Walking the Border

by Ian Crofton

  I’d never been in a gun shop, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I visited Castle Gunmakers. The first thing I noticed was a rack of skis for sale. And fishing flies. But then I noticed the guns – rows and rows of shotguns with fine wooden stocks and ornately chased metalwork. I talked to the owners, Sam Wilcox, a gunsmith, and his father Barry, nicknamed ‘Gramps’, a gunmaker. Gramps, the grandson of a Hampshire gamekeeper, has been working in the gun trade for getting on for sixty years. He’d actually retired, but then when his son decided to set up on his own he couldn’t resist joining him.

  Sam and Gramps showed me a pair of antique shotguns in for repair. They were valued at £18,000. Gramps could tell they’d been re-stocked, and, from the colour and grain, that the walnut was Turkish. Only walnut will do for a shotgun, he told me. It’s a very hard wood, but not brittle. You need wood from the root of a walnut tree for a shotgun stock. There’s not enough volume in the trunk. With French walnut almost exhausted, they source theirs from Kurdistan. ‘I’ve been to the place in Turkey it comes from,’ Gramps told me, ‘and, believe you me, you need an armed guard.’ It was not just the political instability in the region. Each ‘blank’ – the piece of wood from which a single shotgun stock is made – is worth a lot of money. ‘You’ve got to take cash,’ he said.

  They’d had someone turn up a few weeks before with a carful of walnut blanks from Azerbaijan, obviously hoping to make a killing. ‘Beautiful, beautiful blanks. Cut correctly, I would have paid him well in excess of a thousand pound a blank. But it hadn’t been cut right. It needs to be quarter sawn. He’d cut it all wrong, he’d planked it. I said, You’ve just got a carful of rubbish. Logs for the fire. He said, Noooo, I don’t believe you. I said, I’m afraid so.’

  Castle Gunmakers is well situated for all those wealthy Berwickshire farmers and Border landowners. It seems that there has long been more wealth on the north side of the Tweed. This imbalance was remarked upon three centuries ago by the Scottish-born novelist Tobias Smollett, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771):

  Northumberland is a fine county, extending to the Tweed, which is a pleasant pastoral stream; but you will be surprised when I tell you that the English side of that river is neither so well cultivated nor so populous as the other. The farms are thinly scattered, the lands uninclosed, and scarce a gentleman’s seat is to be seen in some miles from the Tweed; whereas the Scots are advanced in crowds to the very brink of the river, so that you may reckon above thirty good houses, in the compass of a few miles, belonging to proprietors whose ancestors had fortified castles in the same situations, a circumstance that shews what dangerous neighbours the Scots must have formerly been to the northern counties of England.

  It is still the case that there are many more fine old mansions on the Scottish bank, from Lennel House near Coldstream, where Burns was entertained, to Ladykirk House across the river from Norham, and Paxton House near Berwick, to name but a few. So plenty of people with enough money to buy a hand-tailored shotgun.

  Beyond Norham, with the light fast fading, we dodged a great curve of the Tweed by cutting a corner across Hangman’s Land and past the Iron Age hillfort on Green Hill. It was the time of day that the French call entre chien et loup (‘between dog and wolf’), a time when the light plays tricks and nothing is certain. Ahead of us there appeared to be a field full of sheep, glimmering white. Then we heard them. They weren’t bleating, they were honking. Louder and louder. They looked like geese, but they were white so could not be pink-foot or greylag. Surely no flock of white domestic geese would be so vast? Then they burst into the air around us, first one group, then another, then another, great heavy wingbeats bruising the air.

  They were swans, whooper swans, scores of them, hundreds even, uttering deep honks of indignation that we’d disturbed their supper in a field of beets. Only that day, perhaps, they’d made the long flight across the North Sea from Scandinavia, en route from Arctic Russia. We could just make them out as they flew across the Tweed and settled in another field opposite the little village of Horncliffe, no doubt hoping for some uninterrupted R&R.

  When we arrived at Horncliffe it was dark, just past five o’clock. Passing through the square we came to the Fishers Arms. There were no lights in the windows, which was deeply depressing, but there was a bench outside. We sat down, put on warm clothes. In the background, across the river, the swans carried on a constant gossip. I rummaged in my rucksack for some food. The sound and the smell of bread and cheese lured a hungry Labrador.

  Then the Lab’s owner appeared, bid us good evening. We asked when the pub opened. ‘Not till six o’clock, I’m afraid,’ he said. This was tragic news. It must have shown on our faces. ‘You’ve had a great big long walk from Coldstream,’ he said solicitously. ‘I’ve got a can of bitter at home if you’d like it. If you’re desperate?’ We said thank you, but we’re ok. Really.

  It wouldn’t have done to appear desperate. So we hunkered down on our bench in the cold, folded our arms, nodded our heads under our hoods like a pair of medieval monks, and dreamt of beer instead, lulled by the distant deep murmurs of the swans across the river.

  * See chapter seven.

  * It turns out that this part of the legend was probably concocted by a certain Reverend Lambe, one-time vicar of Norham.

  † Why a story pertaining to Tillmouth should be recounted in a book about County Durham is explained by the fact that until 1844 ‘Norhamshire’ was an exclave of County Durham, rather than part of Northumberland.

  ‡ The Tweed’s own reputation for swiftness may be reflected in its name. Toponymists believe ‘Tweed’ comes from a Brythonic or pre-Celtic word, possibly meaning ‘powerful one’. It may be related to a widespread Indo-European word that in Sanskrit appears as tavás, ‘to surge’.

  THIRTEEN

  ACROSS THE HILL OF PIGS

  Horncliffe to the Sea

  As we walked over the low hills, we saw that we were in the midst of field after field of free-range pigs.

  Day Ten: Saturday, 16th November 2013 We were back in Horncliffe the next morning. The path took us down from the village square past manicured gardens to the bank of the Tweed. There was a sign so old and peeling it was not possible to make out what it was prohibiting, although the last word was ‘FISHING’.

  A little further on we met a man from Alnwick in his waders, seeing to his rod. His friend was already out in mid-river.

  ‘Wur half-hearted,’ he told us. ‘It’s late in the season but wur going to give it an hour, see what happens. Maybe a couple of hours.’

  We told him about the whoopers we’d seen the previous evening. He said there were a lot of feral greylags that’d started to breed in these parts. They didn’t bother to migrate any longer – unlike the skeins of wild geese I’d seen flying over my camp at Scotch Knowe at the end of May. And there were kingfishers, he said. One year he’d heard a corncrake for a day or two, before it had flown off up north.

  ‘What are you fishing today?’ asked Bob. ‘Black and orange?’ This was mystery talk to me. The talk was to get even more mysterious, although I loved the incantatory sound of it.

  ‘Aye,’ our friend said. ‘Water’s a nice height. You’re running there at about one four four at the minute. You come here like in June, July, when it’s down near enough to summer level and it’s not a big river here at all. Once you wade out, even with a fly rod you can touch the other side. Ah, it’s not a good stretch this, to be honest with you. This is Waltham and Dritness. Opposite Tweed Hill. Just like a private syndicate, this is. It’s not a good beat.’

  It turned out that even this far upriver from the sea the Tweed was still tidal. Sometimes this is good for the fishermen, sometimes bad. ‘If you get like a four point five or a five-metre tide, it just goes all flat,’ he said. ‘You can’t fish it, you know. But in the summer, when it’s drought and everywhere else it’s not worth throwing in, here you still get fresh fish coming in, because of the tide.’ He pointed upriver. ‘Th
e pool over there, that’s the Squire Pool. It’s nearly top of the tide cos it’s like slack water goes up past the island, so the fish’ll lie in there. I’ve seen it. You know this year it was alive in there for three months, just waiting to go. But here, November, it’s too late really. The fish’re pushing through. But like June, July, August, September, when they’re hanging around, when it’s low, the fact of it being tidal is actually good, y’know. I’ve come after work when there’s been a tide and it’s dropping off and then you get new fish. It’s like a new day. It can be really good.’

  As if to prove his point, he invited us into the little fisherman’s hut behind where we stood. The inside was cosy, with sofas and a pot-bellied stove and rows of photographs on the walls of pleased-looking fishermen holding their catches. He himself had landed a thirty-five-pounder in the summer. So the fishing on the Waltham and Dritness Beat maybe wasn’t so bad.

  I think our friend would have made us a nice cup of tea if we hadn’t been in a hurry. I could sense he was in no rush to plunge into the chilly waters of the Tweed. But we had miles to go before we slept, so stepped on . . .

  Our intention to make fast progress was upended by a small Border terrier called Bella. She was shortly joined by her human, a smart-looking, smiling woman with smooth rosy cheeks. It turned out she was a lawyer called Tabitha Bell, a name surely out of Beatrix Potter. Tabitha asked us how the path had been from Norham. She’d been along there in the summer and thought in the wet of November it might be a bit tricky. I told her the trees had kept it quite dry, the butterbur had died back, but the loose earth was slippy here and there.

  I wanted to take Tabitha’s photograph, but she’d only let me snap the dog. And Bella would only consent to be snapped if Bob held her collar. Even then she looked none too pleased. ‘She’s been down a mole hole,’ said Tabitha, as if this explained something.

  ‘So you’re from the other side of the river?’ I asked. ‘Judging from your accent.’ She had what those who care about such things would call an ‘educated Scottish accent’; in other words, she had probably attended one of Edinburgh’s posher schools.

  ‘No, I’m from Horncliffe,’ Tabitha replied, somewhat to my surprise. ‘I used to live on the other side of the river, but I’m from Horncliffe.’

  ‘So would you say you’re Scottish or . . .?’

  ‘Oh, tricky subject,’ she said somewhat guardedly. ‘Are you asking in terms of the independence debate?’

  ‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘I’m just interested in people’s sense of their own identity. Border people don’t seem to identify themselves as either Scottish or English. Do you see yourself as a Borderer?’

  ‘Yes. I think there’s a specific trait. People on either side, whether you’re an English person or a Scottish person, I think there’s a particular trait. I certainly don’t regard myself as English, not out of any antipathy about being English, because I think there’s northern English and southern English. I do associate myself with north of the Border and all the issues that that brings. I don’t think anyone in London gives a toss what happens north of the Border.’

  But she was worried that the Border might become a deeper divide. ‘It doesn’t mean good things to us. It’s the artificiality of it. When you think about the implications it’s going to have for all of us who live here. Even basic things. We’ve got the choice of going to Borders General Hospital, which is in Scotland, if we get sick, or we go south, and they’re equidistant. For everything we’re equidistant here. So even just those basic things are going to be a real issue for us.’

  ‘And does your dog agree?’ I asked.

  Tabitha laughed. ‘My dog is a terrier from the Durham hunt,’ she said proudly. ‘My dog’s got a Geordie flat cap.’

  Tabitha had strong views about the respective merits of English and Scottish law. ‘Scottish law is better,’ she said unequivocally. Then she told us of an interesting anomaly. The Tweed being tidal at this point, seals quite often come this far inland. The anglers don’t like it. ‘On this side you can shoot the seals,’ she said, ‘but on the other side you can’t.’ She obviously had sympathy with the seals, and the Scots who didn’t begrudge them the odd fish. ‘They just come up on the tide,’ she said. She told us that in the Middle Ages hundreds of thousands of salmon were landed every season on the Tweed. The anglers long ago bought off the net-fishermen, but some still resent the seals taking a few.

  Not much further on we came to the Union Bridge, the last bridge over the Border. Up to this point, all of our walk from Coldstream had been on the English side of the Tweed. Now we were to cross back into Scotland. When it was built in 1820, the Union Bridge was the longest iron suspension bridge in the world. This elegant structure was not the work of an engineer but of a naval man, Captain Samuel Brown RN, and only took a year to build, at the modest cost of £5,000.

  When the day of its opening arrived, thousands of people gathered to witness the ceremony. First of all Captain Brown rode across in his tandem, followed by twelve double-horse carts loaded with stones. The strength and safety of the structure thus having been demonstrated, it was opened to the public, who queued up enthusiastically to pay their tolls.

  The name of the bridge is clearly a political statement, reinforced by a plaque bearing the motto Vis Unita Fortior, which means something like ‘Stronger Strength in Unity’. Ironically, a sign warns that the Union Bridge is a ‘WEAK BRIDGE’, with a weight limit of two tons and capable of bearing only one vehicle at a time. A second sign says, ‘No Waiting on Bridge’. A third sign warns:

  DANGER

  Strong current

  do not jump

  off bridge

  The Union Bridge: a bridge that you’re not allowed to linger on or jump off; a bridge that can only bear the lightest of burdens.

  Just over the Union Bridge into Scotland there’s a path alongside the Tweed through the grounds of Paxton House, a fine mid-eighteenth-century Adam mansion built for Patrick Home of Billie. Home apparently hoped such an elegant structure would prove irresistible to Mademoiselle Sophie de Brandt, the Prussian heiress he’d fallen in love with on his Grand Tour. He’d met her at the court of Frederick the Great, where she was a lady-in-waiting. For her part, as a token of her affection she gave Home a pair of her gloves (still on display in the house). However, both families opposed the match. Subsequently, Home fell for a certain Jane Graham, whom he’d met in France. He married her, but she turned out to be of unsound mind, and so when Home returned to Scotland, he returned alone.

  Our way did not take us past the house, so we were unable to pay tribute to the East Wing, added in the early nineteenth century by another Robert Reid. This Robert Reid was rather grander than the site engineer for the bridge at Coldstream, for this Robert Reid was none other than the King’s Architect and Surveyor for Scotland.

  The path along the Tweed here is a delight. Cherries, beeches and larches are succeeded by parallel lines of poplars along the riverside, giving the scene the appearance of something out of Monet. Only the winter bareness of the trees and the cold grey of the river, with its rafts of goosanders, suggests you are somewhere more northerly.

  There are well-preserved memories of the salmon netting that used to be so important here. In the past, so Sir Walter Scott tells us in Old Mortality,

  . . . salmon was caught in such plenty in the considerable rivers of Scotland, that instead of being accounted a delicacy, it was generally applied to feed the servants, who are said sometimes to have stipulated that they should not be required to eat a food so luscious and surfeiting in its quality above five times a week.

  Just back from the river there was a curious structure built into an earthen bank above the path. It was stone-built, with a semicircular roof, a strong iron door and two grills let into the front wall. It looked like an ice house but it turns out it was a fish house. There used to be scores of these along the Tweed. Their cool, damp interiors enabled fishermen to keep their catch for some days befor
e it was loaded onto a boat and taken to market in Berwick. There it would be salted and packed in barrels, and transported as far south as Billingsgate fish market in London.

  Next to the fish house there was a boat house, a two-storey structure set well back from the river – presumably to keep it dry when the river rose. Inside there was a small museum devoted to salmon netting. A series of photographs from the 1920s and 1930s showed how the fishermen rowed their coble out into the river to ‘lay the shot’. This involved unwinding the net from the stern of the boat, the other end being held on the bank. Once the coble and the net reached close to the opposite bank, the coble and the bank crew moved downriver, towing the net with them. When the coble crew saw the net floats shimmer, indicating the presence of salmon, they would quickly row the boat to close the open mouth of the net. Then the bank crew would haul in the net as fast as they could, sometimes with the aid of a powered winch. They needed to keep it moving before the salmon – which prefer to swim near the surface – realised they could escape underneath the shallow net by diving down. Thus the fish ended up trapped between the net and the gravel at the water’s edge.

  An older print shows that in earlier centuries the fishermen’s technique was more basic: one man wading through the water would hold one end of the net, while a second man held the other. When they had encircled some fish, they would stumble for the shore, pulling the U-shaped net behind them.