by Ian Crofton
Various other netting techniques developed. These were so effective and so widely deployed that few salmon could make it further upriver, prompting Parliament to pass a law in 1830 banning bag nets, bob nets, T-nets and other such ingenious devices.
Beyond the boat house there was a curious wooden structure, a bit like a sentry box on stilts. This was a fording tower. When the lookout stationed here spotted the telltale V-shaped wake of the salmon as they swam up the Tweed, he would raise the alarm. The crew would quickly row their coble out into the river upstream of the fish to lay a shot. It must have been a bit like war: long periods of tense, tedious waiting, interrupted by bouts of frenzied action.
All that’s in the past now. The anglers bought out the netters many years ago. The salmon still swim up the Tweed, but in nothing like the numbers that they once did.
Up the bank from us, among the trees, a roe deer ran parallel to the river, rustling through the fallen leaves.
The riverside through the grounds of Paxton House is manicured and well curated, as befits a key component of the Border heritage industry. Beyond the estate boundary the path peters out and things become a bit more feral. I heard a thwack thwack thwack in the woods. It sounded like the Mad Axeman was at work. It turned out to be a couple of wee boys whacking a log with a stick.
‘Hiya,’ I said.
‘Hellaw,’ they said.
‘I thought you were giving something a right beating there,’ I said. ‘Hahahaha.’
They sensibly declined to continue the conversation. I plunged down a steep slope, crashing and crunching through the brashings, before the boys could get their bigger brothers on the mobile.
Back on the riverside stood an abandoned fisherman’s hut. It was a far cry from the smart cottage-like huts we’d seen further upriver, with BMWs, Audis and four-by-fours parked up outside. Some of them had even had satellite TV. This one wasn’t stone-built or even wood-built. It had corrugated iron walls and a panelled door. Someone had kicked the panels in. Inside there were more battered wooden panels, graffiti scratched everywhere, and a load of empty beer cans. It must have been a great place for the wee boys to make a den, and for their bigger brothers and their girlfriends to grow up in. It would have done us for the night had we had the need. But it wasn’t even lunchtime.
A little further on the Border leaves the midline of the Tweed and makes a right-angled turn to the north. If nothing else, this is an aesthetic aberration, as the Border from here follows a succession of tracks, minor roads and higgledy-piggledy field boundaries, skirting the northern bounds of the burgh of Berwick-upon-Tweed. It would be so much more dignified, Bob and I agreed, and easier on our feet, if the Border continued down the middle of the river to the sea.
This is exactly what the Border did do at various points in its history. In the Middle Ages the town of Berwick changed hands thirteen times, finally ending up in England in 1482, where it has languished ever since. However, it has continued to have a somewhat ambivalent status. It was declared a free burgh by a treaty between Edward VI and Mary, Queen of Scots, and remained as such until 1885, when it was formally incorporated into Northumberland. Prior to this ‘Berwick-upon-Tweed’ was added onto various official documents alongside ‘Great Britain and Ireland’. According to an apocryphal but frequently pedalled story, Berwick is still at war with Russia: at the onset of the Crimean War in 1853, so it’s said, Berwick was included in the declaration of hostilities, but failed to put its mark against the peace treaty of 1856.
The town’s impressive artillery-proof walls and fortifications – reminiscent of the massive First World War French fortresses at Verdun – were built in the reign of Elizabeth I, after the last formal wars between the two kingdoms were over. Presumably no one could be sure of that at the time, though the Reformation was bringing both countries closer together, in common cause against Catholic Europe. It was certainly a time of political uncertainty, not to mention – as we have seen on more than one occasion – endemic if informal violence along the Border. As it turned out, the mighty bastions Elizabeth built at Berwick never saw action, although their gun emplacements were still in use until shortly before the First World War, successfully deterring foreign invasion.
Berwick’s fortunes have been mixed. Despite the many battles over its possession, in the Middle Ages the town was such a prosperous trading port that it was known as the Second Alexandria. By 1603, when James VI and I came this way on his route to London to be crowned as monarch of his second kingdom, he called it ‘the little door to the wide House of England’. In the early eighteenth century its fortunes had declined, Daniel Defoe describing it as ‘old, decayed, and neither populous nor rich’.
Today Berwick is bustling enough, with its light industries, its retail park and its high street full of chains – W.H. Smith, Clarks, Boots, Cafe Nero, Superdrug, Burton, Holland and Barratt, Edinburgh Woollen Mill, O2, Phones for You, Clinton’s Cards. When I’d wandered round the battlements in August, I’d spotted a single Union Jack flapping disconsolately in the back garden of a terrace overlooking the mouth of the Tweed. A poll conducted by a local paper in 2008 found that seventy-nine per cent of Berwickers would prefer to be governed from Edinburgh than from London. After all, Edinburgh is only forty minutes away by train. Berwickers appear to be looked at as ‘other’ by people on either side of the Border: a study carried out in 2000 found that inhabitants of Alnwick, thirty miles to the south, considered the Berwick accent to be Scottish, while those of Eyemouth, nine miles north of Berwick, thought the accent was Geordie.
Constrained as we were to follow the Border line on this, the last day of my Border walk, we gave Berwick a wide berth. Instead, we pondered the mystery of the track that emerges out of the River Tweed, bringing the Border onto the north bank from the middle of the river. Might there once have been a ford here? Or was it just a place to launch boats?
Just up the Border track from the river there was, bizarrely, a little roundabout. I supposed that if you changed your mind about crossing the Border, you could turn round here. A man at the wheel of a white van was parked up, eating his lunch. Perhaps he was thinking about which side he was on.
We weren’t too clear ourselves as we walked up the lane, known as the Bound Road. You couldn’t tell from the map whether the Border ran up one or other side of the carriageway, or along the strip of grass in the middle. The latter appears to be the case, as Logan Mack records that the road’s upkeep ‘forms a joint charge on the rates of the Counties of Berwick and Northumberland’. There were beech trees on one side, hawthorns on the other. Then there was a field full of what would be neeps or turnips in Scotland, and swedes in England. I jumped from side to side of the strip of grass in the middle of the Bound Road. ‘Neeps!’ I shouted, then jumped to the other side. ‘Swedes!’ I shouted. Jump. ‘Neeps!’ Jump. ‘Swedes!’ Jump. ‘Neeps!’ Jump. ‘Swedes!’ Jump. Bob looked the other way. I quietened down after a while.
Crossing the B6461 at Paxton Toll House, we continued up the track to the Whiteadder Water, one of the main tributaries of the Tweed. Whiteadder is pronounced ‘whittidder’ (and spelt Whittiter in old documents). The adder element in the name is from a Brythonic or pre-Celtic word possibly meaning ‘flowing one’; the white element serves to distinguish this river from its tributary, the Blackadder (or Blackitter?). Neither are either white or black – just as the Green Needle and the Black Needle had both belied their names.
Along the course of the Whiteadder the toponymy is both poetical and mysterious. We were to pass close to Witches Cleuch, a place you’d be advised not to slither into. Further upriver you’ll find Swallow Heugh, Pear Bank, Bite-about Wood, Willie’s Hole, Paradise and, strangest of all, a water meadow called Anger My Heart. Perhaps there is a story linking these places, a story of passion and heartbreak. There’s also, where the Blackadder joins the Whiteadder, a sewage works.
The leaves of the willows on the far side of the river flickered silver in the breeze. Beyond, there
was a wood filled with deep-red haws. It was clear that we wouldn’t be able to wade across to follow the Border. The Flowing One was in full flow. The water would have been up to our waists, possibly over our heads. A couple of hundred yards downriver I’d seen marked on the map a double line across the Whiteadder, ambiguously marked both ‘Weir’ and ‘FB’. When we got there, the double lines turned out to represent the weir, not the footbridge, which was little more than a plank across a mill stream on the far side. We contemplated trying to balance across the top of the weir, but we didn’t have our walking poles with us to keep us steady, the current was strong, and wet boots – let alone wet clothes – for the last few miles of the walk did not appeal. Not in November. Our only consolation was the sight of a white egret (or ‘whittigrit’?), presumably lured this far north by climate change.
So we continued another half mile downriver to cross Whiteadder Bridge, a fine modern structure supported on inverted wedges of concrete.
On the far side was a pub. The sign said:
CORPORATION’S ARMS
ERECTED 1881
JOHN BERTRAM ORDE ESQ
MAYOR
The sad thing was, although it was lunchtime, the pub was closed. Largely because it was no longer a pub. We were doomed to stay dry. The mayors of Berwick seem to have had considerable commercial interests hereabouts, as the fine old mill house a little further on bore a sign on its gable end stating:
REBUILT 1873
JAMES PURVES ESQ
MA OR
On the front façade, another inscription simply said:
HENRY HODGSON ESQ MAYOR 1767
We rejoined the Border west of Low Cocklaw and followed a minor road some way northward, crossing the A6105. Just short of the little settlement called Clappers, the Border sets off on another course, following a field edge and Bailies’ Burn towards the northeast. The latter is little more than a sheuch or ditch. To the south the very summit of the Cheviot was shrouded by a big lenticular, but to the west of it we could make out Auchope Cairn and the Schil, over which I’d walked in glorious July sunshine.
We were on the English side of the Border, so in the absence of a marked right of way we had no right to walk there. Our incipient flicker of paranoia was kindled further when we realised there was a pheasant shoot taking place in the field just across the Border from where we walked. We could hear the beaters beating through the wood on the far side of the field, clattering and clanging. Waiting on this side of the wood for things to fly out was a scattering of shooters. The first thing to fly out was a duck. No one took a shot.
‘They’re not going to turn around and shoot this way?’ I asked Bob rather nervously.
‘No,’ said Bob, donning his metaphorical Barber jacket and flat cap. ‘They’re not meant to turn more than ninety degrees.’
‘That’s a relief,’ I said. ‘Not much coming out of the wood.’
‘Not yet,’ said Bob.
‘There’s a rabbit,’ I squeaked. ‘And there’s a pheasant.’ There were a couple of cracks from a shotgun, but the bird flew on. Another pheasant burst from cover. No one seemed to notice it.
Then the shoot started to walk our way. I wasn’t keen to argue the finer points of access and trespass on either side of the Border. Nor was I anxious to become an inadvertent target. So we dived into a thick conifer plantation and then leapt over a wall into a field. The field turned out to be full of free-range pigs.
I quite like pigs, but when you see them gathering together in pink grunty clusters and trotting towards you with a purposeful look in their beady eyes, it’s good to have a Plan B. I offered a commentary to my Dictaphone: A pig if it’s cross with you will pin you against a wall and knock you down, trample on you, and then it’ll bite yer ba’s off and work its way gradually through the rest. Even the contents of your bowels are not safe from indignity.
Plan B involved getting ourselves to the corner of the field as quickly as possible, at least before the pigs did, and leaping over another wall. Into another field. Which was also full of pigs, who may or may not have been pleased to see us. Happily, there was an electric fence at shin height between the pigs and the wall, leaving us a yard-wide strip to try to feel safe in. The last thing we wanted to become was a pig’s breakfast. Or afternoon tea.
This part of the Border has long had a porcine flavour. Logan Mack mentions, in perhaps his only attempt at levity, that in his day there was a pigsty near here that straddled both countries. It was, Logan Mack, says, ‘so arranged that its occupant sleeps in England and has his meals in the adjacent country’.
Apparently the Berwickshire County Authorities considered the sty in Scotland, as about ten years ago its owner bought a pig at Marshall Meadows Farm half a mile away on the English side, and brought it home, and was forthwith prosecuted for having introduced it to Scotland without a licence, and accordingly fined £5 for so doing.
I dare say this tale had them all cracking up around the Senior Common Room.
As we walked over the low hills, we saw that we were in the midst of field after field of free-range pigs. There must have been thousands of them, glowing pink and plump in the late afternoon light. In every field we entered a flurry of pigs rushed up to say hello, only prevented from making our closer acquaintance by the unconvincingly low electric fence. Pigs can’t jump, I told myself. Can they?
They were definitely interested in us. We hoped they hoped we’d brought them treats. And not that we were the treats. They frisked about clumsily, grunting, belching, keeping their cards close to their chests. There is something reptilian in the unreadability of a pig’s eye.
I thought of the Gadarene swine, into whose bodies Jesus confined all the devils of hell till they rushed off a cliff and drowned in the Sea of Galilee. Or Ulysses’ shipmates changed into boars by the sorceress Circe on some island in the Mediterranean. Just over the horizon we could see our own sea, the North Sea, shifting, shapeless, uncertain. Nothing can be counted on when the light begins to fade – dogs might become wolves, pigs become devils, or sailors, or eaters of men. There is mutability in the light at dusk; in water at any time.
We were on the broad crest of an undulating ridge. To the north lay Witches Knowe, to the south Halidon Hill. Pigs and pig huts stretched as far as the eye could see. In the midst of all the piggery there was a big brash heritage sign. It had a Look and Learn-style colour painting of an armoured knight carrying a sword and shield with a heart and three stars on it. Above him flew a pennant bearing the words ‘Scottish Position’. This was the starting point, it transpired, for the doomed Scottish advance at the Battle of Halidon Hill, fought here on 19th July 1333, two centuries before Flodden. As at the Battle of Otterburn, the commander of the Scottish army was a Douglas – Sir Archibald Douglas, Guardian of Scotland. And, as at Otterburn, the Douglas commander was killed. But on this occasion a dead man did not win a fight.
The commander on the English side was none other than Edward III. In the Michael Gove / Look and Learn school of English historiography, Edward III is the epitome of English chivalry, the victor of Crécy, the founder of the Order of the Garter, the reviver of the Arthurian ideal of the perfect gentle knight. Even a twenty-first-century English military historian, writing about Halidon Hill, is taken in by the myths of martial glory surrounding Edward: ‘At a stroke he avenged Bannockburn,’ writes Richard Brooks in Battlefields of Britain and Ireland (2005), ‘and laid the tactical foundations for immortal successes in France.’
‘Infamous depredations in France’ might be more like it. It was Edward III above anyone else who was responsible for the Hundred Years War. This was a century of unmitigated calamity for France, initiated by a French-speaking English king who had no better claim to the French throne than the incumbent, Philip VI. Edward and his young followers had been brought up on the romances of chivalry. But if war in France was the path to glory, it was also the means to acquire booty, land and wealth. For the people of France, the war brought famine, disease and
devastation. By the end of it, the population had been reduced by a half. And it wasn’t just the Black Death that was to blame.
Before turning his unwanted attention on France, Edward looked northward. After the death of Robert the Bruce, the English king was determined to have a say in who ruled Scotland. He backed Edward Balliol, the son of John Balliol, Edward I’s puppet. For the English the 1328 Treaty of Northampton, recognising Scottish independence, had been ‘the Shameful Peace’. Edward wanted none of it, and led his army north in support of Balliol, whose forces were besieging Berwick. Balliol himself had plenty of supporters in Scotland – the so-called ‘Disinherited’, who had lost their lands after throwing in their lot with Bruce’s defeated rivals.
Archibald Douglas, who was acting as Guardian of Scotland on behalf of Bruce’s nine-year-old son, David II, led an army southeast from Duns to relieve Berwick. There is only a narrow approach to Berwick from the north between the Whiteadder and the sea, and to block it Edward took a commanding position on Halidon Hill, a mile west of the present-day A1 and the farm called Conundrum. The Scottish army, coming from the north, took their position on Witches Knowe.
Most of the Scottish knights dismounted to join the infantry. The English knights did likewise. The Scots began their advance late in the afternoon, descending their own slope into marshy ground, and then climbing slowly towards the English. They were met with showers of arrows ‘as thick as motes in the sun’s beam’. There was no shelter, no defence, no escape from English longbowmen, who could not fail to miss the dense formations of Scottish spearmen, known as schiltrons. According to the English Lanercost Chronicle:
. . . the Scots who marched in the front were so wounded in the face and blinded by the multitude of English arrows that they could not help themselves, and soon began to turn their faces away from the blows of the arrows and fall.
When the Scots did make contact with the English lines, they had lost all order and momentum, and fell easy prey to the English men at arms. Panic set in, then flight. The English knights remounted and set off in pursuit, felling all in their path for a distance of five miles. Among the thousands of Scottish dead lay Douglas, five earls and a host of notables. The contemporary English poet Laurence Minot exulted over the victory, and the surrender of Berwick the following day: