setting for the climax of the ballad of ‘Black Adam of Cheviot’. Black Adam, also known as the Rider of Cheviot, was an infamous outlaw who lived in a cave among the crags of the Hen Hole. One day he burst in on a wedding at Wooperton intent on villainy. He seized the jewels of the women, raped the bride-to-be, and then stabbed her to death. The would-be groom, Wight Fletcher, had been away to fetch the priest, and returned only in time to hear Adam’s callous laugh as he made good his escape. Picking up his beloved’s blood-stained handkerchief, Fletcher set off through storm and darkness in pursuit, all the way up to the wilds of the Hen Hole. Here Black Adam leapt the chasm to reach his cave. But Fletcher leapt across too, and the two locked in combat so fierce that they lost their footing and fell together to their deaths:
Slowly right owre then they fell,
For Fletcher his hold did keep;
A minute and their twa bodies
Went crashing doun the steep.
Loud and lang Black Adam shrieked,
But naething Fletcher said;
And there was neither twig nor branch
Upon their rocky bed.
Another local legend about the Hen Hole tells of a party of hunters who, in pursuit of a roe deer, ‘heard issuing from this chasm, the sweetest music they had ever heard, and forgetting the roe which scoured away unheeded, they were impelled to enter, and could never again find their way out’*.
Another source identifies the leader of the lost hunters as a member of the Percy family, who for centuries have been Earls, then Dukes, of Northumberland:
There is a small cavern in the face of the highest cliff on the right bank of the ravine, still accessible, we believe, to the venturesome, though dangerously so; and into this it is said that one of the early hunting Percys, along with some of his hounds, went and never returned. He and the hounds, if we may credit the legend, still lie in the cavern, bound by a magic spell – not dead, but fast asleep, and only to be released by a blast of a hunting horn, blown by someone as brave as ever Hotspur was, and more fortunate.*
It was, of course, a dispute over hunting rights between the Percys and the Douglases that led to the Battle of Otterburn. That at least was the explanation put forward by the anonymous author of ‘The Ballad of Chevy Chase’, who recounts that Henry Percy (‘Hotspur’) crossed the Border to hunt on Douglas land, thus outraging James, Earl of Douglas:
Show me, said he, whose men you be
That hunt so boldly here
That, without my consent do chase
And kill my fallow deer?
In historical fact it was Douglas who had encroached on English soil, not on a hunting expedition but at the head of a Scottish army, intent on taking advantage of the turmoil in England, as the great magnates moved to knock Richard II off the throne.
Having (supposedly) captured Hotspur’s lance pennon at Newcastle, Douglas rode back north in triumph, stopping only to lay siege to Otterburn Castle in Redesdale, on the south edge of what are now the MoD ranges. Here, on 15th August 1388, Hotspur caught up with his quarry, his men falling on the Scots with cries of Percy, Percy! ‘The night was far on,’ according to the French chronicler Jean Froissart, ‘but the moon shone so bright as an it had been in a manner day.’ Douglas was, Froissart tells us, ‘young and strong and of great desire to get praise and grace, and was willing to deserve to have it and cared for no pain nor travail’. There followed a ‘sore fight’,
For Englishmen on the one party and Scots on the other party, when they meet there is a hard fight without sparing. There is no ‘Ho!’ between them as long as spears, swords, axes or daggers will endure, but lay on each other.
At first the English, who outnumbered the Scots, had the advantage.
Then the Earl of Douglas, who was of gre
at heart and high of enterprise, seeing his men recoil back, then to recover the place and show knightly valour he took his axe in both his hands and entered so into the press that he made himself way in such wise that none durst approach near him, and he was so well armed that he bare well of such strokes as he received. Thus he ever went forward like a hardy Hector, willing alone to conquer the field and to discomfit his enemies. But at last he was encountered with three spears all at once: the one struck him on the shoulder, the other on the breast, and the stroke glinted down to his belly, and the third struck him in the thigh, and sore hurt with these strokes, so that he was borne perforce to the ground, and after that he could not be again relieved.
In the dark the English did not realise whom they had felled, thinking Douglas was just another man at arms. Tradition has it that Douglas ordered that he be hidden in a stand of bracken, so that his imminent death would not give cheer to the enemy. Asked by Sir John Sinclair how he fared, Froissart tells us Douglas replied,
Right evil, cousin, but thanked be God there hath been but a few of mine ancestors that hath died in their beds. But, cousin, I require you to think to revenge me, for I reckon myself but dead, for my heart fainteth oftentimes.
The Scots were in the end victorious, and – again according to tradition – it was to the stand of bracken where the dead Douglas lay that Hotspur conceded the victory.
In another ballad, ‘The Battle of Otterbourne’, Douglas foresees his own death thus:
But I hae dream’d a dreary dream,
Beyond the Isle of Skye;
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.
Froissart and the ballads depict a battle in which gallantry and chivalry rather than gore and fear and sheer bloody aggression dominate the field. I suspect the reality would have been very different.
It’s a steep knee-jarring stomp down Auchope Rig from Auchope Cairn to the mountain refuge hut, but then you stride along a long, level shoulder towards the Schil. An afternoon breeze stirred the grasses, fluttered a scrap of black bin bag caught in the barbed wire of the Border fence. In Logan Mack’s day the Border here was marked by tall pine posts to let guests of the sporting estates on either side know where the limit of their shooting lay. They presumably didn’t want a repeat of the Percy–Douglas Spat.
At the top of the Schil there is an outcrop of rock that might to the timorous eye of Daniel Defoe have seemed a pinnacle, but which is only a few feet high. Shored against it are great heaps of stones, which, according to Logan Mack, ‘must have been piled together by prehistoric hands for such purpose as seemed fit to their owners’. It may be another Bronze Age burial cairn, but as far as I know it is yet to be excavated. When I passed by, three words were spelt out in stones on the flat grass next to the summit:
I LOVE YOU
I stuck to the Border up to Corbie Craig and Black Hag (circumvented by the Pennine Way), along Steer Rig to White Law and past Whitelaw Nick. Here the Pennine Way leaves the Border for good and heads downhill to Kirk Yetholm. I had thought that by the time I reached this point it would be evening, and I’d have to make camp. But it was only four o’clock in the afternoon, so, even if I followed the Border northward for a couple of miles past Coldmouth Hill and Burnt Humbleton to the Shotton Burn and Yetholm Mains, and then walked the mile or so south down the road to Kirk Yetholm, I’d still be in time for dinner at the pub and bed at the hostel. That was an altogether more tempting prospect than pitching the tent on Tuppie’s Grave – however beautiful these upland grasslands, golden ripe in the summer sun. A third night on rice and ready-made sauce was not so appealing as what was on offer at the Border Hotel: pan-roasted rump of Border lamb on spiced puy lentils, with dauphiniose potato and a red wine and rosemary jus. Besides, the old grey hen was nearly empty.
I didn’t regret my decision. Leaving the Pennine Way behind, I recovered a sense of adventure, of striding into the unknown. At one point the no-man’s-land between the Border wall and the parallel Border fence was filled with meadowsweet, foaming like cream at the top of a pail.
Eventually I came to the saddle between Humbleton Swyre and Coldsmouth Hill. Although the general direction from Auchope Cairn had been downward, there had been quite a few ups on the way. But from here it was entirely downhill. As I turned a corner a roe deer panicked just in front of me, burst into the thick bracken and hid somewhere up by the Border wall. Beyond and above it there was a thick conifer plantation. A buzzard mewed, another answered. To this mournful soundtrack I stumbled down what might have once been a path, but had since been hijacked by cows. The ruts and hollows they’d made in the mud with their hooves had hardened in the sun, making for an awkward, ankle-twisting descent.
The going continued like this along Countrup Sike and the Shotton Burn. At one point I crossed the burn, its banks dotted with yellow mimulus, to take advantage of the right of way marked on the map on the English side. The way was barred by a large bull. I had no intention of embarking on a legal debate with a bull, so I cautiously backtracked and continued down the Scottish bank.
I left the Border at Yetholm Mains, where there’s a road bridge over the Shotton Burn. This was the first road I’d met since leaving Carter Bar. Perversely, on the north side of the bridge lies England, on the south side Scotland. There’s not much at Yetholm Mains apart from a large farm and a few pebble-dashed council houses.
A man was digging his garden. Aware of the geopolitical peculiarities of the place, I asked him, ‘Are you Scottish on this side and English on that side?’
‘Scottish,’ he said.
‘You feel Scottish?’
‘I don’t know whether there’s such a feeling as feeling Scottish,’ he said. Obviously I’d asked another stupid question.
I told him I was heading for the pub to eat.
‘You’ve got about twenty minutes to go,’ he said.
‘Really?’ I said in alarm. Maybe Sunday was early closing.
‘Or twenty-five minutes. Along the road.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘I thought you meant until they closed.’
It was a weary, footsore twenty-five minutes along the tarmac, but there was an open pub at the end of it. I was sweaty, long unwashed.
I told myself I’d just have a quick pint, then have a shower and change of clothes in the hostel before returning to the pub to eat. But then the two young women I’d last seen on Auchope Cairn came in. They’d been to the hostel, washed and changed. I just sat there on my barstool in my T-shirt and stank. But being honest Northern lasses they didn’t turn their noses up. They even bought me a pint.
* Will H. Ogilvie, ‘Sunset’, from The Land We Love (1910).
* Edmund Bogg, Two Thousand Miles of Wandering in the Border Country, Lakeland and Ribblesdale (1898).
* Moses Aaron Richardson, The Local Historian’s Table Book, of remarkable occurrences, historical facts, traditions, legendary and descriptive ballads connected with the counties of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland and Durham (1846).
* Monthly Chronicles of North-Country Lore and Legend (1887).
Photo: Joyce Nicholls
ELEVEN
UNTIL THE NIGHT CAME UPON THEM
Flodden Interlude
. . . the fight continued sharp and hot on both parts until the night came upon them . . .
– William Camden, Britannia (1586–1607),
on the Battle of Flodden
All the lords of this land were left them behind.
Beside Branxton in a brook breathless they lie.
Gaping against the moon their ghost went away.
– Anonymous song from Cheshire, celebrating the defeat of the Scots at Flodden
Interlude: Wednesday, 7th August 2013 Down at Tweed Green, the meadow between the town of Coldstream and the river, a plump southerner in shades and waders stood waist deep in the water.
‘It’s chuffin cold in here,’ he told the world at large.
It’s a notoriously ch
illy river, the Tweed. Hence the name Coldstream. Before the bridge was opened in 1766 this was the lowest place along the course of the Tweed where the river could be forded. Edward I’s army waded across in 1296 on their way to seize Berwick. What happened next is described by the fifteenth-century Scotichronicon of Walter Bower:
When the town had been taken in this way and its citizens had submitted, Edward spared no one, whatever the age or sex, and for two days streams of blood flowed from the bodies of the slain, for in his tyrannous rage he ordered seven thousand souls of both sexes to be massacred . . . So that mills could be turned round by the flow of their blood.
In 1513 James IV took his army across the Tweed in the other direction, on the way to annihilation at Flodden.
It was a quiet sunny evening when we arrived on Tweed Green. I was with my photographer friend Joyce Nicholls. Among the lush vegetation on the bank a young red-haired officer of the Coldstream Guards cast his line into the river. The Guards turn up every year during Coldstream’s Civic Week. Many ex-Guards turn up too, and I spoke to some of them. Despite their name, they told me, the Guards don’t recruit on the Scottish side of the Border. They draw on the youth of Northeast England and, oddly enough, Cornwall. ‘We always wind them up that they’re a Scottish regiment,’ a non-Guard told me. ‘Well they are, Coldstream is in Scotland.’ But, he said, they were actually founded in Northumberland, in Fenwick and Hazelridge. This was during the English Civil War. In 1650 Colonel George Monck drew on these Parliamentary militias to form Monck’s Regiment of Foot.