John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  The reproof was not only just but heartfelt, as my taste for serendipity was pleased to discover while he marched me in pursuit of the last conducted party. He had been a time-serving soldier with the Cameronians, the only regiment on the Scottish Establishment raised by Scotland’s Parliament, by the people and not the Crown. Within a year of their mustering, its Presbyterian zealots from Galloway and the Borders were fighting their first action, driving the Jacobite clans from the burning streets of Dunkeld.

  Time and place knit such small strands of coincidence into my professional life, and did so once in Liddisdale. It is not a valley I enter with a quiet mind. Much of it is bleak, hard and unlovable, a narrow pleat in the western Cheviots. The road is always in shadow, or so it seems to me, and wet from sudden squalls of rain. Its emptiness appears temporary, and the ear listens for the sound of returning hooves. I can feel the daily misery of the medieval monks who served a small abbey below Lamblair Hill, or the railway navvies who laid the line by Saughtree Fell. The black fall of Liddel Water, running rapidly down to the Solway plain, bleeds from the side of Hartshorn Pike where reivers gathered before riding northward into the Middle March or southward into England. No valley in Scotland has so brutal a history, and the competition is strong. Its people were the most headstrong, self-willed and defiant of all Border families, with allegiance to nothing but their own interest. Invading English armies wisely bought their support, or at least their neutrality before advancing further, and if this precaution was overlooked they could be confident that Liddisdale men would not put Scotland’s adversity before their own greed. In 1541 the Armstrongs and the Elliotts, Croziers and Nixons, rode out by Liddelbank to rob and kill the terrified Scots who were running from defeat on Solway Moss. When King Henry’s victorious commander was told of this, and that men from Eskdale and Annandale had joined in the murderous sport, he said it was pleasing

  news for good Englishmen to hear. It also gives Scott’s jingling

  rhyme a mocking ambiguity.

  Stand to your arms then, and march in good order;

  England shall many a day

  Tell of the bloody fray

  When the Blue Bonnets came over the Border.

  Something of Liddisdale’s lingering malevolence was in an overcast sky one afternoon as I drove through it from Hobkirk. To escape this, or perhaps to face its tangible manifestation, I turned northeastward by the road that goes over the brae of Arnton. There the sun at last broke through, first shimmering on the crest of Roan Fell and then flooding in a lemon glow toward the roofless keep of Hermitage. Although a medieval anchorite had a cell nearby, the castle is grotesquely named. It is hostile and sinister, with sloping walls of massive thickness, crow-step gables, high window-slits, and an arched gateway like a screaming mouth. In one form or another it was built to subdue Liddisdale if it could, and its captains were often as base and brutal as the men they were meant to control. A thousand of the King’s men and two hundred horses were once quartered within it or on the marshy ground outside, but at the height of their power the Armstrongs could muster three thousand riders, in quilted jacks of leather and bonnets of steel. It has survived them all, lonely and indifferent. That afternoon white cattle grazed in its shallow moat, but it was still monstrous, its rain-wet stones glistening like scales in the unexpected sunlight.

  James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, once held the castle as Lieutenant of the Marches, and lay there wounded after a vainglorious attempt to take an Elliott reiver on his own. Mary the Queen, from whose brief and somewhat irrelevant intervention in Scottish affairs romance has made too much, rode thirty miles from Jedburgh to succour his wounds and comfort his bruised pride. I thought less of her at that moment than I did of Bothwell. He was a tragic and bloody man, but if remembered for nothing else he should be acknowledged as the only Scotsman of his rank and time who did not take a bribe from the English. He was a prisoner for the last eleven years of his life and long before they were over he was abandoned by those who had hoped to profit from his success or misfortune. My daughter had been in Denmark that summer and had seen his mummified body in the white church at Faarvelje, nine miles from Dragsholm Castle where he died in lonely madness, chained to a wall. As I sat by Hermitage Water in the westering light I thought of this, and her curiosity about him, and I idly devised a television play that might recall his final days. Unlike many of the ideas that walk briskly and briefly through my mind it was ultimately written and played.

  In the quiet solitude of the Border hills it is sometimes difficult to believe their troubled history, until it stirs in sudden images. A buzzard circling over Ettrickdale, turning on its back at last to strike at mobbing crows with its talons. The white head of The Cheviot, grieving against a November sky. A copse of leaning birch trees, winter-bare in a Roxburgh valley, that for a moment become the slanting spears of the Kers of Cessford. The bark of an alarmed dog on Branxton Hill at dusk, and the rallying horn of a diesel above Liddisdale at night. And there are the ballads, their sadness and joy, humour, savagery and love. No other part of Britain is so rich in the voice and verse of the people. John Leyden, James Hogg, and others devilling for Scott’s collection of these songs, rescued much that was slipping from memory, and the vanity which persuaded Hogg and Scott to improve lines they thought imperfect, to include stanzas of their own composition, was no doubt well-intentioned. Scott published them as The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The word was oddly chosen, as if to inspire a picture of harpists in the firelight of a castle hall, in Camelot not Hermitage or Smailholm. It is soft and silken. It is not Scots, it is Middle English and Old French in origin. So too is ballad, of course, but that falls well upon the ear and is appropriate in meaning – a narrative song, a dancing song heard in the peat-smoke of a cottage or the wind of an open heath. It reflects the exacting life Scott willingly endured when gathering the verses, travelling weary miles by hill and moorland tracks, eating rough food and sharing beer from a wooden bowl, sleeping on straw beside his horse, and once in the same room with a corpse.

  The ballads were printed in 1803, in the middle of a global war that was twelve years yet from its final battle. Gentle readers may perhaps have welcomed their bucolic simplicity and small brutalities as a relief from the thought of depersonalised armies in enormous collision, of plague, famine and unending slaughter. A romantic need for them continued after the war was over, when the strange alchemy of new industries was working unsettling magic, and common Scots of the Border and the Lowlands had become a menacing work-host mouthing demands for republican rights. Europeans like Mendelssohn and his friend Klingemann came to Scotland with imaginations fired by the Minstrelsy and Marmion, and not even a brief and dismissive meeting with Sir Walter at the gates of Abbotsford could depress their enthusiasm. Forty years later in America, young Lochinvars of the Union and the Confederacy took Scott’s ballads with them when they rode to war, and may not have read them again after their first battle.

  Printed and published, the ballad is interred in a literary sarcophagus, for it is not thought worthy of preservation until it has all but expired. Its vital existence is when it is still part of an oral culture, the natural voice of an unsophisticated society speaking from generation to generation, each adding to it and broadening its narrative to embrace their own experience. The historic and heroic characters of the epic ballads are stubborn, cross-grained men, steadfast in opposition to unjust authority and ignobly destroyed by it. In death they become immortal, and in folk-lore they are mourned more passionately than the martyred saints. Their retold story, however inexact, heartens the despairing and encourages the hope that there may yet be a sword-stroke solution to all misfortune and oppression. When that glorious simplicity no longer sustains belief, the ballad has become a museum artefact.

  There are, in truth, no national ballads. Their stories are universal, race and place are circumstantial. In a wet ditch in Normandy I once sat with two soldiers, an Irishman and a Cockney, and listened as they
sang to each other, reciprocal ballads they had known since childhood and which they were certain would get them court-martialled if heard by an officer. Music, rhythm and narrative differed as each took his turn to sing, but theme and spirit were constant.

  Many songs of the American West reflect the ballads of Eskdale and Liddisdale. Jesse James, nobly brave and treacherously slain, was “born one day in the county of Clay and came of a solitary race”, and it is not impossible to think of him as Johnie Armstrang in black broadcloth and a white duster. Johnie Armstrang, John Armstrong, Black Jock of Gilnockie, was a sair thorn in the flesh of Scotland’s king but he should be fairly seen in the perspective of his own time, when a political Border had little meaning to a man with kinsmen on both sides. His lawless reiving, and the increasing anger of the English who suffered the worst of it, at last made it necessary for James V to put an end to him. Black Jock’s error – and here truth confirms a recurring cliché in balladry – was to trust the Crown and believe it would treat with him as an equal. When the King came to Teviotdale with ten thousand men, Armstrong rode to meet him with fifty riders only. All were hanged from a copse of trees by Carlinrigg Chapel, below the black wall of Tanlaw Naze. “I am but a fool,” said Armstrong to his royal executioner. “Had I known that you would have taken my life this day, I should have lived on the Borders in spite of King Harry and you both, for I know King Harry would down-weigh my best horse with gold to know that I were condemned to die this day.” The ballad echoes the spirit of that valediction.

  John murder’d was at Carlinrigg,

  And all his gallant companie;

  But Scotland’s heart was never sae wae,

  To see sae mony brave men die.

  Because they saved their country deir

  Frae Englishmen! Nane were sa bauld,

  Whyle Johnie lived on the Border syde

  Nane of them durst cum neir his hauld.

  There is little admiration in the brief contemporary records of his life, but most of them were written by or for his enemies. What Black Jock and his like truly were is perhaps less important than a finer truth, that the folk-verse they inspired ennobled the spirits of ordinary men. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a greater patriot than any Border rider, once spoke in admiration of a friend who said that if he could compose a nation’s ballads he would not care who wrote its history. Two and a half centuries later, when asked why his Western films were not more faithful to fact, John Ford said that wherever legend is in conflict with history we should print the legend. My heart responds to this, but my mind still lags behind conviction.

  More worthy men than the old reivers, but inheriting their sturdy self-reliance, have since come from the Borders and the South-west. Toward the end of the 18th century, when Scotland exploded in a starburst of talent and invention, the sons of hill-shepherds, craftsmen, labourers, farmers and little lairds from Berwick to Galloway enriched the arts and sciences of the world. Allan Ramsay, poet father of a great portraitist, was born in a lead-miner’s cottage on a bleak moorland in Dumfries. Thomas Telford, son of an Eskdale shepherd, began work as a mason’s apprentice carving headstones, but went on to build twelve hundred bridges and a thousand miles of roads. Alexander Murray, the linguist, learnt his letters from his shepherd father in Dunkitterick, writing with charred stems of heather. He taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and German, published an enduring work on comparative philology, and died a professor of Oriental languages at Edinburgh. David Hume, philosopher and historian, one of the most powerful minds Scotland has produced and among the most influential in Europe, was the son of a bonnet laird in Ninewells. John Broadwood, humbly born in the shadow of the Lammermuirs, walked to London where he became a cabinet-maker and the inventor of “a new constructed pianoforte”. A Roxburgh farm-worker called Cook also crossed the Border in search of work, and the English now honour his son as their great navigator. Mungo Park left his birthplace above the lovely Yarrow Water to explore the course of a mightier river. At twenty-six he came home to practice surgery in Peebles, wrote a rattling narrative of his travels, and was then drawn back to the Niger and his death.

  John Leyden, born in a shepherd’s house in Teviotdale, was a rough-mannered, noisy but amiable man who became a poet, physician, minister, linguist and Orientalist before he died in Java at the age of thirty-six. James Hogg, whose wayward talents as a poet and novelist are still neglected, was an Ettrick shepherd, a red-haired, hard-drinking womaniser who taught himself to read at eighteen. Scott was a noble and generous patron of such men, although he sometimes wavered in their support. Thinking of them, and others of the same earthy origin, he said that suddenly “poets began to chirp in every corner like grasshoppers in a sunshine day.” Standing upon the great monument of his own work, he towers above them all. Although he hung the walls of Abbotsford with the arms of noble families with whom he had traced a slender kinship, he was also proud of his grandfather who kept a small farm at Sandyknowe, by the square keep of Smailholm. He spent his boyhood there and filled his mind with wild dreams of his reiving ancestors who had “murdered, stolen, and robbed like other Border gentlemen.”

  At Ferniehill in Roxburgh, and fittingly close to the old treaty-ground of Birgham, an obelisk marks the birthplace of James Thomson. A prolific but indifferent poet, he wrote the verses of that crashing exhortation to a still uneasy Union, Rule Britannia! Its implication that by heaven’s command there were no longer Scots or English has been happily ignored, and a majority of the latter now realise that the word Briton can be used as a natural synonym for themselves.

  From the Lammermuirs to Galloway the past has become a bloodless entertainment for visitors, scripted by guide-books and road-maps, and illustrated by post-cards in which the sun always shines. Where it is celebrated by the Borderers it is with proper concern for present enjoyment. Young men in tweeds and jodhpurs, Braw Lads and Callants, annually enact a ritual remembrance of the moss-troopers who rode from their hills to Flodden, to Halidon Hill and Ancrum Moor, or on a deep foray into England. In the Common Ridings and the Border Games there is a robust desire to share a physical experience with the past, to assert a rugged identity as Border Scots. And there is no irony, only historical paradox, when the followers of the Hawick Riding, and the town’s Rugby team, shout a battle-cry that invokes the Saxon gods Thor and Woden.

  Good roads now take drivers where they wish, and where they wish is where good roads may take them. There are no highways, nor should there be, where the shaggy squadrons of Border horse once passed, and grass has covered the tracks of the cattle they drove home from England. But the high ground of their hills, like the Highlands, is already under assault by man-made erosion, and their valley woodlands are being felled, or choked by a black blanket of alien pine. The boundaries of our society contract within the roads we build, and their littered lay-bys demonstrate our indifference to the survival of what lies beyond them.

  The Borders are my first gateway to Scotland, and nowadays I pass through them too quickly. There are no watchmen in Eskdale or Teviotdale to greet me with the old peel cry of “Who comes!”, but its echo is always in my mind as I move on to the Lowlands and the North.

  Chapter 3

  East to West, Edinburgh and Glasgow hold Scotland by the throat. Or by the loins, perhaps, if its outline on a map is seen to resemble the rearing lion of its standard. The latter image is more appropriate, for almost two-thirds of the nation now live in these cities, their widening suburbs and parasitic towns. Separated by forty-four miles of increasing ugliness they are islands of rival cultures, or so they maintain, and the land between them is a bridge upon which each pays a toll in the worn coin of hostile humour or mutual forbearance. Economic and industrial need, eviction, persecution, poverty and greed have brought the people here, century by century, but it sometimes seems as if Providence cupped its hand in a moment of frustration, gathered them up and dropped them into this Lowland basin where they might do the greatest harm to themselves and the lea
st to others. And the same, good Scots may justly argue, could be said of south-east England.

  Of the two, Glasgow has the right to think of itself as a Celtic city in origin and history. It remained part of a Brythonic kingdom when the east had fallen to Northumbria. For much of its existence it was a frontier town, facing the north in fear. As late as the 18th century it locked its gates against foraying clansmen from Breadalbane and Balquhidder, but within one man’s lifetime its meaner streets had become ghettos for homeless people from the Highlands. When that mountebank chieftain Alasdair Ranaldson MacDonell offered to muster some of these unfortunates into a regiment of Glasgow Highlanders, Lord Provost Dunlop warned the Secretary of War that it would be a calamity if any of them were entrusted with a musket, for they were all vile Democrats. Today the city’s telephone directories and electoral rolls contain more Gaelic names, Highland and Irish, than any other region in Scotland, and there may still be civic officers who have the same nightmares as Mr Dunlop.