The Debatable Land Page 20
Changes of Times surely cannot be small,
When Jesters rise and Archbishops fall.
Perhaps it was the ultimate fate of the reivers to provide entertainment, just as they now play a leading role in Cumbrian and Borders tourism. The antics of Richard Graham and Archie Armstrong are reminders of the sheer callous fun of reiving in its glory days, when humble farmers played practical jokes on the high and mighty, burned down their houses and mills, galloped over the mosses under a harvest moon and stole anything that moved. ‘By my soul’, an old reiver returning from a raid is said to have exclaimed when passing an unusually large haystack, ‘Had ye but four feet, ye should not stand lang there!’
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After 1629, there are no more substantial records of the Debatable Land as a recognizable entity. The last sign that its boundaries lived on in local memory dates from nearly two centuries after its partition. One day in 1740, the rector of Kirkandrews set out to trace the limits of his parish. He reached the river Sark, where the boundary of the former Debatable Land coincides with the border between England and Scotland. In talking to his parishioners, he discovered that parts of the national border had been misplaced. Tradition was so tenacious that the local people could have drawn a map more accurate than that of any cartographer: ‘From the foot of Sark, up Sark to the Scotch Dike, [the border] frequently crosses Sark and follows old water courses, which are known by the inhabitants of both sides.’
This is one of the inconspicuous gems which occasionally wash up on the storm-battered beach of Border history. To the people of the border, the frontier followed the river – but the river as it had run in the distant past, when the Debatable Land was still a separate country. In their eyes, the landscape lived in four dimensions, the shadows of its earlier selves coexisting with the actual scene like the familiar ghosts of ancestors seated at the fireside.
This meant that some parts of England and Scotland were stranded in the opposite country. In a future dis-United Kingdom, when the Sark decides again, as it sometimes does, to move its bed, it might provide English and Scottish property lawyers with some lucrative complications. Even now, there may be some English fields along the Sark which, historically, belong to Scotland, and vice versa.44
Though something of its a-national spirit survives, almost no one living here today knows where the Debatable Land began and ended or even what it was. Some local visitors to the house, when I identified the land across the Liddel as a country that was once neither Scotland nor England, have found it quite plausible that their ancestors didn’t give a hoot about nationality; others said, simply, ‘Sounds like a good idea!’ As for historians, few consider the disappearance of the Debatable Land significant. Most are unaware of its exceptional nature and lump it together with the rest of the border badlands. On a background of national politics, it seems an exotic but irrelevant vestige of local tradition, the domain of ethnology rather than history, doomed to disappear along with the pele towers and the reivers. Having no equivalent in British history, the Debatable Land is easily ignored – a country independent of the two kingdoms, sustained but not created by official treaties, and dating from a time when neither England nor Scotland nor the idea of them existed.
23
Silence
In 2013, for the first time in more than three hundred years, the borderlands felt the tug and pressure of the two great nations on either side. It was as though something previously believed to be immovable had shifted and could no longer be taken for granted. At church, in the village hall, on the roads and lonnings and on the cross-border 127 bus, there were quiet, anxious conversations which contrasted with the strident voices on the radio.
Far away in southern England, there was only the faintest perception of what was coming, and the polls suggested in any case that a referendum on the question of Scottish independence, to be held in September 2014, would result in a clear defeat for the Scottish nationalists. But in Scotland – in Glasgow and Edinburgh and parts of Perthshire – I had seen entire streets festooned with Scottish flags. Some windows were entirely blotted out by the cross of St Andrew.
A special kind of history was evolving on both sides in which every battle and belief was tattooed with an indelible dividing line. The Debatable Land belonged to a different history, curiously in keeping with the spirit in which its present inhabitants faced the gathering storm. A few Border families had had their ‘bravehearts’ and unionists, but to most borderers, as to their twenty-first-century Liddesdale descendants, ‘independence’ in the current sense would still have meant subservience to a state.
With the two nations fighting an increasingly bitter political battle, these expeditions into the land that was once neither Scottish nor English should have become a picturesque irrelevance, yet they took on an incongruous urgency. The boundaries of the Debatable Land might soon be resurrected as a frontier, and it seemed more important than ever to discover the age and origins of the country between the two kingdoms.
All I knew, however, was that, despite the persistence of its boundaries, and apart from two temporary Roman camps, the Debatable Land had been uninhabited from the end of the Bronze Age to the age of Grahams and Armstrongs (here). Two place names – Wobrethills and Brettalach – might refer to an aboriginal British population, but the assortment of material evidence was ridiculously meagre: a rein-guide, a jug, a buried hoard and two drowned cows.
In the face of this silence, there was nothing more to be said. At that distance in time, the historical vista was as impenetrable as the moors and mosses when a Liddesdale drow has descended. That vast gap in the archaeological record was a discovery in itself, but there were no human voices to explain the emptiness, only the river of the ‘loud dale’, proclaiming the ancient boundary with its noise.
* * *
One morning in early summer when it was just warm enough to write out of doors, I was sitting on a bank above the Liddel making the final changes to a book on the surveying skills of the ancient Celts. The sheet in front of me was a reproduction of the only ancient map on which the approximate location of the future borderlands can be surmised. Ptolemy’s map of Britain, created in Alexandria in the second century AD, consists of one hundred and sixteen place names dotted about a hopelessly distorted outline of the British Isles. The section which appears to cover what are now the Borders shows a small scattering of towns, rivers and estuaries.
In a fantasy film, the map could be fed into a computer and forced to yield its secrets with the magic word, ‘Enhance!’ But even a fantasy computer would struggle to make sense of Ptolemy’s map: many of the places have never been identified and the names that can be attached to real sites appear to be wildly misplaced.
Over in the Debatable Land, I heard a rumble above the rushing of the river. A flock of sheep had just seen their hay being delivered by the farmer and were galloping towards the feast. At that moment, I realized that if the map did by some remote chance contain any usable information about this far-flung corner of the Roman Empire, there was a means of finding it out.
PART FOUR
24
Graticules
Somewhere in the Great Library of Alexandria, in about AD 150, a local scholar named Klaudios Ptolemaios (or Ptolemy) sat amongst a huge and miscellaneous collection of scrolls and tablets from all corners of the earth. Thanks to the library’s aggressive acquisitions policy – confiscating and copying any documents found on ships putting in at Alexandria – there were sailors’ logbooks, travellers’ diaries, ‘itineraries’ which gave estimates of distances and sometimes directions where no roads existed, and first-hand reports from merchants who had prospected the routes and resources of distant lands long before the arrival of the Roman army. There were even some ‘precise maps’, painted on wooden boards or etched on metal plates.
Ptolemy’s ambition was to create a map of the entire known world ‘by using the researches of those who have visited the places, or the positions of those places on the mo
re accurate charts’. The maps of particular regions on wood or metal were naturally of great value, but, as Ptolemy explained in the introduction to his eight-volume Geography, these were painted landscapes rather than mathematical descriptions. The information he prized above all took the form of coordinates which had been obtained using the latest scientific techniques. Only astronomical measurements, he believed, could produce a reliable map.
His main source was a world map composed but never completed by a Greek mathematician, Marinus of Tyre, who had probably died by the time Ptolemy started work. Marinus had assigned coordinates of latitude and longitude to every place, defining its exact position on the earth. This is the method which Ptolemy adopted. In effect, he digitized the information.
Each section of his ‘map’ listed and located the poleis (‘towns’) of each region, with the names of the tribes to whom they belonged, as well as river mouths, estuaries, headlands and islands. This, for example, is part of the section which details the towns and tribes of southern Caledonia (lowland Scotland):
. . . To the east of the Selgovae and farther north live the Damnonii, whose towns are:
Colanica
20° 45'
59°
Vindogara
21° 40'
60°
Coria
21° 30'
59° 20'
Alauna
22° 45'
59° 50'
A painted map would have disappeared centuries ago, but in the superficially tedious form of lists of numbers, Ptolemy’s world map was able to traverse the centuries. The text of his Geography was rediscovered in the late thirteenth century, and when its eight thousand coordinates of towns, rivers, islands, bays and headlands were plotted on parchment, the ancient world appeared as fresh as though Ptolemy himself had just unfurled his great scroll on the floor of the Library of Alexandria.
Contemplating this masterpiece today, when the astronomical measurements prized by Ptolemy are so refined that the global position of a blade of grass can be determined in an instant, the inadequacies of the map are obvious. As Ptolemy knew all too well, the quality of the information varied. Some travellers had recorded their geographical observations in ‘a crude manner’, ‘perhaps because it was not yet understood how useful the more mathematical mode of investigation is’. Both he and Marinus had continually revised their maps as new information arrived, but for remote regions, unvisited by people with ‘scientific training’, only the older, unsophisticated varieties of map were available.
How much accurate information could one expect to obtain, for example, from those foggy isles whose shores were sometimes visible from the north coast of Gaul? The conquest of Britannia had not begun until AD 43, and it was only in AD 84 that a ship of the Roman fleet had circumnavigated the island now called Great Britain. The names on the British section of Ptolemy’s world map suggest that he had been forced to work with antiquated data. The ‘Legio II Augusta’, located below Isca (Exeter), had operated there in the AD 50s. Several towns had their original British rather than Roman names. The island of Great Britain itself was labelled with its older name, ‘Albion’. Modern, astronomical readings were available for only nine places in the British Isles.
Even if the information had been accurate, there was another problem to solve. The coordinates of latitude and longitude have to be plotted on a grid or ‘graticule’, from the Latin craticula, meaning a finely woven lattice. Unless the dimensions of the graticule are known, the coordinates are practically worthless and the resulting map is about as useful as a blank chess board or a treasure map scaled to the paces of an unknown species.
Ptolemy derived his graticule, in part, from what he took to be the distances separating lines of latitude. The farther north, the shorter the distances. Accordingly, for each part of his world map, he specified a different grid: ‘2 by 3’ for Gaul, ‘approximately 11 by 20’ for the British Isles, and so on. These were simply educated guesses. The main point was to enable readers to draw their own copies of the map. The more names there were to fit on the map, the larger the ‘boxes’ of the graticule.
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This digital map kit is one of the great wonders and disappointments of the ancient world. When the British coordinates are plotted on Ptolemy’s specified grid of 11 by 20, the tantalizing wealth of geographical data grows dull like a glinting stone removed from a clear pool. Assembled according to Ptolemy’s instructions, the map is ludicrously inaccurate (fig. 7). Some places appear on the wrong coast, Scotland has swung ninety degrees to the east on a giant hinge located somewhere along the future Anglo-Scottish border, and the region of the Debatable Land seems to have vanished into the pit of ignorance.
The queer contortions of Ptolemy’s map are assumed to reflect the ancients’ hazy view of the world. The Romans certainly harboured some bewilderingly erroneous conceptions of European geography, but Rome was not the only scientific civilization in Western Europe. After studying the art and technology of the ancient Celts of Gaul and Britannia, I was full of admiration for the precision of their science, and so I wondered: what if the original data obtained in Britain had been accurate? Perhaps it had become muddled only when Ptolemy pieced it all together and fitted it to his grid . . .
Ptolemy’s coordinates for the British Isles as plotted in Joan Blaeu’s atlas of Scotland (1654).
I chose two places whose ancient locations are known – Londinium (London) and Camulodunum (Colchester). Then I stretched the grid in both directions, horizontally and vertically, until both places were correctly positioned relative to each other. This produced a graticule of 4 by 3 instead of Ptolemy’s 11 by 20. Logically, if the data had been accurate, all the other known places would now appear on the map in their correct positions – which would mean, of course, that the unknown places could also be identified.
I made the necessary adjustments, using the ‘resize’ function in Microsoft’s ‘Paint’ program, and with that simple operation, the mechanism which had seemed damaged beyond repair began to tick like a well-regulated clock. Not only London and Colchester but also all the other known towns appeared in their proper locations.
Correcting Ptolemy’s map. Left: London (54° 00', 20° 00') and Colchester (55° 00', 21° 15'), using Ptolemy’s suggested graticule of 11 by 20. Right: on a graticule of 4 by 3, the two places are correctly positioned. Applied to the rest of the map of southern England (fig. 10), this graticule reveals a remarkably accurate map of the entire area.
A few hours later on the same day, in accordance with the staring-us-in-the-face-all-along phenomenon, I noticed that the solution had been spelled out on the pages I was correcting by the river. I had discovered that, unlike the Romans, who attached no particular significance to one ratio or another, the tribes of Gaul and southern Britain had organized their urban settlements according to certain basic ratios. The ratio used in Britain had been 4:3 – the same ratio which had just opened the way back to the ancient borderlands.
Despite their practical uses, mathematical ratios have an aura of esoteric mystery – especially when applied to Celts and Druids. But here, in the restored map of southern England, was a radiant confirmation, with as many particular proofs as there are towns on Ptolemy’s map. The ratio of 4 and 3 produces a perfect ‘Pythagorean’ 3–4–5 triangle. It now appeared that this simple formula had been used with spectacular success in the mapping of southern Britannia.
Discoveries like this often turn up at the last minute like chaotic, luggage-laden travellers. My publishers were hard at work on the final details of the book on the ancient Celts, and the four-hundred-page balloon was already sufficiently inflated. It would have been inconsiderate, to say the least, to come rushing up with another load for the creaking basket. The book would have to be launched as it was. But another journey was beginning. In the distant past, I could see a well-charted landscape of rivers and towns and, by implication, roads that might lead back to the borderlands, and although the details of tha
t journey had yet to be worked out, the Debatable Land in its earliest days no longer seemed entirely beyond reach.
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Three years before, we had travelled up from the south of England to the borderlands. This time, the journey would take place on paper and two thousand years in the past. The task now was to check that the navigational equipment was reliable, which meant working out how the map had been produced.45
With its tin and gold mines, Britain had long been a target for merchants. In the sixth century BC, a trader or explorer from the Greek port of Massilia had walked the length of Britain. Either by Luguvalium (Carlisle) or a more easterly route, Pytheas of Marseille had passed through the borderlands with no more trouble than King James’s favourite cow (here). Since then, sailors from Gaul and Spain had called at ports on both sides of the Irish Sea and travelled far inland in search of minerals and exotic merchandise. This would explain why Ptolemy’s map includes eleven ‘towns’ in Ireland, which no Roman army ever visited.
Some of the charts and periploi (written descriptions of sea routes) used by maritime merchants would have provided Ptolemy with the coastal information he needed for his map. Most of the coastal features can be identified, but they were plotted far less accurately than the towns. The reason is that distances at sea were calculated by the time it took to sail from one port or headland to the next. Easy sailing contracted the apparent distances; adverse conditions had the opposite effect.
On land, with measuring instruments placed on a stable surface, more accurate information can be obtained. This was the second key to understanding the map. The coastal coordinates have to be treated as an entirely separate set of data. With his passion for completeness, Ptolemy tried to fit the two discrepant sets of data together. To assemble the map of Ireland, for instance, believing the maritime data and the land data to be compatible in their original forms, he squeezed the coastal locations to give the impression that the eleven towns stretched from coast to coast. In reality, they cover little more than half the island.