The Debatable Land Read online

  The zone’s political significance is easier to grasp. Its nearest equivalent in the Roman Empire is the tribal frontier zone ‘of doubtful ownership’ between the Rhine and the Danube. This Debatable Land of Germania had a similar history. It was eventually invaded by ‘worthless vagabonds’ from Gaul who, like the Armstrongs and Grahams, involuntarily acted as the spearhead of a greater power. Its integrity destroyed, it was swallowed by the Roman Empire, primarily so that its inhabitants could be taxed. In both cases, borders established for the purposes of trade and cooperation became barriers to be exploited for financial and political ends.

  * * *

  As the day of the Scottish Referendum drew near, I often looked at the map of the kingdom of Selgovia. The Solway Firth, where one country seems to pull away from the other, was not an ancient border after all. It had been no more a boundary to the people of the Iron Age than it was to the oystercatchers and the barnacle geese. After the Romans, it had belonged to the kingdom of Strathclyde, which straddled the future border. Only much later was this kingdom which embraced both sides of the Solway divided. That division, which now seems such an essential feature of British history, had lasted only five hundred years, and for much of that time, England and Scotland had been officially at peace. The frontier zone shared by three powerful tribes had continued to serve its purpose, and when the two modern nations had united, its spirit had lived on. Now, there was a real possibility that they would be separated again.

  The Celtic tribes of the borderlands proved that independent nations could form a stable partnership. Ptolemy’s map and the history of the Debatable Land could be used to support rational arguments on either side of the independence debate. But the tone of the debate was aggressive and the references to Anglo-Scottish history were becoming increasingly dubious. The Border ballads were read as evidence of fierce national pride. Even some academic historians seemed to guide the hand of history towards a ‘Yes’ vote. One scholar claimed in a study of the Scottish Middle March that cross-border marriages had been a myth invented by the English: ‘Reports of them were partly the result of English scaremongering.’ The absence of marriage contracts was held to prove that interbreeding had not been prevalent – though it is hard to imagine illiterate reivers postponing their wedding feasts so that the proper documents could be obtained from the relevant authority.

  The view which prevailed in this part of the borderlands was more in keeping with recorded history. What was traditional and ancient in the Debatable Land was not division but agreement. In metropolitan Scotland, the borderers’ reluctance to see their cross-border community disrupted was characterized as ‘rural’, as though people who stand in the rain without umbrellas and who recognize the seasons within seasons must be out of touch with important realities.

  On a last visit to the Lochmaben Stone, a few feet from the national border, I turned down the lane which leads to the sea in the part of Gretna called Old Graitney. In a field bordered by houses, a farmer was trying to separate two bucking cows. As I cycled past, he was nearly knocked off his feet by the cows and shouted, ‘Gie ower!’ (‘Stop it!’) The words are identical in the two dialects of English spoken in the region – Southern Scots and Cumbrian – and it was as hard to tell whether the man was English or Scottish as it might have been to know on which side of the Solway a Selgovian farmer had been born.

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  ‘Arthur’

  At the time, the map appeared to have nothing more to say about the borderlands. Instead, I used it as a source of themes for longer bike rides. The point of a theme is that it can take you to places you might never have visited and it makes the memory of the ride more vivid. In this case, there was the added incentive of using a map of second-century Britain to plan a cycling route.

  We explored the kingdoms of the Selgovae, the Damnonii and the Votadini, impressed by their vastness and the natural wealth of their lands. Wherever possible, we followed the Roman roads which had connected the places on the map. In Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire and the Galloway peninsula, there were sites whose importance to Roman traders and the native British had only now become apparent, and although these rides were recreational, they began to feel like a necessary experiment. There was no sign that the map could bring back to life that dark age of the Debatable Land, but it was already offering answers to questions which had been raised by the earlier expeditions.

  For example, since practically every place on the map stood at a road junction, this confirmed the idea that Broomholm had been served, not only by the Roman road which was ‘plain to be seen’ on Canonbie Moor in 1757, but also by the ‘dry march’ from the west which marked the boundary of the Debatable Land (here). This meant that Colanica/Broomholm had been a major crossroads in Roman Scotland, and it showed that almost the entire northern boundary of the Debatable Land had been traced by a Roman road. (Coincidentally, an archaeological survey of Broomholm in the summer of 2016 showed that the site was ‘more substantial than originally thought’: ‘Most people regard the fort as being off on a limb . . . Now, it’s looking as if it was quite large and important.’47)

  The other main theme of these longer rides seemed at first to have only a tenuous connection with the map. It concerned a heroic figure of such questionable reality that he may never have existed. If he did exist, no one knows whether he came from the West Country, Wales, the north of England or Scotland.

  Most of the places which bear the name of Arthur are in Wales and the south-west, but there are also thirty-seven ‘Arthur’ places scattered over the Scottish lowlands and the north of England. Several of them are less than a day’s ride from home: the closest are a wooded ridge on the road to Bewcastle called Arthurseat and a farm near Carwinley Burn once named Arthur’s Cross after a stone placed at the intersection of three parishes.48 Arthuret itself, despite its legendary connection with Myrddin or Merlin, may be only accidentally Arthurian.49

  Even if a hero of that name had lived in late Roman or Dark Age Britain, it is doubtful that any historical truth would have survived. The comparatively recent figures of Johnnie Armstrong and Kinmont Willie had quickly mutated into figments of legend, their exploits confused with the antics of Robin Hood or associated incongruously with Scottish national sentiment. If a real Arthur had existed, how many other layers of confusion must have built up over the centuries? On Hadrian’s Wall, King Arthur’s Well, the crag of Arthur’s Chair and tales of Arthur’s sleeping knights were no more enlightening than the wordless monoliths of the Debatable Land’s boundaries.

  Yet there was one common feature which emerged when I plotted all these places on a map with a view to planning the bike rides. The distribution of ‘Arthur’ place names in Wales and the West Country closely matches the distribution of stones inscribed in the Ogham alphabet, which in turn reflects the Irish settlement of Wales in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. They also tend to be found in relatively inaccessible areas. The ‘Arthurs’ of the North are quite different and form a distinct group. Though fewer in number, they are more widely spread and, for some reason, they tend to occur on or near Roman roads.

  I had not seen this peculiarity mentioned and assumed it to be of no real historical significance. Its main interest lay in the fact that the proximity of northern ‘Arthur’ places to long-distance roads made it easy to include them in a cycling route. ‘Arthur’ himself could safely be placed between inverted commas and escorted from the scene of serious history.

  * * *

  In 2014, serious history was being written all over the borderlands. The words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ (to Scottish independence) were prominent even in sparsely populated areas. They appeared on telegraph poles and pylons, on sheds and barns, on farm machinery and on the walls of ruined cottages. Riding through Ayrshire, I saw a white cow wearing a waistcoat marked ‘No’ and several sheep tattooed with a ‘Yes’.

  In living memory, the national border had never been so important, and it was only now that it became obvious how many
British people had no idea where it ran. Sometimes, it seemed as though James VI and my mother had been the only people who knew that the border cut Great Britain approximately in half. A local driver who used to take tourists to Hadrian’s Wall and other local sites told me that he was constantly badgered with questions: ‘Is this the border?’ ‘Are we in Scotland yet?’ Some of our visitors from the south thought that they must have arrived in Scotland when the train had crossed Shap, until they remembered that they had yet to reach Carlisle. But then others thought that Carlisle was in Scotland. Many more visitors, including some who have academic qualifications in history, assumed that Hadrian’s Wall marked the border.

  This reminded me of the man who had urged Elizabeth I to build another Roman Wall, believing that the ‘Romaynes’ had built theirs to defend themselves ‘from the dayly and daungereous incurtyons of the valyaunte barberous Scottyshe nation’. The half-Scottish member of parliament for Penrith and the Border exacerbated the confusion with his ‘Hands Across the Border’ campaign, which invited English people to form a human chain along Hadrian’s Wall ‘bearing torches in a bid to convince Scots to vote “No” in September’. A bogus ‘Reverend’ who published a Scottish nationalist blog imagined ‘100,000 English people lined up on a wall’ as ‘target practice’, but observed that, unfortunately, parts of Hadrian’s Wall lie ‘sixty-odd miles from the Scottish border’.

  On the English side of the Debatable Land, in the parish churches of Arthuret, Kirkandrews and Nicholforest, the talk was all of the referendum. Nicholforest Church, which hides in the woods near Liddel Water far from anything that might be called a village, is one of the rare churches which still use the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It is unusual, too, in the unpredictability of its services. Because of the size and remoteness of the border parishes, there are not enough vicars to go around and the officiating priest can change from one Sunday to the next.

  The sounds of Jacobean English and hymns rarely heard since Victoria fill the church with an air of olden days. The setting evokes an even more distant age, when small congregations worshipped secretly at forest shrines, praying to save the guttering flame from extinction. ‘Vicars . . . we’re a dying breed!’ were the first words I heard at Nicholforest. They came from the rear of the church, where a door leads out into the graveyard. The vicar, who had been delayed by snow and chronic back pain, sounded almost cheerful.

  One Sunday, a minister I had not seen before was officiating. He spoke with a distinct Scottish accent: for a moment I imagined a clerical fifth-columnist sent by the Church of Scotland to infiltrate the Anglican community. The organist explained to me that this was a ‘runner’ – a peripatetic minister who takes the place of an absent vicar. The noun in its ecclesiastical sense is unknown to the Oxford English Dictionary, the closest definition being ‘a wanderer, a rover; specifically, an itinerant seller of supposed medicines and remedies’. I had come across the word in the report of a Puritan bishop who visited Nicholforest and other border parishes in 1599: ‘In divers places of the Borders the churches have walls without covering, and they have none to celebrate divine service save certain beggarly runners which come out of Scotland.’

  There was nothing ‘beggarly’ about the Scottish Anglican. He delivered his sermon in a stern but affable and sometimes ironical voice which reminded me of ministers I had heard in Scotland on family holidays. He leant on the edge of the pulpit, scanning the flock, and began in an admonitory tone: ‘Now, we’re all Christians here . . . aren’t we?’ I recognized the allusion to the tale of a traveller lost in Liddesdale who, seeking help in vain, had cried out, ‘Are there nae Christians here?’, only to be answered, ‘Na, na, we’s all Armstrongs and Elliots.’

  The sermon ranged widely over the minister’s bookshelves – the books unread (‘the Complete Works of Robert Burns for instance’), and the books long forgotten. Much of the sermon was devoted to John Wesley’s Primitive Physick, or An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases. This led back by a carefully meandering route to the New Testament reading, which had been the Raising of Lazarus. It was an odd sermon for the church of a predominantly agricultural community, where the most popular service is the annual blessing of sheep. At the end of the sermon, as he gathered up his notes, the minister appeared to have an afterthought: ‘There’s one thing I could never understand. Why did Jesus bring Lazarus back from the dead, knowing full well that poor old Lazarus would only have to jump through the hoop a second time?’

  There were long silences between the prayers which followed. The minister prayed for the sick and the dead, ‘and also for the souls of those whose names have become illegible on the gravestones outside’. Then came a longer silence while the congregation took communion. I was in the habit of reading the Order for the Burial of the Dead or another liturgical text from the time of the reivers. But that Sunday, thinking of Arthurian excursions, I was pondering a litany even older than the Book of Common Prayer.

  The list of the twelve battles of Arthur is the only detailed record of events in Dark Age Britain. It forms part of a Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), which was cobbled together from various sources in 828 or 829. The scribe was not a historian in the modern sense. He rummaged through chronicles and fragments of folklore, ‘heaping together all [he] could find’ in order to create a heroic narrative. One of those ancient texts was a list of nine battle sites at which twelve battles had been fought by ‘British kings’ under a great commander described as a ‘leader of battles’ (a direct translation of the Celtic ‘Cadwalader’).

  The original, lost Brittonic text would have been written several centuries before. It had probably been a poem, with the names of the battles providing the rhymes. The scribe updated the old chronicle and rewrote it for a contemporary, ninth-century audience which was facing the threat of heathen Saxon invaders. In this modernized version, the Saxons were the villains and the hero was a semi-mythical British hero called Arthur, who may or may not have appeared in the original poem. (This was the prototype of the Arthur who, much later, became the central figure of the medieval chivalric fantasies involving Merlin, Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table.)

  Then Arthur fought against them in those days with British kings, though he himself was the leader of battles.

  The first battle was at the mouth of the river called Glein.

  The second and third and fourth and fifth battles were on another river, which is called Dubglas and is in the Linnuis region.

  The sixth battle was on the river which is named Bassas.

  The seventh was the battle in the Celidonian forest, which is to say the Battle of Celidon Wood.

  The eighth was the battle at Guinnion fort, in which Arthur carried the image of the Holy Perpetual Virgin Mary on his shoulders and the pagans were put to flight that day and great slaughter was upon them by the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of Holy Mary His Mother.

  The ninth battle was in the city of the Legion.

  The tenth battle was fought on the shore of the river which is named Tribruit.

  The eleventh battle was on the hill which is called Agned. (Variant: which we call the battle of Bregion [or Bregomion].)

  The twelfth was the battle of Badon Hill, in which, in one day and a single charge by Arthur, nine hundred and sixty men fell, and he alone and no one else cast them down, and in all those battles he emerged the victor. (Alternative: The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.)

  Since early Brittonic texts usually contained factual rather than legendary material, even if there never was a real Arthur, this record of a military campaign at the dawn of British history is potentially priceless. This would be the earliest detailed account of historical events in Britain from a British point of view. Unfortunately, only two of the places can be identified; the others are either ambiguous or completely obscure. One scholar has angrily dismissed it as a poet’s fabrication, but most agree that the list of battles refers to
real places and that, if they could be identified, ‘Arthur’ and his world might return to the light of recorded history.

  Having memorized the list imperfectly, I was trying to recall what came after the river called Dubglas in the region of Linnuis. ‘Linnuis’ is the Old Welsh form of the Roman name for the region of Lindum, which is now the city of Lincoln. The problem is that no river Dubglas (or Douglas) runs anywhere near Lincoln. Then I remembered that Ptolemy’s map of Britain shows two places called Lindum. One is Lincoln; the other can now be identified as the Roman fort of Castledykes near Lanark.

  This had been one of the little gems thrown up by the restored map. The Scottish Earls of Lindsay, who owned a large part of Lanarkshire and whose family goes back at least to the Norman Conquest, have never been able to explain the origin of their name. The Lindsays had no connection with the part of Lincolnshire once known as Lindesey and there was no district of that name either in Normandy or Scotland. The identification of Lindum as Castledykes solved the mystery: the territory of the Lindsays was indeed the region of Lindum or Linnuis. Perhaps this northern Lindum would also be the key to the four battles on the elusive river Dubglas . . .

  *

  After the post-communion cup of coffee, I cycled home with a tailwind and unfolded the map of the Upper Clyde Valley. Three miles south of the fort of Lindum, the Clyde is joined by one of its main tributaries. Printed along the winding blue line on the map was the long-lost coincidence of river and region . . . The name of the river is Douglas Water or, as early Britons said, ‘Dubh-glas’ (‘black water’).