The Debatable Land Read online

  GRAHAM ROBB

  THE DEBATABLE LAND

  The Lost World Between Scotland and England

  PICADOR

  TO GILL COLERIDGE

  AND IN AFFECTIONATE MEMORY OF

  DEBORAH ROGERS AND DAVID MILLER

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Figures

  A Guide to Pronunciation

  PART ONE

  1. Hidden Places

  2. Outpost

  3. Panic Button

  4. The True and Ancient Border

  5. ‘The Sewer of Abandoned Men’

  6. Mouldywarp

  7. Beachcombing

  PART TWO

  8. Blind Roads

  9. Harrowed

  10. ‘Loveable Custumis’

  11. Accelerated Transhumance

  12. Skurrlywarble

  13. Exploratores

  14. Windy Edge

  15. ‘In Tymis Bigane’

  PART THREE

  16. ‘Stob and Staik’

  17. ‘Rube, Burne, Spoyll, Slaye, Murder annd Destrewe’

  18. The Final Partition

  19. Hector of ye Harlawe

  20. Scrope

  21. Tarras Moss

  22. ‘A Factious and Naughty People’

  23. Silence

  PART FOUR

  24. Graticules

  25. The Kingdom of Selgovia

  26. ‘Arthur’

  27. The Great Caledonian Invasion

  28. Polling Stations

  29. No Man’s Land

  30. The River

  Appendix

  Chronology

  Notes

  Works Cited

  General Index

  Geographical Index

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Front cover. The eastern slope of Greena Hill looking towards Tarras Moss. © Elliot J. Simpson.

  Endpapers. Tinnis Burn on the north-eastern slope of Tinnis Hill descending to Liddesdale. © Elliot J. Simpson.

  SECTION ONE

  1. ‘North East View of the City of Carlisle’, by Robert Carlyle (1791). © Martin and Jean Northgate 2014.

  2. A Northbound freight train on the Waverley Line hauled by a LNER Class B1 locomotive approaches Riccarton Junction in June 1965, climbing to ‘the Edge’ (the northern limit of Liddesdale). Photograph by Maurice Burns. © Maurice Burns 1965.

  3. Joan Blaeu’s map of ‘Lidalia’ (Liddesdale), 1654, based on Timothy Pont’s survey, conducted c. 1590. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

  4. Part of the Debatable Land on Joan Blaeu’s map of ‘Lidalia’. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

  5. Liddel Water in early December 2010. Author’s photograph.

  6. The Solway Firth near the Lochmaben Stone, August 2014. Author’s photograph.

  7. Statue of King Edward I in Burgh by Sands. © Roger Clegg Photography.

  8. ‘Gilnockie [sic] – or Johnny Armstrong’s Tower (Dumfries-shire)’ by Henry Adlard from an original study by Thomas Allom, 1837. Private collection. Engraving by Henry Adlard from an original study by Thomas Allom, 1837.

  9. Statue of ‘Lang Sandy’ in Rowanburn. © Nigel Cole.

  10. Hermitage Castle, April 2016. Author’s photograph.

  11. ‘A Platt of the opposete Borders of Scotland to ye west marches of England’, drawn by an anonymous cartographer for William Cecil, December 1590. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.

  12. ‘Walter Scott Esqr’. Engraving by Charles Turner after Henry Raeburn, 1810. Yale Center for British Art. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

  13. The Lochmaben Stone near Gretna. © Elliot J. Simpson.

  SECTION TWO

  14. Henry Bullock’s map of the Debatable Land, 1552. Reproduced with permission from The National Archives, ref. MPF1/257.

  15. ‘Mile-Castle near Caw-Fields’. From The Roman Wall by the Rev. John Collingwood Bruce (1851).

  16. The Scots’ Dike (in England) or March Bank (in Scotland), built in 1552. © Elliot J. Simpson.

  17. Thomas Scrope, tenth Baron Scrope of Bolton, and his mother Margaret Howard. Anonymous portrait, c. 1593. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s Picture Library.

  18. Robert Carey, first Earl of Monmouth. Anonymous portrait, c. 1591. © National Trust Images.

  19. Richard Beavis, ‘The Rescue of Kinmont Willie’, 1872. © Bonhams.

  20. Kirkandrews church and graveyard, and the Grahams’ pele tower, March 2016. Author’s photograph.

  21. Hills Tower, Lochfoot, Dumfriesshire, in 1911. Crown Copyright: HES.

  22. The line of the lost Roman road leading from the Debatable Land into Tarras Moss, September 2013. Author’s photograph.

  23. The British Isles according to Ptolemy’s coordinates, plotted by Jacob d’Angelo in Cosmographia Claudii Ptolomaei Alexandrini (1467). National Library of Poland.

  24. A Roman cavalryman trampling a British barbarian, first century AD. In Hexham Abbey. Author’s photograph.

  25. The ‘Border Reiver’ statue (2003) on Kingstown Road, Carlisle. © Roger Clegg.

  List of Figures

  Pagelink The four Border counties in the early twenty-first century.

  Pagelink Ptolemy’s coordinates for the British Isles as plotted in Joan Blaeu’s atlas of Scotland (1654).

  Pagelink Determining the correct graticule for Ptolemy’s coordinates.

  Pagelink Places in Ptolemy’s atlas of the British Isles shown on a modern map.

  Pagelink The towns of the Damnonii, Selgovae and Votadini in relation to the Debatable Land.

  Pagelink The Anglo-Scottish border and the Marches (inset: The Debatable Land).

  Pagelink Surnames of the West Marches and the Debatable Land.

  Pagelink Marriages in and around the Debatable Land and Liddesdale.

  Pagelink A key to Henry Bullock’s ‘platt’ of the Debatable Land, 1552.

  Pagelink The partition of the Debatable Land on Bullock’s ‘platt’.

  Pagelink The colonization of the Debatable Land.

  Pagelink Ptolemy’s map of Albion and Hibernia (Britain and Ireland), with parts of Gaul and Germany.

  Pagelink Ptolemy’s atlas of the British Isles.

  Pagelink Ptolemy’s map of Southern and South-Western England.

  Pagelink Ptolemy’s map of Northern England.

  Pagelink Ptolemy’s map of Caledonia.

  Pagelink An Iron Age buffer zone in the region of the Debatable Land.

  Pagelink The Great Caledonian Invasion (1).

  Pagelink The Great Caledonian Invasion (2).

  A Guide to Pronunciation

  Annan: stress on first syllable

  Arthuret: Arthrut

  Berwick: Berrick

  Buccleuch: Bucloo (stress on second syllable)

  Burgh by Sands: Bruff be Sands

  Carlisle: on pronunciations and spellings, see note 4, here.

  Fenwick: Fennick

  Furness: as ‘furnace’

  Gaelic (Scottish): gaa-lik

  Hawick: Hoik

  Haythwaite: Hethet

  Hepburn: Hebburn

  Hollows: Hollus

  Kershope: Kirsop

  Kielder: Keelder

  knowe (hill): as ‘now’

  Langholm: Lang’um (silent ‘g’)

  Liddesdale: in three syllables

  Lochmaben: Lochmayb’n (stress on second syllable)

  Note o’ the Gate: ‘Note’ as ‘knot’

  pele (tower): peel

  Penton: stress on second syllable (as ‘Penrith’)

  reiver: reever

  Sanquhar: Sankhar (stress on first syllable)
>
  Scrope: Scroop

  Stanegarthside: Stingerside

  Stanwix: Stannix

  Whithaugh: Whitaff

  The four Border counties in the early twenty-first century.

  PART ONE

  1

  Hidden Places

  Early one evening in the autumn of 2010, my wife Margaret and I stood in front of Carlisle railway station in the far north-west of England with two loaded bicycles and a one-way ticket from Oxford. After twenty-three years in the South, we had decided to move to Scotland. The idea was to live closer to my mother – her son and daughter-in-law becoming every day a more distant memory – and to find a home more conducive to those two inseparable pursuits: writing and cycling. By chance, our search had ended just short of Scotland, at a lonely house on the very edge of England. The title deed showed that we would own a stretch of the national border. If Scotland regained its independence – which seemed a remote prospect – we would be custodians of an international frontier.

  During our last months in Oxford, I had read about our future home and discovered that the river which almost surrounds the house had once marked the southern boundary of a region called the Debatable Land. For several centuries, this desolate tract running north-east from the Solway Firth had served as a buffer between the two nations. Within those fifty square miles, by parliamentary decrees issued by both countries in 1537 and 1551, ‘all Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock . . . without any redress to be made for same’. By all accounts, they availed themselves of the privilege. Under Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James V and James VI, the Debatable Land had been the bloodiest region in Britain.

  Finding out about the area as it exists today had proved surprisingly difficult. The name on the postal address, a collective term for a scattering of small settlements and isolated farms, seemed to refer to a mythical place. It was missing entirely from a book titled The Hidden Places of Cumbria (1990); even the long valley in which it lies had remained invisible to the author. When, a few weeks after moving, I mentioned the name of the place to a Carlisle taxi driver, a faraway look appeared in his eyes. ‘I’ve heard of it,’ he said, as though I was asking to be driven to a place out of legend.

  Those days of first contact with the borderlands now seem to belong to a distant past. I had no idea how much there was to be explored and no intention of writing a book about the place in which we had found a home. The history of the area was a threadbare tapestry on which scenes of fruitless chaos in a derelict realm were monotonously depicted. The border itself was little more than a quaint memento of the Anglo-Scottish wars, and there were few signs that it would rise from the enormous burial mound of British history, proclaiming its ancient identity like a sleeping knight to whom life but not memory had been restored.

  Then, under the powerful spell of idle curiosity, documents and maps arrived unbidden: the land and its inhabitants seemed to have become aware that someone was taking an interest in them. The story unfolded itself between 2010 and 2016, and the independent territory which used to exist between Scotland and England began to look like a crucial, missing piece in the puzzle of British history.

  It was towards the end of that period, when the United Kingdom was entering a new and unpredictable world, that I made the two discoveries described in the last part of this book. One was a second-century atlas of Iron Age and Roman Britain so wonderfully accurate that it could still be used today. The other was the earliest account of a major historical event in Britain from a British point of view. The past, too, then seemed to dissolve and reshape itself, and the existence of those ancient documents would have seemed fantastic were it not for the tangible reality of their revelations.

  *

  The country in miniature known as the Debatable Land came to the attention of the outside world in the sixteenth century. Surveyors were sent from London to explore and chart its moors and meadows, its plains and wooded gorges, its bogs and hidden glens. Fifty years later, when most of its population was slaughtered or deported, it became the last part of Great Britain to be conquered and brought under the control of a state.

  The Debatable Land – a name it acquired in the last two centuries of its existence – is the oldest detectable territorial division in Great Britain. Its roots lie in an age when neither England nor Scotland nor even the Roman Empire could be imagined. At the height of its notoriety, it preoccupied the monarchs and parliaments of England, Scotland and France. Today, though some of its boundaries survive as sections of the national border, it has vanished from the map and no one knows exactly where and what it was.

  This book, which I had never expected to write, now seems almost too slender to encompass that magically expanding realm. From its northernmost point, one thousand feet above sea level, to the great estuary into which all its becks, burns, gills, sikes and waters flow, the Debatable Land measures only thirteen miles. The widest crossing is eight and a half miles, and it can be circumambulated – with difficulty – in two days. There are three ranges of hills, one mountain and, when the tide is in, a mile of coastline. A main artery of the British road system passes through it, yet it is quite possible to spend a long day walking across it without seeing another human being, even in the distance.

  In that emptiness, paths stretch far back in time. For several years, I explored every corner of the medieval Debatable Land: I saw in its ruins the remnants of an older civilization, and I knew that this unique survivor of a maligned society had fostered the formation of a United Kingdom. But the mystery of its origins remained intact until those two chance discoveries relaunched the expedition.

  These treasures have implications for a much wider world, but the keys to their decipherment and their long-term significance belong to the Debatable Land. The light of the Border fells, which can suddenly illumine a hidden valley when the rest of the landscape is in darkness, gives even the most extraordinary discovery the air of a natural occurrence. Yet it still seems a wonder to have found in the remotest past of the Anglo-Scottish frontier a path which led back to the present.

  2

  Outpost

  Travellers arriving in the ‘Border City’ of Carlisle on the north-bound train are likely to be taken unawares. One moment, there is a view of scraggly sheep chomping at the foot of a drystone wall as they shelter from the horizontal rain. A moment later, without the warning of any noticeable suburb, the train is pulling into the airy gloom of a Victorian Gothic railway station, and there is just enough time to untether the bicycles and rescue the luggage from the rack.

  A hundred years ago, a train was approaching Carlisle Station from the opposite direction. This was the night express from Scotland, due to arrive in London the following morning. In one of the compartments, a newly married couple were staring out at the black night of the borderlands, watching for the first signs of England. The bulk of a great castle rose on the left and the station lights glimmered up ahead. Lowering the window, the bridegroom leaned out to shout his joy, probably hoping to startle any Englishmen who might be standing on the platform. The station roof was in no better repair than when I first saw it in 2010. A steel cable had become detached from the gantries. Its sagging loop snagged the shouting Scotsman, his body slumped onto the floor of the compartment, and a severed head leapt onto the seat, leaving the young bride in a gruesome tête-à-tête with her late husband as the train screamed on towards the dark Cumbrian fells.

  No trace of this unhappy incident can be found in any newspaper of the time. The story might have been invented to explain the headless ghost which is occasionally seen in the undercroft of Carlisle Station, built in 1847 on a slum clearance area called ‘the Fever Pit’. This sounds like a specimen of North Cumbrian humour served up to tourists who expect to hear tales of cross-border conflict: English patriots exulting at the mishaps of loud-mouthed haggis-eaters, or kilted clansmen wreaki
ng romantic revenge on the stout and stuck-up yeomanry of England.

  Anyone who leaves Carlisle Station on a Saturday night when the pubs of Botchergate are disgorging their clientele stands a reasonable chance of witnessing some inter-tribal violence. The border lies just a few miles to the north at Gretna, and Carlisle is the only significant urban centre between Newcastle, sixty miles to the east, and Dumfries, thirty-five miles to the west. But the battles in the streets of Carlisle are rarely between Scots and English. A few extended local families preserve the traditions of feuding Border clans, but the frightened faces pressed up against a taxi driver’s window, begging to be rescued from a gathering mob, are more likely to be those of lads from Furness, the coastal part of Cumbria, where they say ‘me marrer’ instead of ‘me mate’. Cumbria’s tribal map is as complex as its history. Carlisle itself once belonged to Scotland – as quite a few English people still believe to be the case – which is why the Domesday Book of 1086 contains no mention of Carlisle.

  A great many other books contain no mention of Carlisle. It may be the capital (and only) city of the county of Cumbria and the former western command centre of Hadrian’s Wall, but with its population of seventy-three thousand, Carlisle is a poor relation to the famous, poet-celebrated Lake District, which has an annual tourist population of sixteen million. After a municipal reassessment of the city’s economic potential, a forlorn sign on the station platform now proclaims ‘The Border City’ to be ‘The City of the Lakes’, but most tourists from the South will have alighted long before at Oxenholme or Penrith. The standing water in the vicinity of Carlisle consists mainly of brackish ponds, slurry lagoons and, with increasing frequency, floodwater which submerges a large part of the modern city, leaving the medieval districts high and dry, and inducing the long-suffering burghers of Carlisle to rebrand it ‘The City of the Lake’.

  That evening in 2010, as we stood in front of the station, dazed by the long journey and a sense of the irreparable, Carlisle itself looked like the last place in England. From there, it would be a ride of almost twenty miles to the house, which is why we had booked a room at the County Hotel. It stared at us with its flaking facade from the other side of a car-clogged square, beyond the iron railings of a disaffected public toilet. The bicycles might have been stowed in the removal van, which was travelling overnight, but a bus ran only twice a week – and only to within two miles of the house – and the railway known as the Waverley Line, which once connected Carlisle with Edinburgh, had been closed for forty years. Its closure had transformed an area of a thousand square miles into a vast backwater. One roadless settlement, Riccarton, had been entirely cut off. The only noticeable economic advantage was the depressing effect on house prices.