The Law was steep, but not difficult to climb, and when I reached the top the view was disappointing. I could see little more of the river, and to the south only as far as a nearby ridge above Roxburgh Newtown Farm. But I did find something fascinating. The Law has a flat summit, perhaps as big as the footprint of an average house, and in one corner there is a strangely carved low pillar. It has three deep grooves cut on the top and some rectilinear markings on one side. Mobile phones are more than wonderfully handy cameras (I long ago abandoned taking paper notes in favour of photographing a record of walks and wanders): they can solve mysteries instantly. Having searched online for the Law at Makerstoun, I came up with the answer. This was a meridian pillar placed on the Law by a keen aristocratic astronomer and geophysicist, Sir Thomas Brisbane. He lived across the river at Makerstoun House in the first half of the nineteenth century. In order to make accurate readings of where true north (as opposed to magnetic north) lay, he had meridian pillars erected so that precise measurements could be taken. In an era when the British Empire and its attendant trade were expanding, this was more than a hobby or an interest.
But was the Law raised by Brisbane (who incidentally gave his name to the capital of Queensland) to site his meridian pillar on it? Other evidence, and what I could see, persuaded me that it was much older. The Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments recorded the discovery of terracing on the mound but does not hazard a conjecture about its purpose, agricultural or otherwise. Other sources remembered a holy well at the Law, one dedicated to St John. I could find no trace of any water source either on the top or around the foot of the mound. What I did notice was a distinct kerb all around the circumference. This will have been accentuated by annual ploughing, but I did see that in several places there was stone revetting. All that I could conclude was that this strange eminence had been man-made, and very probably long before Sir Thomas had workmen raise his meridian pillar on it.
Four huge beech trees have established themselves on the summit, growing to an immense height, their roots gripping the soil like thick fingers. They must post-date the period when the meridian stone was used because they stand between it and the observatory at Makerstoun, but they seemed to add something to the strangeness of this place. Carved on two of the more smooth-barked beeches were initials, one set dated 11 December 1922, almost a century old and now a considerable height off the ground, beyond the reach of contemporary knife-wielders. In the bole of one of these massive trees, water had been trapped where the roots knotted around each other, and to my amazement I saw two coins at the bottom of this tiny pool. On the north side of the mound, I came across something very puzzling: three canes had been rammed far enough into the ground to keep them upright in the wind, and on the end of each fluttered ragged flags that were so discoloured I could make nothing of them. Mystery is not confined to the unfathomable ceremonies of prehistory. For some people, their secret venerations on this old mound had enduring meaning.
If Cuthbert passed below the Law and prayed at the holy well dedicated to St John, it would have had some poignancy. When Boisil lay dying of the Yellow Plague, Cuthbert read him the Gospel of St John and they discussed it – as much as the old man’s pain allowed. In the early medieval period, it was believed that the Book of Revelation was also written by the Apostle, although modern scholarship thinks that unlikely. Full of famous and extravagant imagery in its prophesies, Revelation culminates in the Second Coming of Christ, the time when God would walk once more in the Garden and Creation would be made anew. Many signs that the world to come is at hand are found in the book that is also known as the Apocalypse, derived from a Greek word that means not catastrophic disaster but an unveiling, and these include outbreaks of plague. After Boisil’s death, it may be that Cuthbert believed the end times were coming and he fled Old Melrose so that he could both become closer to God and pray for his own salvation and also that of others. His journey down the Tweed may have been an urgent mission.
Making my way carefully down off the Law, I was fascinated to watch a cloud of tiny birds, finches, I think, playing in the bushy young trees on the northern slopes. They seemed little bigger than butterflies, and moved skittishly across the high willowherb and the dried crackling stalks of cow parsley, not staying long enough on each stem, it seemed to me, to eat the seeds. Perhaps fifty of them, they sometimes all flew in harmony, so that for a moment the sun caught the bright plumage of their bellies. The cloud of little birds suddenly glinted like blown sunlight and then they seemed to disappear as they perched once more on the stalks of the tall plants and were still. It was mesmerising. Autumn may be a melancholy farewell to summer but it still holds small moments of quiet beauty.
On the way back down to my car, these feeding birds sparked a memory of childhood. I noticed that rosehips were ripening in the hedgerow. When I was a little boy, we used to pick the red hips and take bags of them to school to be weighed. The Delrosa company paid about 3d a pound, I think, and from them they made rosehip syrup, a sweet cordial rich in vitamin C that was spooned into the unwilling mouths of children. We were given cards to mark and, for a week or two, evenings were taken up as groups of kids stripped the prickly bushes by the roadsides and in the woods. It was fun, but surely a fragile business model, one with no chance of working now, what with health, safety, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. I haven’t seen a bottle of Delrosa for years, or anyone gathering the hips. It seems like a waste; there were plenty of bushes hung with thick bunches of their red fruit after the long, hot summer.
Having hurt my back clambering up steep slopes, I was pleased to feel less pain on this brief expedition. I thought I could begin walking again for some longer distances so that I might follow Cuthbert downriver as he fled from the world.
Amongst the first blooms of spring, primroses were my mother’s favourite and most years she took my sisters and I to Daniel’s Den. On a wooded bank by the Tweed that shelved steeply downwards like the biblical pit, many clumps of these fresh little yellow flowers grew and we took as many bunches home as we could carry. They seemed not to flourish for long indoors, but their picking was a welcome ritual, an expedition that made my mother smile, and it was a smile that made us smile.
On my way down to the riverbank, I passed the old wood, now putting on its autumn colours, and began walking along the edge of history, my own as well as Scotland’s. Rearing up from the floodplain of the Tweed, and with the River Teviot guarding its eastern flank, are the relics of an ancient fortress, what was once a stockade, a stone-built castle and for me a crucible of dreams. What we knew as the Old Castle when we were little boys is marked on the Ordnance Survey as Roxburgh Castle. It sits on top of a vast oblong kaim or mound piled up partly by geology and very substantially by human hand. A few shattered fragments of the medieval castle’s mighty walls survive, impossibly thick, teetering on the edge of the steep slopes.
As a child, I was fascinated by the Old Castle. Even though the site is obscured and choked by many mature trees and chest-high nettles and willowherb, it was a place where my imagination was fired. I could reconstruct the massive gatehouses, the keep, and fire arrows or roll down boulders or pour hot oil on any who dared attack the mighty fortress. I knew all the stories of its sieges and invented more of my own. I convinced myself there were tunnels under the rivers, that the kaim was hollow and that there was treasure buried – somewhere.
The site has never been excavated, and as a young teenager I persuaded my friends that we should borrow garden trowels and dig for history, maybe even treasure. Instead we found fragments of green and brown glazed medieval pots, uncovered a flagstone pavement only just under the grass near the north-east gatehouse and came across a great deal of fleetingly exciting rubbish. Half-buried under neglect, spectacularly situated, the commanding and protecting presence above Roxburgh, Scotland’s first recorded town, now entirely effaced, not one stone left standing on another, this rich, mysterious place made me a historian. As I climbed up to where we
had scrabbled around fifty-five years ago, much of that excitement came flooding back. I even kicked around the loose dirt with my boot, vaguely wondering what I might uncover.
In those far-off summer holidays, all that interested me was the medieval castle and how it had changed hands often, sometimes garrisoned by Scots, other times by English soldiers. It was only much later that I realised it had a longer and even more intriguing history. In 1999, after I had left the world of television, Weidenfeld and Nicolson published Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms, in which I made a historical case (one that still persuades me) that Roxburgh Castle was once a base for the shadowy post-Roman warlord. The old name was Marchidun. In Old Welsh, it means ‘horse fort’ and I argued that Arthur led hosts of cavalry warriors against those who attacked and invaded the faded Roman province of Britannia: Anglo-Saxons, Picts and others.
Some time in the early seventh century, almost certainly after Aethelfrith’s victory at Addinston in 603, an Anglian warrior know as Hroc took control of the old horse fort, after Arthur was long dead and the armies of the native kingdoms everywhere defeated. In common with other warlike cultures, Anglian chieftains often adopted animal names, and Hroc means ‘the rook’. On top of the vast kaim he had a burh built, a fortified stockade, probably on the highest point, where the medieval keep later stood. The entire area, which had been encircled by the walls of the medieval castle, would have been an impossibly long perimeter to garrison. By the time Cuthbert rowed his curragh down the wide reach of the Tweed to the northwest, this fascinating place had become Hroc’s burh, later rubbed smooth into Roxburgh. Perhaps sentries on the palisade saw him pass.
Across the busy road that skirts the deep ditch of the moat on the same side, a tree-lined track leads down to the river and a fishermen’s hut. I wanted to walk the wide sweep of the haughland that leads around a loop to the town of Kelso, my home place. Grazed by sheep and cattle, this broad expanse leads up to a knoll which was marked on old maps as High Town. It was the centre of Roxburgh, where urban life began in Scotland in the early twelfth century. Documents in the cartulary of Kelso Abbey, founded in 1128, detail the names of streets – King’s Street, Market Street and the Headgate – two churches, a Franciscan friary, a mint, a school and a bustling market. All of it has completely disappeared, leaving no visible trace of any kind. With the coming of the Wars of Independence in the late thirteenth century, the wool trade that built Roxburgh shrivelled and gradually the town sank into oblivion beneath the grass. The castle was eventually destroyed, ‘doung to the ground’ by the Scots in the late fifteenth century, in case it fell into English hands.
I walked up to a stand of copper beeches and wondered at the ruthless transit of history. As late as the 1290s I would have been standing at the corner of a busy market place where wool merchants from as far afield as Italy bargained with producers, many of them monks or their agents. The four great Border abbeys at Melrose, Kelso, Dryburgh and Jedburgh all ran vast sheep ranches in the Cheviots and the Lammermuirs, and their annual wool crop generated so much cash that the Abbot of Melrose was once able to borrow against it. And yet instead of the bustle of commerce, the creak of cartwheels, the smell of fresh bread from street ovens and the stink of tanning pits, only a gentle breeze blew up from the river, riffling the long grass in the autumn sunshine. I had brought a small rucksack with me and it was warm enough to sit down by the bole of a wide chestnut tree to eat my cheese sandwiches and wash them down with bottled water. Across the haughland and a wide reach of the Tweed I could see the Cobby, a stretch of riverbank where local people were permitted to fish and swim. The name remembers a time before bridges and derives from ‘coble’, a raft-like ferry that once plied between the two banks on a diagonal course to allow for the current.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Kelso pumped its untreated sewage into the Tweed at the Cobby, and yet no one thought anything of swimming and paddling in the filthy water. Sometimes children’s skin was badly affected with what we called water blobs: strange, almost translucent blisters. Hard by the Duke’s Dyke – a vast and high encircling wall built around Floors Castle and its wide policies in the early nineteenth century by local people in a project paid for by the duke to provide income for unemployed and destitute families – there used to be a diving board. Below was a deep, mostly natural pool that lay upstream from the effluent, and I can remember my dad launching himself off the top board. That terrified me, even though he was a good swimmer. When a severe stroke almost killed him at the age of fifty-eight and deprived him of movement in one arm and partially in one leg, he was still able to swim in the indoor pool that had been built in Kelso by then.
I walked downhill towards the river, dipping further to where a ditch had once run around the town of Roxburgh. This part of what is now called Friars Haugh (after a Franciscan friary built south of the town, beyond the walls) encompasses all of the pasture down to the point where the River Teviot joins the Tweed at the Junction Pool, making it a wide, stately, even majestic river. The pool is an expensive and productive place to fish and a grey rowing boat is often seen eddying in the conjoined currents. About a hundred yards upstream is the cauld, a breakwater originally built by the monks of Kelso Abbey and their lay workers to create a lade that would direct the flow of the river to the wheels of their mill. Part of an ancient arch survives, and the deep channel disappears into a dangerous darkness under it. Remarkably, a modern corn mill, run by John Hogarth Ltd, is built right on top of the Abbey Mill and its mighty pantechnicons still transport the finest oatmeal and pearl barley in the world, a near thousand-year continuity.
Built up to divert the current, the cauld (maddeningly noted as a ‘weir’ on the otherwise excellent Pathfinder maps) had the effect of creating a short fall of white water, as the Tweed spilled over its edges. In addition, it has enabled the build-up of small, oblong river islands called the annas. A term unique to the banks of the Tweed, it may derive from the Gaelic annaid meaning ‘church lands’, perhaps a distant memory of Aidan and the Irish monks at Old Melrose. Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, the annas were a dangerous and exotic playground. Trees, hogweed and dense undergrowth, all made lush by the river and the silt it swept down, had grown up, and winter spates deposited all sorts of debris on these islets, sometimes whole tree trunks, roots and all. Once we came across part of a tractor cab, a tangle of old signposts and much else that could be turned over and examined by little boys who had waded the river at the Cobby.
Our principal summer holiday sport was rat hunting. The annas were infested with them and, feeding on the corn from the adjacent mill, some rats were the size of cats. If cornered, they were likely to turn and fly at any attacker. Armed with whuppie sticks, stout staves cut from trees on the annas, we thrashed the undergrowth to flush them out. I remember seeing a huge rat trying to escape into the river, its back end as big as a football and its orange tail long and whip-like. Looking back, it was a crazy, cruel and pointless thing to do, its only purpose to generate excitement and tall stories.
To Cuthbert’s eye, the river will have looked very different as it looped around the peninsula Kelso is built on. Under the modern town may lie the fleeting whispers of the wooden cells of a diseart like those in the loops of the Tweed at Dryburgh and Old Melrose, but all that is known of the site before the foundation of the abbey in 1128 is that there was a pre-existing church dedicated to St Mary. And while the loop of the river is not as extravagant as at Old Melrose, there exist the remains of a strip of boggy ground to the north. It may be where an older course of the Tweed ran and could have served as a barrier or a perimeter for a sacred precinct. However that may be, Kelso will always be hallowed ground for me.
As Cuthbert fled from the world, guiding his curragh around the Maxwheel, a powerful, treacherous tangle of currents where the Tweed is turned north-east by a high river cliff, his mind will have filled with thoughts of his mission. Early Christians often acted consciously in imitation of Christ, following his actions and ex
amples literally. When David I of Scotland invited communities of monks northwards to found his Border abbeys, thirteen came, their abbot and twelve brothers, like Jesus and the Apostles. Cuthbert’s faith was leading him to a different life from the communities of monasteries; he was seeking the secret tracts of a solitary place, but also following Jesus’ example. After his baptism by John, Christ entered the desert ‘with only wild animals’ for company, and there he endured the temptations placed before him by Satan. Fasting, struggling against the pangs of hunger, he resisted the offer to turn stones into loaves of bread, uttering the much quoted ‘One cannot live by bread alone’, followed by the much less quoted ‘but by every word that proceeds from the word of God’. When his faith and trust was tested by Satan’s challenge to jump from the ‘pinnacle of the temple’, Christ replied, ‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test’. Faith and not certainty was what mattered. In the final temptation, on a high mountain where ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ could be seen, Christ rejected the offer of power and the adulation of crowds.
Cuthbert was steeped in these stories from the gospels and could recite them from memory when he preached. He believed in their literal as well as spiritual truth. The Anonymous Life was explicit, saying that the saint ‘fled from worldly glory’, rejecting it just as Christ had done. And in further emulation he sought solitary places just as Christ had done when he wandered into the trackless desert – and did so for the same reason. Devils lurked there. Places where no one lived were the resort of an army of demons, all of them very real to Cuthbert and his contemporaries, and he sought to do battle with them and their temptations. Many were the fallen angels brought down by Lucifer. Molech, Chemosh and Samael all appear in the Old Testament. In Revelation, Abaddon was the King of the Abyss, Asmodai the Demon of Wrath and Mammon the Demon of Avarice. The desert was haunted by the Goat-Demon, Azazel, and by the enormity of Behemoth. Some of these have survived as metaphors in modern culture, but the existence of the Devil and other malign beings has faded out of fashion in recent times. We no longer fear them, or even think about them. But for Cuthbert their hellish power was real and, as he fasted and prayed, he aimed to drive back Satan and his evil angels into the shadows where they belonged. In the deserts he would find, Cuthbert would use the power of prayer to call down God’s help and vanquish the demonic legions not only for the sake of his own salvation but also to save other souls.
To the Island of Tides Page 12