The Debatable Land Read online

  While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,

  And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume;

  And the bride-maidens whisper’d, ‘’Twere better by far

  To have match’d our fair cousin with young Lochinvar.’

  One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear,

  When they reach’d the hall-door, and the charger stood near;

  So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,

  So light to the saddle before her he sprung! . . .

  There was mounting ’mong Graemes of the Netherby clan;

  Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran:

  There was racing and chasing on Cannobie Lee,

  But the lost bride of Netherby ne’er did they see.

  Netherby has always been a place of disappearances: the clan of Grahams who were dispossessed and transported to Ireland in 1605; the ghosts of two children whose footprints were seen in the dust of a spiral staircase, starting halfway up and ending just as suddenly; Lady Graham’s prized jewellery which was snatched by a murderous ‘ladder gang’ in 1885. But the greatest vanishing of all, and a crime of far greater consequence, was the complete eradication of the ‘strange and great ruins of an ancient Citie’.

  The antiquary John Leland visited Netherby in 1539, when the West Marches were in an unusually peaceful state. All around the Grahams’ pele tower on the south bank of the Esk lay the vestiges of Roman greatness. ‘Ther hath bene mervelus buyldinges, as appere by ruinus walles’. Inscribed stones, urns and altars littered the ground, and in the fields sloping down to the Esk, the foundations of streets and houses were clearly visible. A Roman fort had been established there in the first century AD. In the third century it was known as Castra Exploratorum.

  The most curious find was reported to Leland by some local people: ‘Men alyve have sene rynges and staples yn the walles, as yt had bene stayes or holdes for shyppes.’ The fact, surprising at first sight, is that Netherby had been an inland port. Ships had sailed up the Esk almost to its confluence with the Liddel. Two centuries after Leland’s visit, the ‘great marks of a ruinous Town’ were still in evidence and an elaborate bath-house had been uncovered, though most of the stones had already been absorbed by the growing mansion.

  The name ‘Castra Exploratorum’ – the ‘camp of the scouts’ – is usually interpreted as a sign that this part of the world has always been a backwater. Few people travelling through North Cumbria would naturally imagine a sophisticated urban settlement in which the barbarian ancestors of today’s borderers wore togas and spoke Latin. The ‘exploratores’, however, were not the creeping pathfinders of a remote and fearful outpost nine miles north of Hadrian’s Wall. The name did not refer to the untamed frontier but to the busy river and the sail-flecked sea. ‘Scafae exploratoriae’ were boats used to intercept convoys and to spy on the enemy. The ‘scouts’ themselves would have been the crews of reconnaissance vessels which patrolled the Solway from Castra Exploratorum and protected the merchant shipping. The place to conjure up an image of Roman Netherby is on the thrillingly springy suspension bridge which connects Netherby Hall to the church of Kirkandrews, where the broad and confident Esk stretches away like a highway to the coast.

  A safe inland port on the Esk was a vital strategic asset. A line of forts and earthwork defences – many of them still in evidence – continued Hadrian’s Wall along the Solway Firth and down the Cumbrian coast. At Netherby, the road from Luguvalium (Carlisle) led north to the rich mining and agricultural lands of southern Caledonia. Another road, crossing the Esk here or at the southern edge of the Debatable Land, headed west to the forts of Blatobulgium and Burnswark Hill. This was an important and well-connected settlement which thrived for at least three hundred years. To judge by the many native Celtic finds, it had been a major tribal centre before the Roman invasion. A Roman lady called Titullinia Pussitta, who left the Danube for the Esk and was buried at Netherby under a red sandstone monument, might have been appalled at the progress of barbarism had she seen the place in the eighteenth century: ‘As for the houses of the cottagers, they are mean beyond imagination; made of mud, and thatched with turf, without windows, only one story; the people almost naked.’

  When William Stukeley wrote this in 1725, almost nothing remained of the ‘ancient Citie’. A succession of Grahams, repairing the sins of their reiving forefathers, ‘improved’ Roman Netherby out of existence. The cemetery was swallowed by a shrubbery. A miscellaneous, muddled collection of sculptures, coins and inscribed stones – some from Netherby, others from places unknown – was eventually acquired by the museum in Carlisle, where one of the most popular exhibits from Netherby is a pair of .38 bulldog revolvers used in the famous jewel robbery.

  *

  Eradication of the past is a constant theme of border history. On 17 November 1771, after three days and nights of heavy rain, the Grahams of Netherby woke to find their view to the south-west greatly extended. Distant fields and woods, previously obscured, could now be seen beyond the great bog of Solway Moss. Sodden with rain, the bulging morass had heaved itself up, burst through its crust of peat, and, in a belch of black slime engulfing cottages and cattle, deposited half its mass on four hundred acres of farmland until finally it surged into the raging Esk, leaving behind a huge, foul-smelling basin.

  The eruption of Solway Moss is as much an emblem of the Borders as the pele towers and the salmon rivers. Nothing here is timeless, not even the hills which subside and the rivers which change their course, and especially not loyalties and deep-rooted traditions – traditionally associated with ‘remote’ populations – unless, like the Debatable Land, they served an enduring practical purpose. Rain and floods were ably assisted by human beings. Almost as soon as the Romans stopped maintaining their towns and infrastructure, the great Wall and its forts were pillaged for nicely dressed stones and lintels. The building of Lanercost Priory in the late twelfth century sucked in Roman stone from miles around. The fort of Camboglanna, where ‘several foundations of houses [were] still standing pretty high’ before 1789, was lost to the blight of landscaping when Castlesteads House was built in 1791.

  The tyranny of the weather, the needs and habits of farmers, and, probably, the scarcity of witnesses foster a utilitarian attitude to the natural and historic environment. The woman who took her granny’s gravestone from Canonbie kirkyard and the man who scattered the bones of buried reivers are not entirely exceptional. The inhabitants of a certain Roman site near the Wall have assembled a collection of Roman artefacts known only to themselves and their dinner guests. Stories of marauding reivers are valued more than their material traces. A local man explained to me how he came to acquire some useful stone from a well-known Roman fort on the Wall. Another Liddesdale man, who happens to have the name of a reiver, told me about his garden landscaping which includes a feature referred to by his wife, with good reason, as ‘Hadrian’s Wall’. As a road engineer observed to me, when complaining about a law which forbids him from scooping stones from gravel beds and shingle beaches, ‘It all ends up back in the river anyway, doesn’t it?’

  14

  Windy Edge

  From Netherby, the road follows the Esk, which forms the boundary of the Debatable Land. After Longtown and the busy A7 from Carlisle comes a region where the Border hills are a distant memory. Here, the farms are like islands in the muddy plain. Smells of cowsheds and manure hang in the air and the puddly roads zigzag between hedges towards the sea.

  A Roman road led to a temporary marching camp above the river Sark. It was obliterated by the bunkers of the munitions depot between Longtown and Gretna. The whole area seems to have been given over to infrastructure. As the Solway delta comes into view, so do the railway and motorway bridges, the electricity pylons and, straddling the national border, the remnants of the nine-mile-long First World War cordite factory.

  Though its name is associated with natural scenery, this, too, is the Debatable Land: �
��the greatest factory on Earth’ where twenty thousand workers kept the British army supplied with shells, the biggest sheep market in Britain, the trunk roads to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the west-coast main-line railway which divides on the boundary of the Debatable Land at Gretna Junction. This is a scene to test the resolve and the high spirits of the English couples who come to be married romantically at Gretna Green.

  Where the Esk pushes into the Solway Firth, the world comes to an end. Far out across the sandflats, the tenuous lines of wading birds and their thin cries give a more accurate measure of distance than the shifting sandbanks and shallow river channels. At low tide, it is still possible to splash across the Solway on foot, but the Eden, the Esk, the Kirtle and the Sark change their courses through the sands and it is hard to say exactly where reivers and drovers crossed the border with their cattle. The crossing on the edge of the Debatable Land was the Sulwath or Solewath, a Norse name meaning ‘muddy ford’. Long after the days of reiving, whisky was smuggled across the Solway in carts with secret compartments, hollowed-out cheeses and bladders strapped to dogs and ‘pregnant’ women.

  The English end of the Solewath probably lay near the incongruously perpendicular monument to Edward I on Burgh Marsh. On that spot, in July 1307, the ailing King of England stared out from his tent over the watery sands at the country he was hoping to ravage one last time. Dissolving with dysentery, ‘the Hammer of the Scots’ watched his strength ebb away into the mud and the silt. Even on a clear day, with the sun high in the sky, the hills over the water look like a mirage of the Scottish Highlands.

  The Scottish end of the Solewath is marked by something less antagonistic than a tribute to the genocidal ‘greatest King of England’ (so named by the inscription). A ten-ton lump of glacial granite in a field of cows is not the most obvious memorial to international cooperation, yet the Lochmaben Stone, where England, Scotland and the Debatable Land come together, was for centuries the meeting place of ambassadors and wardens. In the presence of the stone, prisoners were exchanged, legal disputes settled and truces discussed. It was first recorded in 1398 as the ‘Clochmabanestane’. The name itself is a monument to Anglo-Scottish harmony – Gaelic ‘cloch’ and Old English ‘stane’, both meaning ‘stone’, on either side of ‘Maban’ or Maponus, a Celtic god whose name appears on several inscriptions in the region.

  The Lochmaben Stone was once surrounded by a prehistoric stone circle. The attendant menhirs were buried some time before 1841 by a farmer who found them a hindrance to his plough. The meeting point of nations is now quite hard to find. Seen from a distance, it imitates a large hay bale. The footpath sign points implausibly to an area of oily runnels and knee-deep chasms strewn with agricultural rubbish. It may be the low point of a Debatable Land tour in more than one sense, but this mute witness to several centuries of British history is an impressive testament to the durability of tradition and a stern lesson to planning committees and developers. In 2015, when much of Carlisle was under water, the Lochmaben Stone was standing proud on the ocean’s edge where it has stood for five thousand years.

  *

  The Debatable Land is a plateau tilted up towards the north. From the Lochmaben Stone, its western boundary rises four hundred feet in ten miles, following the corkscrew windings of the little river Sark.15 After the Old Toll Bar tearoom at Sark Bridge in Gretna (‘First House in Scotland / Last House in Scotland’) and the 130,000 painted stones of the ‘Auld Acquaintance’ or ‘Hands Across the Border’ cairn inaugurated shortly before the Scottish Referendum by Rory Stewart, member of parliament for Penrith and the Border, nothing indicates the existence of a major frontier. Small roads run along the field boundaries on either side of the Sark towards the worn velvet of the border hills. Apart from the occasional tractor, there is rarely any traffic. Buzzards and curlews are a more common sight than human beings.

  Six miles north of the Solway, a long barrier of trees stretches towards the horizon. This is the embankment called the Scots’ Dike or March Bank, which, since 1552, carries the national border across to the eastern boundary of the Debatable Land at Kirkandrews. Even in these flat and marshy moorlands, the Debatable Land looks like a crossroads of different regions. The hills of four counties create a panorama almost worthy of a mountain-top viewing platform: the granite bulk of Criffel guards the gateway to the Galloway peninsula; the North Pennines mark the edge of Northumberland; the Cumbrian Mountains mass like storm clouds on the horizon; and the hills of Eskdale form the backdrop of the Debatable Land’s northern perimeter, ending at its North Pole, the tawny pyramid of Tinnis Hill.

  Beyond the Scots’ Dike, the road rises gently to a farm called Tower of Sark. The tower, which no longer exists, was the stronghold of the unjustly venerated reiver, Kinmont Willie (here). Across the road, on a cliff above the Sark, a small, weed-strangled cemetery crouches behind crumbling walls. The oldest stones are being eaten by slime and fungus; most have fallen or are stacked in mouldering heaps. In the 1830s, a raised arm brandishing a sword was spotted on one of the stones. This was the crest of the Armstrongs. The name on the stone was William Armstrang of Sark, and the place is still identified as ‘Kinmont Willie’s Grave’, though the William in question was probably born after the death of the old reiver. The verses are now illegible but were recorded before they disappeared:

  Grass decays and man he dies

  Grass revives and man does rise

  For some of the cemetery’s inhabitants, this mystical rebirth has taken a literal form. The badly eroded gravestone of the Beattie family of Sark would be completely indecipherable if rain and dew had not collected in the dimples of the letters and allowed a perfect relief inscription of their names to be raised in mossy tufts.

  A greater mystery is written in all the religious ruins of the Debatable Land. The cemetery at Tower of Sark belonged to a twelfth-century church. Two miles to the north, at the Debatable Land’s north-western tip, another vanished chapel gave its name to Barnglies, from Gaelic ‘eaglais’ (‘church’). On the Mere Burn above the Liddel, where this tour began, the boundary was marked by yet another small chapel, and at least three other churches stood on the eastern perimeter: Kirkandrews (replaced by the present church on a modern, north–south orientation), the Church of Liddel at Canonbie and the original church of St Michael at Arthuret.

  Why were these chapels and churches sited on the boundaries of the Debatable Land? Parish churches normally occur near the convenient centre of a parish rather than on its perimeter. Were the Debatable Land chapels intended to guard its sanctity and prevent its occupation by miscreants and evil spirits? Perhaps these perimeter chapels are proof of a steady and ancient state of concord protecting the pastures of the ‘batable’ land which only later became ‘debatable’. Carvings, place names and Viking burials show that many Cumbrian churches were already established in the ninth century. In 1517, when the Armstrongs and Grahams began to build within the hallowed precincts, how much weight of history and tradition was pushed aside and consigned to oblivion?

  *

  From Barnglieshead, the northern boundary strikes out across a region of peat bogs and plantations which might be in deepest Galloway. The breeze from the Solway and the Carlisle Plain brings the oceanic sounds of a vast landscape. After a formidable forestry gate, which an Olympic-strength acrobat with extendable arms would have no trouble negotiating with a bicycle, the tarmacked road becomes a wide track surfaced with fist-sized gravel. It cuts straight across a heathy bog from which almost the entire Debatable Land can be seen.

  On just such a moorland highway, the hero of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps flees across Galloway on an old bicycle. For a fugitive reiver, the long views might have been reassuring, but that was before technology had given the advantage to the oppressor:

  I was on the central boss of a huge upland country, and could see everything moving for miles . . . Half a mile back, a cottage smoked, but it was the only sign of human life. Otherwise there was only the calli
ng of plovers and the tinkling of little streams. . . . Then I saw an aeroplane coming up from the east . . .

  This magnificent, empty road is the ‘dry march’ of the ‘Bateable grounds’ mentioned in the 1597 description of the boundaries. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was the main road to Langholm from the south-west. For hundreds of years, this would have been a familiar sight to travellers bound for the border passes and the Scottish Lowlands: an arrow-straight road pointing directly at the peak of Tinnis Hill, whose Cumbric name means ‘hill fort’.

  On the unmarked boundaries of the Debatable Land, time seems to thicken like the boggy moors after heavy rain: it is easy to forget not only in which country one is travelling but also in which age. Long before the days of the turnpike, this was an artery of the northern Roman road system centred on the fort and tribal capital at Newstead on the river Tweed. Like many Roman roads, it probably followed the trajectory of an earlier, British road. This spectacular orientation on a prominent hill fort is typical of native tracks adopted by the Romans.

  As though to confirm its ancestry, when the road spirals down to the confluence of the ravinous Irvine Burn and the Esk, beyond the embankments of the A7, it offers another view from ancient Britain: a grassy plateau suspended high above the river. Even on a dull day, the luminous meadow of Broomholm Knowe catches the sun. In 1950, a Roman fort was discovered there. It had been built on an earlier settlement of the native British.

  Placed at the northern end of the Esk corridor, the boundary fort of Broomholm mirrors the fort and settlement of Netherby at its southern end. Here again, in the obvious and exact relationship between an ancient site and the medieval boundaries of the Debatable Land, a geographical coincidence took on the appearance of a clue.