by Ian Crofton
As it happens, the site engineer responsible for the construction of Coldstream Bridge some two and a half centuries ago was also called Robert Reid. Eyebrows were raised when he used some of the funds for the bridge to build a house for himself (this is the house that later became the Toll House and the Marriage House*). John Smeaton, the designer of the bridge, argued that the house actually helped to support the bridge. He apparently felt that Reid, a fellow engineer, was entitled to some perks, given the miserliness of his pay.
Late autumn, when the colours on the trees are burning at their brightest, is a fine time to walk the lower Tweed. On the Scottish side of the bridge a cherry tree blazed like a bonfire. On the English side we stood beneath a row of old beeches, their leaves golden in the grey light.
The River Tweed is above all else a salmon river, and for the first few miles we’d be walking the Tillmouth Beat. In a few hundred yards we came to a well-appointed fisherman’s hut. A rather grand-looking man emerged, dressed in a casual jumper. He reminded me of Max Hastings. He was talking to a younger man in jacket and tie who carried a clipboard and laptop.
We gave them a merry hello, got into conversation. The older man was a member of the syndicate that owned the Tillmouth Beat. He was from down south. The younger man was the factor. They’d been holding a meeting to discuss the next season.
I told them about my walk, about the book.
‘You know about the law, do you?’ the older man said.
Uh-oh, I thought. Are we trespassing? Surely this was a public right of way. Maybe walkers here were prohibited from wearing anything brighter than brown for fear of frightening the fish. Bob – a fisherman as well as a climber – had suggested a green Barber rather than a bright red mountain jacket might make it easier to blend in with the natives.
‘You mean the law on this side and that side, or the river?’ I answered cautiously. ‘What do you have in mind?’
‘Well, normally the law on rivers is that if you own one bank you can go out to the middle line and fish the other side.’ The older man warmed to his theme. I think he shared my fascination for the vagaries of Border law. ‘And if the river moves – and the river does move with erosion – under those circumstances the median line moves as well. But . . . this is the national boundary between England and Scotland, and it doesn’t move, it’s a fixed line. So there are places where if you want to fish the other bank you have to come to an arrangement with the opposite neighbour to trespass. If there’s an island in the middle, for example – we have a pool down there where there’s an island in the middle – we have to trespass onto their land to be able to fish where the fish are.’
I said I didn’t think there was such a thing as trespass in Scotland. But Bob gently reminded me that we were talking about fishing rights, not the right to roam.
Logan Mack relates another story concerning the vagaries of Border law hereabouts. He says that fifty years before his time – so that must have been around 1870 – a man had been arrested for throwing stones from Coldstream Bridge at a boy bathing in the river below. One of the stones had hit the boy, although the injury was not serious. However, ‘pains were taken to ascertain exactly where he stood on the bridge when he threw the stone – as it was a question of bringing him before a Sheriff in Scotland, or before a Justice of the Peace in England’. Logan Mack goes on to ponder the following question:
If one person stands in Scotland and assaults another admittedly at the moment on English soil, in which country was the offence committed? If the intention proves the crime, it was committed in Scotland, but the assault, that is to say the actual spot where the missile impacted on the head of the victim, took place in England.
No doubt arguing on such matters could keep chambers of lawyers in port and brandy for a dozen years. As far as I know, the question has not yet been brought before the House of Lords.
Shortly after leaving the fishermen’s hut the path climbed up above a line of steep bluffs plunging into the Tweed. At the top of the bluffs the map marks Cornhill Castle, but today there’s nothing more than a shapeless earthern mound in amongst the tangled trees.
With ground to cover, we cut a corner of the Tweed over Brownridge Bank to Oxendean Burn. The path followed the edge of a field of turnips. These days farmers are paid a subsidy if they leave a two-metre strip down the side of their fields fallow, to provide corridors for wildlife. Although the strip was untended, the hedge at its side had recently been given a severe haircut by a mechanised strimmer. It must have been a shock for any birds in residence. Bob told me this was classic estate management philosophy: ‘What shall we do at this time of year? We’ll do a tidy-up.’ He was brought up in Lancashire, near the Forest of Bowland. Much of the land roundabout there belongs to the Duchy of Lancashire. He remembers the Duchy’s estate manager expatiating on the virtues of the winter tidy-up. ‘He’d never let a farm to anybody who didn’t tidy up,’ Bob said. ‘He’d go round and tell the farmers they had to maintain all the hedges and the paths and the byways. An orderly looking farm is a well-managed farm. That was his mentality.’
I said I supposed to maintain a hedge as a hedge you do have to keep it trimmed. An abandoned hedge turns into something else, a line of twisted trees, picturesque but not very functional. But perhaps the yearly short back and sides wasn’t strictly necessary.
A little further on we crossed a cutting on the dismantled railway that once linked Tweedmouth to Kelso. The cutting was full of rubbish and there was a sickly sweet smell of decay. Some animal had died and been left to rot. So much for the winter tidy-up.
We followed the stagnant ditch of the Oxendean Burn along its deep cleugh back down to the Tweed. All around were autumn berries – hips, haws, rowans. Bob told me that rowan berries only germinate if they’ve passed through the bowel of a bird. He is a font of knowledge.
Once again we were above the Tweed, on the high bluffs of Callerheugh Bank. Bob explained the geomorphology hereabouts was the result of ‘postglacial rebound’. Since the melting of the ice-caps at the end of the last Ice Age, he told me, the land in northern Britain, relieved of the burden of the ice, has been gradually rising. As a consequence, rivers like the Tweed have cut back into the land and made deep troughs like the one we now stood above.
What Bob could not explain, however, was the presence, on a narrow shelf by the river one hundred feet below, of an armchair. An elegant, cream-coloured armchair. Perhaps it had been washed down in a flood. Or perhaps some lazy fisherman had dropped it there from the top of the bluff so he could take his ease while casting his fly.
The path gradually made its way down to the river past some small outcrops. The rock here was softer and flakier than the usual Northumbrian sandstone. You’d get a bit of sand under your thumbnail if you gouged it.
So we found ourselves on Callerheugh itself. A heugh is a riverside meadow, while caller means fresh, cold, chilly – in the past the fishwives of Newhaven would cry ‘Caller herrin! Wha’ll buy caller herrin?’ It certainly was caller on this November day, with a lazy wind blowing. A lazy wind, my father used to explain, can’t be bothered to go round you. It cuts straight through you instead.
In the middle of the river – or, presumably, just on the English side of the median line – a ghillie held his boat steady in the current while his client cast a line into Scotland. A white dog sat patiently in the bows. It looked cold. They all looked cold. The boat was a Tweed coble, with its signature flat bottom, sharp prow and broad, straight stern. The fisherman sat hunched on a round swivel stool.
There was a plaintive roar as the ghillie spotted us walking past him on the southern bank. ‘Ye cannae come along here,’ he shouted. ‘Ye got tae go roond the top.’ Well, true enough, we were in England and the path wasn’t marked as a right of way. Although the ghillie was clearly Scottish, and had lost any right to bawl out walkers on the northern bank, he was black affrontit that anybody should trespass on his master’s land on the English side. Quite what harm he th
ought we might be doing was not clear, but our mere presence as unauthorised human beings was patently offensive.
It was as well we turned back, because the ‘private’ path would have taken us to a dead end at the tip of the peninsula called Great Haugh – a peninsula that must sometimes, when the Tweed’s in spate, become an island. When that happens, the dirty ditch that Bob described as an incipient oxbow lake becomes a fully flowing channel of the river. For now it was dry and jammed full of driftwood. Who knows how far this wood had travelled – from Kelso maybe, or Melrose, or Peebles, or Dawyck or Drumelzier – where, the legend says, the wizard Merlin died, having been chased over the bluffs by who knows what enemies. He fell, they say, among the salmon nets below, which caught him by his feet. Hanging upside down in the water, he drowned.
Just downriver from Great Haugh there are a couple of unnamed islands. The narrow channel between them and the English bank is called the Slap. The name evokes the sound of the river rushing through these narrows, or perhaps the slap a leaping salmon makes when it flops back in the water.
Following the Slap, we came to the roofless Gothic ruins of St Cuthbert’s Chapel, standing alone in a field near the mouth of the River Till. Saplings sprout thickly up its nave, reaching up to the light where the roof once was. According to legend it was here that the stone coffin carrying the remains of St Cuthbert came ashore, having floated down the Tweed from Melrose Abbey. Scott refers to the legend in Marmion:
Not there his relics might repose;
For, wondrous tale to tell!
A ponderous bark by river tides;
Yet light as gossamer it glides,
Downward to Tillmouth cell.
The saint’s body was taken on to Durham, but the stone coffin stayed here, close to the Chapel. Centuries later a local farmer put the coffin to use as a cattle trough. Deeply offended, the saint came in the night and smashed it to pieces.*
The seaworthiness of the saint’s stone coffin, before it was broken up, was put to the test by later antiquaries. According to William Hutchinson’s History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham (Vol. III, 1794), ‘By some hydrostatical experiments whilst it was intire, we are informed it was proved that it might float with the remains of the saint.’†
The mouth of the River Till barred further progress along the south bank of the Tweed, but a few hundred yards up the Till there’s an old railway viaduct you can walk across. The wind was bitter up there, but the views down the Till were worth it, with St Cuthbert’s Chapel on one bank and the yellows and bronzes of lime and beech on the other.
Compared to the Tweed, the Till is a sluggish river. It rises on the flanks of the Cheviot, and then takes a leisurely course eastward, then northward and finally northwestward before joining the Tweed. The Till has a sinister reputation, as attested by the following rhyme from the seventeenth century:
Says Tweed to Till –
‘Wha gars ye run sae still?’
Says Till to Tweed –
‘Though ye run wi’ speed,
And I rin slaw,
For ae man that ye droon
I droon twa.’‡
Beyond Tillmouth it’s a pleasant enough tramp along the bank of the Tweed past crumbling sandstone outcrops. There are signs warning of rockfalls and collapsing riverbanks. Bob suggested that some of this eroding English land might end up deposited on the Scottish side. In which case, I wondered, would it become Scottish territory, or form an exclave of England?
Further downriver we came to the scrub-covered flats of Dreeper and Kippie Islands. These actually form a single island, but the former is entirely in England and the latter entirely in Scotland. On the west side of Dreeper the Border follows the conventional median line down the main channel of the Tweed, but then it makes a sharp right turn across the island and then follows the narrow minor channel on the east side of Kippie. Once past Kippie, the Border resumes its customary course in the middle of the main stream. Quite why this little diversion came about is unclear. There is a story that the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic near Derry/Londonderry was decided by floating a barrel down the River Foyle; whatever course the barrel took, it is said, determined the Border line. Maybe something similar happened in this section of the Tweed.
As the river opened out again, dozens of goosanders flew fast and low upriver, their white wing bars flashing. Goosanders are saw-toothed, fish-eating ducks, more elongated and elegant than, say, a mallard. They reminded me of attack jets flying low and mean beneath the enemy’s radar.
There were others after the river’s fish. As we left the Tillmouth Beat and entered that of West Newbiggin, we met a couple of anglers, one from Haydon Bridge, the other from Hexham. They were just setting up their rods for the day. Normally, they said, they fished the Tyne.
‘Nice place to be, intit?’ said one. He looked out over the river. ‘There’s a sea trout across there.’
‘Best kept secret, the Border counties,’ said the other.
‘We’ve lived here all oor lives,’ said the first Geordie. ‘I wouldn’t move. It’s probably work that’s the biggest problem. My car up there, it never heads south. North or west. Never south, never south. It’s got 125,000 miles on it, and not one of those miles will have been further south than Durham. Always north. Every year. Borders, way up north of Inverness. Ah, beautiful.’
‘When we’re independent,’ said Bob, ‘you’ll be lobbying to come and join us.’
‘Why not? We live in northern England anyway, Northumbria. Depends which way you look at it. The Border used to be the Roman Wall.’
‘Some people think that independence would be good for northern England,’ said Bob.
‘I love the Scots and all the rest of it, but I think they’d be foolhardy to do it.’ There’s a pause. ‘If I was Scottish, I might have a different opinion.’
‘I don’t get the vote,’ I said, ‘so I don’t have that difficult decision.’
‘I’ve not made my mind up,’ said Bob.
‘Where do you draw the line in this independence thing?’ asked the first Geordie. ‘I cannot see that happening. Crazy. As long as you can walk from one place to another.’
The conversation went back to the fish. ‘If that water temperature is warmer than the air temperature, they’ll not come,’ he said. ‘That’s fisherman’s talk. Probably true.’ He chuckled.
We said our farewells and strode out for Norham. It was getting on for dusk when we got there, so we had no time to linger if we were to make Horncliffe before dark. Fortunately I’d visited the place in August, when I’d been up with Joyce for the Flodden commemorations. Walking round its mighty Border fortress, now an impressive ruin, I’d overheard a little girl ask her mother, ‘What were they fighting about?’
‘Oh, all sorts of things,’ her mother said.
‘Was it the reds and the whites?’ the little girl asked.
‘Hm,’ the mother said. ‘That and other things.’
After the castle, we’d walked back into the village to buy bacon rolls for lunch. I’d seen a sign advertising them outside the butcher, alongside the sign
R.G. Forman & Son
Established 1840
Mr Forman told us the firm had been founded by his great-great grandfather, Robert George Forman. The present Mr Forman is a man of many parts. It turned out he was the custodian of Norham Castle, and had a sideline selling fishing flies and other tackle.
He also stocked some fine-looking wines and chutneys. I couldn’t resist, filled my basket. It turned out Mr Forman sourced all his meat locally. The beef came from a herd that lived just behind his house, about a hundred and fifty yards away from his shop. And the lamb came from Ladykirk, just across the river in Scotland. The church in Ladykirk, he told me, is famous for the fact that it was originally built entirely in stone – even the pews were stone – so the building could never be burnt to the ground, a constant danger in these war-ravaged parts.
‘There’s a Sco
ttish tenner, and an English one,’ I said when it came time to pay.
‘We take anything here,’ Mr Forman said, laughing. His accent was more Scottish than English, but every now and again there was a suggestion of Geordie.
‘Are you from this side?’ I asked.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Berwick.’
I asked him whether he supported Berwick Rangers, who, strangely enough (or not), play in the Scottish League. He didn’t, though he knew many who did. He supported Leeds United. I asked him why such a distant team? It turned out his father came from Leeds; it was his mother who was a Berwicker. But his father didn’t support Leeds, he supported Newcastle. I was beginning to find these loyalties, or unloyalties – to place, to parent, to patrimony – confusing.
‘Do you describe yourself as a Northumbrian, a Geordie or a Borderer?’ I asked.
‘Hmm.’ He paused for thought.
‘Or none of the above?’ I asked.
‘A Berwicker,’ he said.
‘The people in Berwick, what are they going to feel when . . .’ I didn’t have to spell it out.
‘I don’t know, because a lot of people class themselves as Scottish and a lot class themselves as English. Half and half. It’s a divide.’
‘Is there a tension?’
‘No, not really.’
‘But there’s an awareness?’
‘Exactly.’
It turned out that this Borderer (in the end he was prepared to say he was a Borderer, not just a Berwicker) didn’t think of himself as English, or at least he felt ‘more Scottish than English’, as he’d been born in Edinburgh. But he’d only lived on the north side of the Border for half a day, in the Simpson Maternity Pavilion of Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary (incidentally my own place of birth). He’d lived in England since, or at least what is officially designated England. But he had business interests north of the Border, including a shop in Eyemouth. He thought that if Scotland did go for independence there would be an exodus of wealthy Berwickshire farmers heading south over the Border. ‘There’s already quite a few looking to move,’ he told me, and Norham, he believed, offered everything they might need: builders, joiners, bakers, butchers, two pubs, a travelling post office – even a gunmaker.