The Debatable Land Page 12

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  Beyond Broomholm, the nightmare section of the Debatable Land tour begins. On a map scaled to journey time instead of distance, the northern section would be many times larger than the rest. I first approached the north-eastern corner from Broomholm, following the torrent of Tarras Water to the edge of Bruntshiel Moss. Tarras Water surges out of Tarras Moss, where the outlawed Armstrongs took refuge from the English warden Robert Carey in the summer of 1601 (ch. 21). They camped with all their possessions on dry ‘islands’ in the bog. ‘Tarras . . . was of that strength, and so surrounded with bogges and marish [marshy] grounds, and thicke bushes and shrubbes, as they feared not the force nor power of England nor Scotland, so long as they were there.’

  The torrent itself used to be famous as the subject of a cautionary rhyme –

  Was ne’er ane drown’d in Tarras, nor yet in doubt,

  For e’er the head can win doun, the harns are out

  – meaning that you’re in no danger of drowning in Tarras Water because it will dash your brains out first.

  A rough-looking man was striding down the track towards Broomholm and, unusually in these parts, passed without a greeting. He seemed to be staring at a mental image and moved at such a speed that I instinctively looked at his hands for the bloodied weapon or the poacher’s trap. As it wound up from the burn, the track ran alongside a stock fence, and a herd of similarly wild-eyed Galloway cattle galloped away at the shock of seeing a human being on two wheels. After that, the only signs of life were the forest finches which dart at waist-height from one gorse bush to the next.

  The goal of this stage of the expedition was the haunch of Tinnis Hill beyond Bruntshiel Moss. On the edge of the Tinnisburn Forest, the 1552 map of the Debatable Land shows a dark-green eminence called ‘Toplyff hille’ and then the highest and northernmost point of the Debatable Land: a monolith labelled ‘Standyng stane’. On modern maps, the area is named Windy Edge.

  I gave up the attempt to reach Windy Edge from the south-west and eventually took a more easterly route, which proved just as damp and arduous. Where the track petered out, I laid the bicycle down among the bentgrass. It disappeared from view within a few steps and so I memorized its location using as reference points a hilltop, the straight edge of a distant fir plantation and a fallen tree, which was the only useful landmark for half a mile.

  Now that the Ordnance Survey updates its cartographic data from the air, nothing on the map distinguishes the Queen’s Mire from the peat bog below Tinnis Hill. While the former had been exhausting but manageable, the latter was soft and intimidating: it sparkled like a jewel box and yielded like a trap door. It did not have the simple colour coding of mountain bogs with their gleaming, light-green morasses. A tip for borderline bog-walkers, which I discovered by trial and mostly error, is that the muscular thistle which suggests solidity grows on a suddenly descending platform of moss, whereas the reeds and rushes, normally to be avoided, are firmly rooted in stubborn tussocks. The real danger is not the clinging quagmire but the likelihood of a twisted ankle. The whole process is so absorbing that it is easy to walk a long way into the bog without noticing how far one has travelled.

  It was obvious why the wardens and their troops never followed the reivers into the mosses, but how had a reiver’s pony ever managed to totter across these peaty pools and crevasses? To recreate a journey in the past, it is usually necessary to imagine all sorts of additional discomforts, but the mosses are more treacherous now than they were five hundred years ago. Non-native conifers planted for profit have covered most of the mountain’s lower slopes. The trees are planted so close together that their branches interlock in the lifeless gloom like the bars of a cage. Where the giant machines called harvesters have snatched up the trunks and shaved them, the brash lies on the bog like the covering of an elephant trap. The peat built up over millennia has been gashed at unpredictable angles and intervals by ditches which drain the sphagnum and cottongrass of their moisture and send the water rocketing down into the brown, swollen rivers.

  Tinnisburn Forest is a ‘sustainable resource’ in the sense that the devastation can be sustained indefinitely. No bog-trotting pony would ever have traversed those moats and entanglements. It was strange to think that barely two miles separated this forest Armageddon from the roads from which I had often seen the mountain looking down over Liddesdale. Only two patches of the original terrain have been spared. One surrounds a small stone which commemorates the death of a slater from Castleton who was struck by lightning on 29 July 1805. The other is a stretch of heath at the top of the forest on Windy Edge, where the Debatable Land reaches its highest point, one thousand feet above sea level.

  The standing stone depicted on the 1552 map leans heavily at the end of a long scatter of grey rubble. This is the ruin of a ‘chambered cairn’ or ‘gallery grave’ of a type found in Ireland and south-western Scotland. When the stone became a boundary marker of the Debatable Land, like the Lochmaben Stone thirteen miles to the south-west, no one would have known its original purpose. Celtic civilization reached Britain in about 800 BC, by which time this burial site of a forgotten ruler was already more than three thousand years old. Perhaps, like other such monuments on the Anglo-Scottish border, the cairn and the stone always marked a boundary, but there are, of course, no prehistoric documents to tell us, and the landscape is unreliable. In this part of Britain, it can change from one week to the next, when a plantation is felled, or over several years, when the black wall of spruce slowly blots out the view which a previous generation had taken for granted.

  On Windy Edge, commercial forestry has eradicated one of the most valuable clues to the historical meaning of a site. Near the chambered cairn, a narrow swathe in the forest gives a blinkered view south towards Canonbie. I could see the mists processing up Liddesdale and the grey veil of the Solway at high tide, but nothing else. The bare summit of Tinnis Hill lay just behind to the north, looking much higher but also closer than the map suggested: from there, the view must be tremendous . . . But since Tinnis Hill lies outside the Debatable Land, I postponed the pleasure of making its acquaintance and returned through the forest to find the bicycle not yet swallowed by the bog. Nearby, a forestry track leads down along the Mere Burn, where the ruined chapel marks the boundary, and finally to the B road from Newcastleton to Canonbie. The burn then descends through native woodland to the broadening Liddel, which enters the Debatable Land with a serenity that belies the cataracts to come.

  15

  ‘In Tymis Bigane’

  This circumambulation of the country between Scotland and England had consisted of several coincident journeys to very different periods. Roman roads ran along three sides of it and in one case formed the boundary itself. Two Iron Age British settlements stood at its main entry points in the north and south. The Roman forts which replaced them had been vital links in the northern British network. One of those forts – Castra Exploratorum – had controlled the road to Luguvalium (Carlisle) as well as the north-western seaboard. Only two or three centuries after the Romans had abandoned Britain to the barbarians, chapels were built on the boundaries. Some of the streams forming those boundaries had Old Norse or Old English names – ‘rae’, ‘mere’, ‘har’ – suggesting that they had marked off a distinct territory long before the earliest written records of the Debatable Land.

  This varied realm of moor and meadow was quite unlike the other ‘debatable lands’ of the Borders. It was not a small, anonymous patch of ground far from any settlement but an extensive zone of great strategic importance. For a thousand years, armies had fought on its perimeter. The Debatable Land had been the eye of the storm, an unpopulated but well-managed country, governed only by ancient tradition. The sloping plateau with its panoramic corniches under high ridges might almost have been designed to be visually policed. Some of the terrain was wild and inaccessible, but much of it was indeed ‘batable’: the cattle and sheep which grazed its woodland and grew fat on its pasture had always kno
wn its value. Most of it had never been ‘waste’. Even in the 1980s, farmers in the former Debatable Land considered the old, unimproved fields near the original farmhouse to be of greater worth than the modern, artificially fertilized land.

  The unexpectedly sharp outlines of the Roman and pre-Roman Debatable Land suggested that the clues to its unique significance might lie in a very distant past. But the idea of discovering the earliest origins of the Debatable Land in the infinity of unrecorded history was, of course, a pipe dream. How far back would it be possible to go in a land whose illiterate inhabitants destroyed more than they preserved and whose principal legacy consists of ruined towers and historically dubious ballads? Before the 1400s, written documents are sparse. In 1297, the archives of Scotland were seized by Edward I and taken back to London, where most of them disappeared. When the national archives were finally returned to Scotland in 1948, they consisted of barely two hundred documents.

  The boundaries of the Debatable Land, however, had been vivid and consistent. They were invariably described as ‘ancient’. The word sometimes meant ‘former’, like the French ‘ancien’, but in the fifteenth century, it already had the modern sense of ‘far back in time’. The oldest documents which mention ‘the landez called batable landez’ (1449–57) refer to a very long-standing agreement that the region was to remain unoccupied: the boundaries had ‘always’ been there, ‘aforetyme’ or ‘in tymis bigane’.

  In 1580, they were said to stand where they had stood in the reign of Edward VI, which takes us back to 1550. But in 1550, the Debatable Land was already believed to have ‘remained undivided’ since the days of Robert the Bruce. This was a reference to the treaty of 1328, in which the border was dated to the days of Alexander III, who acceded to the throne in 1249. No doubt it was ‘ancient’ even then. In 1245, the knights who walked along the border line were following a document or a verbal ‘map’ from ‘the time of King John and his predecessors’. This was presumably an allusion to William Rufus, the son of the Conqueror, who had driven the Scots out of Cumbria in 1092.

  At this remote extremity, where the trail of documents ends, the Debatable Land itself becomes wonderfully eloquent. That oddly persistent western boundary, the tiny river Sark, is such a paltry obstacle that it can easily be crossed on foot. This was clearly a boundary set by consensus rather than conquest. As a national border, it seems out of place in the early Middle Ages, when frontiers were marked by the great rivers of Esk, Liddel, Tweed, Forth and Humber.

  The Sark, with its obscure Brittonic name, belongs to an even earlier age. The main river of the Debatable Land is the Esk, but it lies at the heart, not on the confines of the little country. This may reflect the way in which rivers were used by the people who lived along their banks: they were often shared thoroughfares rather than obstacles, impossible to demarcate and fence. The trickling Sark, by contrast, is a thread of steel, its integrity maintained for centuries by something even stronger than a body of raging water.

  Only then, when I tried to trace the Debatable Land beyond the age of its notoriety, did it occur to me that in all the early medieval charters and land grants which list every hill, stream and farm of the surrounding baronies and estates, I had never seen any of the place names of the Debatable Land. A few were shown on Bullock’s map of 1552 (here); most were not recorded until 1605. The only exception was a vaguely located corner of land called Brettalach (here).

  This absence from the legal record is intriguing. Before the 1500s, no one ever claimed possession of that useful tract of land. Neither the Barony of Liddel, created in the early 1100s, nor the older parishes of Canonbie and Kirkandrews – apart from the holm between Liddel and Esk – explicitly included the Debatable Land. The northern boundary of the later parish of Canonbie is quite different from that of the Debatable Land. Parish boundaries, in any case, meant nothing to the natives who could trace the limits of the Debatable Land in minute detail. In 1604, when its boundaries were as familiar to local people as a mother’s face, ‘the bounder of the forest of Nicholl’ (the parish of Nicholforest) was ‘not knowne by anie of the antient [people] ther dwellinge, neither have ye Commissioners anie meanes in ye Countrie to decide the same’.

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  The Debatable Land is so closely tied to medieval history that I had not thought to look deeper into the past by consulting the archaeological rather than historical records. I knew something of the Roman remains, but the pre-medieval Debatable Land belonged to a different stage of civilization. What possible connection could it have with the world referred to as ‘the modern period’ (from the early sixteenth century to the present)? Now, as I picked through the wordless relics of the pre-modern borderlands, I began to see, as though approaching a familiar place from an unfamiliar direction, the uncanny depths of the Debatable Land’s foundations.

  Before the first pele towers in the early 1500s, there were the medieval or Anglo-Saxon chapels and the two Roman forts and British settlements which had stood on the perimeter. In the Debatable Land itself, there were not only no settlements, there was practically nothing human at all. From the end of Roman rule (c. AD 400) to the age of the Armstrongs and Grahams – a period spanning more than one thousand years – in all thirty-three thousand acres of the Debatable Land, the archaeological record is almost completely blank (fig. 6). The only signs of human activity between the Roman conquest and the 1500s are a bronze jug with three legs, two dead animals and a hoard of miscellaneous treasures.

  The jug was unearthed at Whitlawside near the Debatable Land’s eastern boundary. It has been dated roughly to the period AD 1100–1499, though it may have been handed down as an heirloom and reached its final resting place in the Debatable Land only later. The two animals were cows whose remains were found in a peat bog a short distance east of the river Sark. The archaeologists’ report gives a radiocarbon dating of ‘between AD 684 and 947’ and suggests ‘a ritual motive’. Ritual or not, the remains are consistent with the ancient law which allowed livestock to be pastured on the Debatable Land between sunrise and sunset. To judge by the name of the nearby Drownedcow Moss, they were not alone in meeting a soggy end.

  The only definite human traces in the pre-1500s Debatable Land are those of a man or a woman who must have scrambled up from Canonbie Priory through the decayed Roman camp of Gilnockie to the point where the Solway Firth gleams in the distance and the view opens up in all directions. Some time after 1307, a hole was dug in ground which now belongs to the farm of New Woodhead. A hoard of rings, brooches, beads and coins was buried. The newest coins were pennies and halfpennies bearing the head of Edward II (r. 1307–27). The owner or purloiner of the treasure then left the scene, never to return.

  This extraordinary absence of material traces over such a vast stretch of time suggests a remarkable, perhaps unprecedentedly long-lasting observance of a rule by a supposedly unruly society. In all those years, in the ebb and flow of conquest, with the great tides of Strathclyde and Northumbria sweeping in and being driven back, the Debatable Land had remained intact and unspoiled. For century after century, when the setting sun had turned the Solway into a shining sea of blood, the pastures, moors and hills of the Debatable Land must have been one of the quietest parts of Britain.

  The ‘batable’ land, I now knew, had not been uninhabited because it was uninhabitable. The tracts of ‘wasteland’ lay beyond its boundaries, and even its mosses and moors had been grazed by livestock. But who were the people whose laws and traditions had preserved its integrity? Among the Old Norse, Old English, Gaelic and Brittonic place names of the Debatable Land, there are two which contain the relatively uncommon word ‘Brettas’ or ‘Bretar’. In 1190, a certain area – perhaps the flood-prone meadows by Canonbie – was referred to as Brettalach. Some higher ground to the north, around Windyhill, was recorded in 1661 as Wobrethills. ‘Bret’ place names first appeared in the ninth century. They were given to enclaves of the surviving native population which was there when the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons a
rrived. The Romans had known these people as ‘Britanni’ or Britons. Since ‘Briton’ now has a wider sense, they are usually referred to as Celts.

  There is no direct connection between Border clans and ancient Celtic tribes. The family names of the borderers are Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic. But in the organization of the Debatable Land itself, there are distinct features of ancient Celtic society: the cattleraiding economy, the creation and maintenance of an extensive neutral zone, the use of tiny streams as major frontiers and the adoption of prehistoric monuments as boundary markers – the standing stone below Tinnis Hill and the Lochmaben Stone at the mouth of the Sark.

  Were these the people who first drew the boundaries of that undefended and unassailable fortress? If so, could its origins be traced back to the days of the Romans and even beyond? Perhaps the siting of those Roman roads and forts and their British predecessors at Netherby and Broomholm was not coincidental but a sign that the boundaries had been respected even then. This time, returning to the archaeological records, I pursued the search as far as it could go . . .

  There it was again: the strange, yawning gap. Apart from the temporary Roman camps, there was a void of more than two thousand years. The Stone Age and the Bronze Age were represented by cairns and stone circles, weapons, tools and utensils. But the entire Celtic Iron Age (c. 800 BC–AD 600) had nothing to show but a small copper terret (a rein-guide) discovered in a field to the west of Canonbie. The Iron Age had been an age of technological innovation, of agricultural improvement and population growth, yet the ancient Celts appeared to have left the Debatable Land almost completely unlittered and unoccupied.

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  That curious alcove of British history now looked like a vast and unexplorable cave system. The chronicle would have to begin in the early sixteenth century with the mountain of maps and official documents. How and why the Debatable Land had come into existence would, I thought, remain obscure, and its verifiable history would be the story of its disappearance and destruction.