The Debatable Land Page 25
The region of the Debatable Land is popular with fracking and wind-farm companies because of its small, scattered population and, despite the appearance of remoteness, its proximity to ports and major trade routes. A plan to send electricity pylons twice the normal height marching across the southern Debatable Land was recently dropped – for the time being – but the northern half, with its unique history and landscapes, may soon be devastated by the construction of multiple wind turbines in the Tinnisburn and Newcastleton Forests.
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No Man’s Land
The Debatable Land – even if enough people knew where and what it was – will never redeclare its independence. No Scottish or English region, nor the whole island of Great Britain, can be a world within itself. The English half of the Debatable Land is now a part of the City of Carlisle. Carlisle has a population of 75,306, but, since the local government reforms of the 1970s, ‘Carlisle’ encompasses a vast rural hinterland with a population of 32,218 and an area of more than four hundred square miles. As a former mayor pointed out to me with a mixture of pride and a sense of the ridiculous, this makes ‘Carlisle’ the largest city in England.
On Kingstown Road, which leads out of the city towards the Debatable Land, running parallel to the Roman road, a bronze reiver, ten feet tall, steel-bonneted and heavily armed, stands hunched and ready on a brick plinth in front of a health club. The statue was erected in 2003 by a local housing developer, Story, whose ancestors were reivers. It confronts the cars and trucks with the determined but slightly fearful expression of a borderer preparing for a warden’s attack or, in view of its situation, a cyclist about to negotiate the traffic system up the road.
The statue might have been intended as a monument to civic pride, but reiving was never an urban phenomenon. The reivers came from the wild lands to the north and east of the city which are now officially designated, for agricultural purposes, ‘Disadvantaged’ or ‘Severely Disadvantaged Areas’. In some municipal minds, the human population of those areas is still a nuisance.
The sense of inferiority which inspired some of the more belligerent nationalist campaigning in Scotland is also noticeable in the professional and administrative echelons of Carlisle. Rural Cumbria is seen as a potential asset, but only as part of that half-imagined, leafy suburb of metropolitan Britain which includes the over-visited Lake District and the Scottish Highlands. To anyone who knows the area or travels through it, the people themselves are a vital part of its attraction, but this is not an asset which stirs civic ambition. The appealingly named AD122 bus which serves small towns and isolated settlements along Hadrian’s Wall runs only between March and September, when tourist money justifies its existence. Cumbria County Council now refuses to support it. The two Cumbrian towns (Carlisle and Alston) whose predecessors are shown on Ptolemy’s map and on the Roman letter found beneath Tullie House Museum (here) are connected by a bus service only two days a week and not during school holidays.
The idea that Carlisle is hampered by its hinterland is also evident in official attitudes to the environment. Planning committees have taken to heart the expression, ‘a once-in-a-hundred-years event’, with its consoling suggestion that no one who makes a disastrous decision today will live long enough to be held responsible. It was applied to the floods of 2005, 2009 and 2015, when not even the bold Buccleuch and his band would have tried to cross the river Eden. Water has become a greater economic threat than the reivers ever were. When Carlisle was cut off by floods in 2015, aerial views of the city showed it almost as it had been in the Middle Ages, with the cathedral, the castle and Ptolemy’s Uxellum (Stanwix) high and dry and the Civic Centre under water.
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Even the ancient woodland along the Liddel came under threat. Some of the woods on the edge of the Debatable Land where Myrddin sought refuge and where ‘Arthur’ fought his seventh battle are officially designated ‘ancient’. This gives them some protection against ‘unnecessary’ development. Other areas of woodland are effectively defenceless. But the plants and animals which live along the river have no more respect for official designations than the reivers did for the national border, and if the unprotected woodland under the administration of ‘Carlisle’ were to be developed, the rare and endangered flora and fauna would be confined to segregated enclaves in which no population could flourish.
For five years, we had cycled through the Debatable Land and its region in ever-widening circles. Meanwhile, parts of the woodland near the house had remained unexplored. Most ancient woodland has survived because it was managed continuously for centuries: otherwise, it would have turned into a tangle of shrubs and invasive plants of little value either to humans or to animals. We had coppiced several sections, removing the rhododendron, letting in the sunlight and allowing the enormous hazel stools which are older than the biggest trees to send up fresh shoots. As a result, countless woodland flowers had woken from a long slumber.
Less accessible parts of the woodland had remained untouched for a good reason. After weeks of steady rain, the boulder clay heaves itself up and slumps towards the river. Like heavy blankets slithering off a bed, thick layers of soil and stone move downhill overnight. Trees fall with a crack and a thud, offering their upper branches to mice and voles, terracing the muddy slope with their trunks and making room for the next generation.
With the threat of development downstream, I looked again at the old maps and title deeds. The house had changed hands often enough since the early nineteenth century that, besides the printed maps, there were also hand-drawn charts and plans coloured in crayon and paint. Some of them showed a path which had forded the burn and climbed up from the Liddel towards the disused railway. This must have been the track by which ‘Romany’ and his wife had reached the house in the 1910s: ‘Down a steep bank we slid, across a trickle of a stream and up the other side we clambered.’
There was no longer any trace of a path. The largest-scale maps showed that it had reached the ford near the mouth of the burn by descending a bank between an English oak and a Scots pine. To judge by their girth, both trees had begun to grow not long after the division of the Debatable Land when the ‘order of watches’ was set. Some time in the last century, the bank had collapsed. A deep dell had formed at the foot of the oak, and the pine now clung to the cliff with twisted roots. It was here, at the confluence of the burn and the river, that the two horsemen who patrolled the lower Liddel had been relayed by the four riders who watched the remoter stretches to the north.
Otters had made a mud-slide on the opposite bank: their prints could be seen in the sand washed in by the river. Beyond lay an area of hanging woodland which the previous owner of the house had pointed out to us as an unsolved mystery: ‘No one we’ve talked to knows who owns it. It might be no man’s land!’ Since the days of ‘Romany’, landslips had obliterated the path. Many years had passed since any human had walked through that muddy jungle, and without the need to watch every step I would not have noticed that the invisible path was still in use.
Clutches of black, glossy beads marked its course on either side of the ford. Even after the collapse of the bank had made the path impracticable for humans, roe deer had continued to use it. I scrambled up the slope, grabbing branches of hazel, until the way was blocked by tangled wire. Fallen birches had pushed a fence to the ground; its posts still jutted obliquely out of the mud. Their half-rotten state suggested that they were no more than thirty years old. Pausing to catch my breath, I looked down at the burn, which was now forty feet below, and at that moment I became aware of a stranger in the wood.
On the edge of a waterlogged sinkhole stood a tall and slender tree, its bark shining like old silver. I could make out a tracery of delicate twigs high up in its crown and tiny, crinkly leaves of a kind I had never seen. It would have taken a long time to identify it without the metal label, partially engulfed by the bark, on which a hand had scratched the word ‘Pumilio’. In the confusion of native trees, a rare species of Antarctic be
ech had made its home and appeared to be thriving.
Over the years, tree guide in hand, I had discovered that the exotic specimens planted by Nicholas Ridley in the late 1980s observed a secret geographical logic. No written evidence of the plan existed, but the trees themselves were proof that Baron Ridley of Liddesdale had conceived the half-island on which his house stood, hemmed in by wooded ridges and the river, as a world in miniature. The Pumilio’s Patagonian origin matched its position on the extreme southern edge of the property – which meant that the fallen fence running across the hillside beyond the burn must mark the original boundary.
On one of the old charts, a faint line had been drawn on the far side of the burn. Later, I found another example in the neighbourhood of this unusual type of boundary, which attributes both banks of a watercourse near its mouth to one property and the upstream banks to another. I charted the fence line and sent the redrawn maps to the Rural Land Registry in Carlisle. Several weeks later, after consultation with the relevant authorities, an official version of the map came back with the new property line labelled ‘Unconfirmed Boundary’. Apparently, confirmation is a formality, but the expression seemed appropriate.
This part of the woodland at least would be safe from development. We decided to maintain it as a buffer zone and as a Debatable Land in which no man should ‘set stob and staik’. The land is too dangerous to build upon in any case. Even walking there is risky. Dusk comes early in that part of the woods. The sun sinks below the cliffs when the fields on higher ground to the north and west are still in daylight. The hours pass quickly in the woods, and apart from a saw and a billhook, the most useful tool is a means of telling the time.
At that exact spot, two horsemen reached the end of their nightly watch and looked over into the Debatable Land. The sounds are unchanged – the guttural murmur of the burn, the rumble of the river, a rustle and a splash that might be a water vole or an otter. Five hundred years ago, it might have been a rider coming from no country but his own place of birth or returning to a stone tower with a stolen sheep and the contents of a farmhouse.
The slabs of tombstone limestone which form the riverbed at that point might still tempt a fugitive or an adventurer to cross the border, but when the river was high, carrying the brown peat of the Liddesdale hills, there would have been no cause for worry – only the natural devastation, the river stealing soil from the banks, erasing evidence of human endeavour and importing its own miscellaneous archive: the stones of a demolished building, a shard of metal that might once have been a weapon or a tool, or some other eroded object bringing unexpected news of the past.
30
The River
In June 2016, the river’s ‘loud dale’ became a chasm. After a long dry spell during which it had provided a perfect practice ground of rills and pools for ducklings, the Liddel rose and the amphitheatre of woodland was once again a stadium of noise. On the evening of the 23rd, we went to sleep with a feeling of anticipated relief. The pound was rising; the markets were confident.
In the early morning, a strained quality in the voices of the radio presenters made it obvious, before the reading of the news, that the catastrophe had occurred. More than half the electorate had decided that England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland should leave the European Union. The United Kingdom would after all become what a Scottish king had once called ‘a little world within itself’.
Almost immediately, there was talk of a new referendum on Scottish independence. Every region in Scotland had voted to remain in the Union, and the Scottish First Minister vowed that Scotland would not be evicted from Europe by the reckless gamble of an English Prime Minister whose primary aim had been to resolve a dispute in his own party.
Not since I lived in the United States had I felt so historically, culturally and personally European. The proximity of the border suddenly had a cruel poignancy: I would be looking over to a country from which I might soon be expelled. Emails of condolence came from friends and acquaintances in France. I replied in what seemed at that moment, like the Scots I had learned from my father, one of my native tongues: ‘La rivière qui entoure presque notre maison sera bientôt plus large que la Manche.’
The oddest detail in that wakening to a state of national hallucination was the map on the computer screen which showed how each area had voted. All of Scotland was neatly severed along the border from the rest of Great Britain. In the regions of Scotland which are contiguous with England, 55.8% had voted to remain in the European Union; on the English side of the border, in Cumbria, 60.1% had voted to leave. I was on the point of completing a book – this book – in which the cross-border community was said to have overridden national differences and administrative divisions. Yet here was proof of the contrary. On a matter of historic importance, the two sides faced in opposite directions.
This seemed especially odd in an area which is heavily dependent on agricultural and other subsidies from Europe. At a recent local meeting, farmers – those who were working rather than retired – had been strongly in favour of remaining in Europe, but the meeting as a whole had been divided.
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The chasm was as unreal as the fantasies of opportunist politicians who had lied about the workings and purposes of the European Union. Scottish voters had been sensitized to the benefits of European membership by the campaign for Scottish independence. On the English side, there was confusion and ignorance. The areas which had most to lose from leaving Europe and which had the lowest ‘educational attainment’ were the areas which voted most heavily to leave.
Lack of higher qualifications is not always seen as a serious disadvantage in Cumbria. Local newspapers publish articles in praise of young people who have decided to stay at home instead of going away to university. This appeared to have played a role in the Cumbrian vote. There was not much evidence of the xenophobia which was said to have inspired some voters in the south. In Carlisle and elsewhere, I had talked to people who had a sincere desire to learn the truth and to form a clear opinion but little idea of how to go about acquiring the necessary knowledge. One young woman explained, a week after the referendum, that, to her regret, she had not cast a vote because she had been unable to discover any solid facts that might have helped her to make up her mind. Information seemed to her a rare commodity to which only certain people had access.
In the absence of information, they had relied on their families, favouring especially the views of grandparents, who claimed to remember some powerful infancy of the nation when Britain had been ‘great’ and had ‘stood on its own two feet’. But the respected wisdom of the elders was an exact regurgitation of slogans. The descendants of reivers had been told a fairy tale of men in suits who lived in a distant city, imposing the laws of another land and plotting the downfall of the little people. And so, setting out on a new adventure, and ready to suffer the economic consequences, they boldly voted for what might destroy them and their community. Meanwhile, that administrative fiction the border, which for so long had been an irrelevance to the people of the borderlands, was hardening into a political reality.
For the rest of that month, it rained, sometimes quite heavily, and by the time I completed this book a few days later, I knew that, once the river was calm again and falling, the shingle beach and the flower-covered banks would be quite transformed.
Appendix
Fig. 1: The Anglo-Scottish border and the Marches
(inset and Fig. 1a:)
Fig. 2: Surnames of the West Marches and the Debatable Land
Fig. 3: Marriages in and around the Debatable Land and Liddesdale
Fig. 4: A key to Henry Bullock’s ‘platt’ of the Debatable Land, 1552
Fig. 5: The partition of the Debatable Land on Bullock’s ‘platt’
Fig. 6: The colonization of the Debatable Land
Fig. 7: Ptolemy’s map of Albion and Hibernia (Britain and Ireland), with parts of Gaul and Germany
Figs 8 and 9: Ptolemy’s atlas of the British
Isles
Fig. 10: Ptolemy’s map of Southern and South-Western England
Fig. 11: Ptolemy’s map of Northern England
Fig. 12: Ptolemy’s map of Caledonia
Fig. 13: An Iron Age buffer zone in the region of the Debatable Land
Fig. 14: The Great Caledonian Invasion (1)
Fig. 15: The Great Caledonian Invasion (2)
Full-size maps can be downloaded here.
Fig. 1: The Anglo-Scottish border and the Marches
(inset and Fig. 1a:)
Fig. 2: Surnames of the West Marches and the Debatable Land
The distribution of clans or ‘surnames’ in the 1580s and 90s. From reports of the English and Scottish wardens.
Fig. 3: Marriages in and around the Debatable Land and Liddesdale
Each arrow represents a bride’s journey to her new home. The map shows all the ‘alliances’ – not just those that bridged the border – for which both places can be identified. From Thomas Musgrave’s report to Lord Burghley (William Cecil) on ‘the riders and ill doers both of England and Scotland’, late 1583 (Calendar of Border Papers, I, 120–27).
Fig. 4: A key to Henry Bullock’s ‘platt’ of the Debatable Land, 1552