In the distance I could see the high, grassy mound of Wark Castle rising above the bank of the river. Much smaller than Roxburgh but almost as dramatic, it glowers over the Tweed, standing guard on the frontier, keeping watch over the fields of Berwickshire and Scotland across the water. Sheep grazed its flanks, following the sun around them, and on the road to the east of the castle a tractor trundled downhill, a trailer bouncing behind it. In early June 1314, this quiet landscape would have looked very different.
To finish his father’s work, complete the conquest of Scotland and defeat the traitor Robert Bruce, Edward II mustered an army at Wark. On the flat haughland, almost eighteen thousand men had answered the royal call to arms and marched or ridden north. Latecomers saw a vast military camp sprawling westwards along the banks of the Tweed for more than four miles, reaching at least as far as Carham. In the midst of a myriad of pavilions, awnings, temporary corrals, parked ox-carts and the spiralling smoke of cooking fires Wark Castle rose on its mound and the royal standards fluttered from its walls. Between eight and ten thousand animals were devouring the summer grass for miles around it. The much-feared English armoured knights had brought their heavy horses, their destriers, and there were perhaps two and a half thousand of these valuable creatures being managed by their grooms, grazing in their halters, drinking deep from the Tweed. And there were even more riding horses, ponies, mules and oxen, as well as herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, a mobile food supply.
Once the muster was complete, the great army descended to the river, splashed across the fords of Wark and entered the realm of Scotland. Over the heads of the spearmen, the men at arms, archers and armoured knights, many banners fluttered, but one of these was thought to have great talismanic power. The Prince-Bishop of Durham, Richard Kellaw, had brought with him the precious Banner of St Cuthbert and all believed that it would bring victory against the barbarian, godless Scots. In the event, the English army was routed at Bannockburn in 1314. But Cuthbert had brought victory almost two centuries before, when in 1138 David I’s invading army had been defeated near Northallerton in Yorkshire. Mounted on a battle cart, the presence of the holy banners from Durham and the minsters at York, Ripon and Beverly, was thought to have been so powerful in a decisive English victory that it became known as the Battle of the Standard. The Banner of St Cuthbert was also carried at the disastrous defeat of the Scots at Flodden in 1513, only four or five miles from where I walked.
Soldiers fought more fiercely because they believed Cuthbert was by their sides, in a physical sense, and that his certain presence meant God too was with them. The banner was not large. Square and mounted in loops on a horizontal pole, it was made principally from red silk and velvet. Crucially, part of the shroud of Cuthbert had been sewn into its centre behind white velvet that had been embroidered with a cross. It is not clear from the sixteenth-century description that this was the silk cloth given to Cuthbert by the Abbess Verca when he visited her nunnery on Coquet Island off the Northumberland coast, but what mattered was that the army believed it was. And what is equally striking is the denial of history. By the early twelfth century Cuthbert had become an emphatically English saint, perhaps one of their most powerful weapons, despite the fact that he had been born and raised north of the Tweed and in Northumbria. And this saintly, fragile and peaceful man would have been appalled at the way he had been recruited into an English army intent on slaughter. The Englishing of Cuthbert would run like a nationalist ribbon along the frontier for centuries.
More irony waited further along the riverbank. East of Wark lies an international anomaly. Plotted on my trusty Pathfinder, and also on the most recent Ordnance Survey maps, such as the spectacularly unwieldy Explorer series, is a kink, a shift of the frontier from the midstream of the Tweed. As the river bends around Lees Haugh, south of the town of Coldstream, the line abruptly dips south into England and brings two or three acres back into Scotland. No one is sure why.
However, nineteenth-century histories repeat an entertaining tradition. This small parcel of Scotland used to be known as the Ba’ Green and it was said that each year the men of Coldstream would play an early, anarchic version of rugby against the men of Wark. The prize was this piece of England. But when Coldstream grew much larger than Wark, the annual fixture became so one-sided that it was eventually abandoned – with Scotland keeping the Ba’ Green. It is cheering to see the august and precise Ordnance Survey remember such an unlikely tradition – but what other explanation fits this remarkable oddity?
* * *
On my way down the Tweed, travelling in the shadow of Cuthbert, I had walked in stages of only short distances, not trusting my back and my wonky left leg to carry me for more than two or three miles at a time, and preferably on the flat ground of the riverbank. I decided it was time to take on a longer journey and I pulled out my rucksack and packed it. Frankly, I was becoming more than a little frustrated by all of my aches and pains. They themselves were becoming a pain.
My life seems increasingly governed by the relative severity of all my aches, as my body copes less and less well even with quotidian demands, things I could do with perfect ease a year or two ago. At sixty-eight I am not ancient (well, not very ancient), but my body seems to be losing function faster than I can think of workarounds, and this baleful process has been accelerated by the miserable and seemingly interminable business first of reconstructive surgery to fix my shoulders in 2017, and now with my back and leg. Pain bores a hole in your brain, and its more or less constant presence is not only unpleasant, but is also making me so much less productive than I used to be. I refuse to be stoical, meekly accepting. Sod it. I need to fight, block it out and bloody well get on with things.
I have always had a strong work ethic, linked to my non-PC sense of myself as a provider for my family. I also feel that food and drink cannot really be relished unless they have been earned, and these days I am not doing enough, frankly, to deserve an evening by the fire with a glass of something good. That’s if I can manage to carry the bottles from the shop to the car without yelping at the soreness in my dodgy shoulder.
I realise that this is a dour and dismal value system. Maybe it is genetic. My Ednam ancestors all worked on the land through scores of winters, enduring the cold and wet (without waterproofs), and they wore out their bodies. By the time they had reached their sixties (if they were lucky), they were din, Scots for ‘done’, meaning worn out and weakened. When he was fifty-eight, my dad had two massive strokes, and while my mum waited by the phone for news from the Western General in Edinburgh I went down the street in Kelso to do some basic shopping. I met an old lady well known for her directness and she asked for news. ‘Aye,’ she sighed, ‘it’s no’ as if he was a din man.’ Perhaps that’s what I am becoming: a din man.
But that sounds like an excuse: the top of the slippery slope of using age as a qualifier: not bad for sixty, sixty-five, seventy . . . Who says? Apart from being made grumpy by pain, my brain is no more clouded than it has ever been. And there is no reason why I can’t still do good work, none at all.
Fortified by a refusal to be pathetic, I pulled out my rucksack, made some cheese sandwiches, wrapped them in foil and packed some standard kit – dry socks, maps, compass, waterproof, hat, water, charged-up mobile phone and a notebook. In the early morning I would drive downriver, park the car and follow Cuthbert as he sought the secret tracts of solitude, places where he would pray and make a covenant with silence.
6
The Quiet Waters By
Two recent forecasts of high winds had not amounted to much, and as I put my rucksack in the back of the car early on a September morning, it was breezy, but nothing alarming. However, an instinct sent me to check the BBC News website, where worrying reports were coming in from the west, Northern Ireland and Galloway of gale force winds, and they seemed to be heading in our direction. At their predicted arrival time in the Borders, nothing changed. Maybe the wind had turned in another direction. Nevertheless, som
ething told me to wait.
In the middle of the morning, the breeze began to freshen. I saw very few birds in the sky, as clouds scudded eastwards at high altitude. And Lindsay decided to bring in all the horses. Minutes after she shut the last of the stable doors, the storm raced over the hills to the west, driving heavy rain in front of it, and smashed into us. Suddenly a gale was raging.
At noon, Lindsay came rushing into my office. ‘Come and look!’ What? ‘Just look!’ Our glorious, lustrous, purple-leaf maple tree that stood by the gates to the stable yard had been torn in half by the storm and its main trunk completely blocked the track, hanging from a huge gash. It was a stunning, majestic tree, but its wide maple leaves were its downfall. As the eighty-mile-an-hour gale blew directly at it, the leaves acted like thousands of postcard size sails and the trunk had been ripped down its middle. In shock at the suddenness of such destruction, we gawped for a moment at the death of a tree we had planted, one we had watched grow and had come to love.
But it had to be destroyed even more completely, and quickly. I ran to alert my son, Adam, to fetch the chainsaw. In the teeth of driving rain that stung us like spears of ice, we dismembered the fallen tree, cutting its smooth, healthy limbs to pieces, dragging the branches and their fatal leaves off the track and jamming them into the back of the pick-up so that the storm could not pick them up and smash them into buildings or worse.
In the evening, when the storm had calmed to a strong breeze, Lindsay and I tried to count our blessings; no human beings, no animals and no buildings (apart from fences) had come to harm. But in truth we were dumbstruck, grief-stricken at the loss of an old friend. As she came up from the stables at the end of each day, having given the horses their night-time haynets, Lindsay told me she sometimes said goodnight to our beautiful tree. Now it is goodbye, after only a few moments of elemental rage. But thank goodness no one was injured.
The day after the storm dawned bright and only breezy; it seemed a good day to be walking with Cuthbert. Our track is so pock-marked with countless puddles and ruts, it forces a very slow descent to the tarmac of the lane at the bottom. I have shredded too many tyres to rush, and crawling along in first gear has encouraged me to look up and notice more and more detail, the transit of subtle changes from day to day. This morning the last few swallows were gathering after the storm, a process known as staging, and they lined up on the telephone cable beside the track like crochets on a music score. I counted twenty, some of them very small, all of them the parents and broods from the nests in the stable yard. Some of the wee ones looked impossibly fragile, and for all those hatched and fledged on our farm this summer their immense journey to Africa will test their endurance and will be unlike anything else they have experienced. Perhaps they fly in the slipstream of their parents. As I reached the lane, I wondered if the storm had been a signal.
When I parked at Twizel Bridge an hour later, I noticed a large flock of swallows wheeling over the fields by the side of the road. High in the sky, occasionally swooping low over the river, they seemed to be getting ready for the flight south, perhaps gauging the strength and direction of the wind, sensing the temperature, feeling the air in some unknowable way. What prompts all of this concerted activity both mystifies and awes me. I love the swallows and count the winter months until they return.
Twizel Bridge crosses the River Till, a tributary of the Tweed, and history has marched across it for centuries. Completed in 1511, it was the longest single-arch bridge in Britain until 1727, reaching ninety feet across the river. Two years after the masons had paved it, the vanguard of the English army tramped across Twizel Bridge to outflank James IV of Scotland’s forces. They had encamped on Branxton Hill at Flodden, well to the south. Ten thousand men trundled the cannon behind them that would rake the ranks of Scottish spearmen a few hours later, as a crushing defeat was inflicted and James IV was killed. Behind the English battle lines, the Banner of St Cuthbert was flown, its red silk fluttering above the ruck of hand-to-hand fighting.
A modern bridge now carries the traffic between the Scottish Borders and Berwick-upon-Tweed, but Twizel Bridge is still open to walkers, and from its parapet I looked east down the Till. When Cuthbert rowed his curragh to the place where it joins the Tweed, I believe that he pulled on the left oar and turned it up the tributary. This eventually leads close to the moors and mosses above Ford and Doddington, to the crags and caves of the Kyloe Hills, to places that were remote and trackless, where he might retreat completely from the world and find peace to pray, and by fasting and self-denial bring himself to a transcendent state where he might better know the mind of God.
On the Ordnance Survey, the Till looks a small river, meandering below the eastern foothills of the Cheviots, but what first struck me on that bright morning was how deep and in places how wide it was. And even when the sun shone and the bankside trees glistened, the river was not so much picturesque as dramatic, even sinister in places. River names are amongst the oldest and least changed in the landscape, so ancient that their derivation can only be guessed at. Till is obscure, but it shares an initial letter with many of the major rivers of Britain that empty into the North Sea. The T-rivers include the Thames, the Trent, Tees, Tyne, Tweed and Tay. It is a coincidence that may be more than surprising and might make a thread-like link to a lost language. The derivation of Tay is thought to be Taus, and that probably in turn relates to the Sanskrit word tavas, which means ‘to surge’. Variations in the Indo-European languages related to Sanskrit might account for the similarities in these ancient river names.
Walking along the banks of the Till, I felt the sense of genius loci was powerful, and I quickly came to understand the sentiment behind a rhyme that has survived in local folklore and that I knew as a child:
Tweed said to Till
‘What gars ye rin sae still?’
Says Till to Tweed,
‘Though ye rin wi’ speed
And I rin slaw
Whar ye droon yin man
I droon twa’.
Chilling. And as it turned out, a worthwhile warning to those like myself who spend time looking around and not where they are going. The Ordnance Survey showed a path all the way from Twizel Bridge to the village of Etal, but I wanted to begin where Cuthbert had begun his journey into the moors and hills – at the confluence of the Till with the Tweed. It proved impossible to walk up the southern bank of the river and so I was forced to make a detour to St Cuthbert’s Farm, so that I could follow the man of God from there.
It was by now a magical early autumn morning. The wind had dropped and I’d soon stuffed my body warmer into my rucksack. Till meets Tweed at an anna, a river island called Little Haugh, and the currents of the rivers run so slow and deep that no movement is perceptible. A swan glided out from the bank of the anna and slowly made its way to the mouth of the Till. It seemed like a good omen.
The map also marks the site of St Cuthbert’s Chapel (which had probably given the farm its name) and it was sad to see the state it was in. Marooned in the midst of a ploughed field, it was like a metaphor for the decline and isolation of religion. Roofless, the rectangular structure was medieval, built in 1311 on the footprint of a much older chapel. Its arches had been prevented from collapsing by some shoring brickwork and the weeds and small trees that had grown inside had been cut down and treated with weedkiller of some sort, but otherwise it was in a neglected, lonely state. The chapel perches above the confluence of Till and Tweed, and it will have been visible from both rivers, but its history is less obvious, difficult to untangle from the legends that grew up around Cuthbert.
Viking raids on Britain began with an attack on Lindisfarne in 793, and by the early ninth century, or perhaps later, the monks felt forced to abandon their vulnerable coastal church. They took Cuthbert’s body and his relics with them to begin their wanderings over southern Scotland and northern England, and legends grew up quickly. In his long poem Marmion, Walter Scott repeated one of the more unlikely tales. Having s
ought refuge at Old Melrose, he wrote, the brothers took Cuthbert’s body down the Tweed in a stone boat. It foundered at the mouth of the Till, where for centuries something that looked a bit like a stone boat lay on the bank of the river. Perhaps it was a natural rock formation that encouraged the tale. Offshore from Dunbar in East Lothian, St Baldred’s Boat is in fact a dangerous rocky outcrop. Above the confluence of the rivers a chapel was built and in the early Middle Ages it may have served a small village called Tillmouth, all trace of which has been obliterated.
To me, on that blessed September morning, when the wind had calmed after the storm, the little chapel seemed less like a relic of ancient miracles or even a metaphor. It was more of a signpost that told me to turn and follow the Till, so that I could stay close to Cuthbert as he fled from temptation to seek the solitude of the moors and hills.
At first the going was gratifyingly easy, as a metalled road followed the eastern bank of the river past two Hansel and Gretel cottages that looked as if they had been built by the wealthy owner of an estate as decoration as much as accommodation. It would be like living in a cuckoo clock. As I marched on, any thoughts of my back and dodgy leg were banished by curiosity. The river surprised me: its pools were dark and deep and in places it looked fifty yards across. Cuthbert would have had no difficulty navigating the shallow draught of his curragh up the Till. Where it was occasionally shallow and rocky, he could easily have kilted up his robes and waded, towing the boat and whatever he had stowed in it for his new and solitary life. Soon I came across the first of a long series of sheer sandstone river cliffs that had been scarted out by the glaciers of the last ice age as the young river found its course. It occurred to me that hermits liked cliffs and the occasional caves that could be found where the strata folded or fractured. Just before Twizel Mill and its complex of channels or lades, built to direct the water to its wheels, I saw a heron standing still as a stick on a rock, searching for movement in the pool below. A friend once memorably described herons as Presbyterian flamingos.
To the Island of Tides Page 14