The Debatable Land Read online

Lady’s Well, Liddesdale ref1

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  Langtoon see Longtown

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  1. ‘North East View of the City of Carlisle’, by Robert Carlyle (1791): the cathedral, the castle and the Eden bridges, from the vallum of Hadrian’s Wall, looking south to the Lake District.

  2. A Northbound freight train on the Waverley Line near Riccarton Junction, in June 1965, climbing to ‘the Edge’ (the northern limit of Liddesdale). Photograph by Maurice Burns.

  3. Joan Blaeu’s map of ‘Lidalia’ (Liddesdale), 1654, based on Timothy Pont’s survey, conducted c.1590.

  4. Part of the Debatable Land on Blaeu’s ‘Lidalia’. Right: Tinnis Hill and Mere Burn descending to the Liddel. Bottom left: the Scots’ Dike.

  5. Liddel Water in early December 2010: England on the right, the former Debatable Land (now part of Scotland) on the left.

  6. The Solway Firth near the Lochmaben Stone, looking south to the Lake District, August 2014.

  7. Statue of King Edward I in Burgh by Sands, commemorating the seven hundredth anniversary of his death on the Solway Sands in 1307.

  8. ‘Gilnockie [sic] – or Johnny Armstrong’s Tower (Dumfries-shire)’ by Henry Adlard from an original study by Thomas Allom, 1837. The true name of Armstrong’s home above the Esk is Hollows Tower. Both banks of the river lie in the former Debatable Land.

  9. Statue of ‘Lang Sandy’ in Rowanburn. ‘Lang Sandy’ (Alexander Armstrong) was hanged in 1606 for the murder of Sir John Carmichael, Warden of the Scottish West March.

  10. Hermitage Castle, seen from the ruins of its fourteenth-century chapel, April 2016.

  11. ‘A Platt of the opposete Borders of Scotland to ye west marches of England’, drawn by an anonymous cartographer for William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer of England, in December 1590. The map shows the towers and bastles of the clans or surnames of Liddesdale, Eskdale and the Debatable Land.

  12. ‘Walter Scott Esqr’. Engraving by Charles Turner after Henry Raeburn, 1810. The ruin in the background is Hermitage Castle.

  13. The Lochmaben Stone near Gretna, the ancient, wordless monument to inter-tribal and Anglo-Scottish relations at the south-western tip of the Debatable Land.

  14. Henry Bullock’s map of the Debatable Land, drawn in the spring of 1552.

  15. ‘Mile-Castle near Caw-Fields’, on a reivers’ route from Liddesdale to Tynedale. From The Roman Wall by the Rev. John Collingwood Bruce (1851).

  16. The Scots’ Dike (in England) or March Bank (in Scotland), built to mark the partition of the Debatable Land in 1552.

  17. Thomas Scrape, tenth Baron Scrape of Bolton, and his mother Margaret Howard, shortly before his appointment as Warden of the English West March in 1593 at the age of twenty-six. Anonymous portrait.

  18. Scrope’s deputy, Robert Carey, first Earl of Monmouth. Anonymous portrait, c. 1591.

  19. Richard Beavis, ‘The Rescue of Kinmont Willie’, 1872. No contemporary portraits survive of ‘Kinmont Willie’ and ‘the Bold Buccleuch’, who rescued him from Carlisle Castle in 1596. The horses and the armour belong to a slightly later period.

  20. Kirkandrews church and graveyard, looking towards the Grahams’ pele tower and the Scots’ Dike, March 2016.

  21. Hills Tower, Lochfoot, four miles south-west of Dumfries: a tower house or bastle with gatehouse and barmkin built c. 1530 for the Maxwell family, many of whom served as wardens of the Scottish West March. The more comfortable house on the left was added in 1721. Photographed from the south-west in 1911.

  22. A farm track on the line of the lost Roman road leading north from the Debatable Land into Tarras Moss, September 2013.

  23. The British Isles according to Ptolemy’s coordinates (c. AD 150), plotted by Jacob d’Angelo in Cosmographia Claudii Ptolomaei Alexandrini (1467).

  24. A Roman cavalryman trampling a British barbarian, first century AD. In Hexham Abbey, probably removed from the Roman fort at Corbridge. A similar tombstone was discovered in 1787 in the wall of Stanwix church (Carlisle).

  25. The ‘Border Reiver’ statue (2003) on Kingstown Road, Carlisle.

  Acknowledgements

  It will be obvious how much this book owes to Margaret, but not how much of the Border world was illuminated by her work for North Cumbria Magistrates’ Court, Cumbria NHS, the Corporation Board of Carlisle College, the School Admission Appeals Panel, the Society of Friends, the Liddesdale Heritage Centre (Newcastleton) and the rural library Book Drop with its vast and undervalued constituency. Crucially, she was instrumental in saving the cross-border 127A bus service, for which I and many others also have to thank Cllr Val Tarbitt, Rory Stewart MP and the parish councils of Kirkandrews-on-Esk and Nicholforest.

  Several people who should have been named on this page would prefer
not to be publicly thanked. I kept a list of their names and realized, when I came to write these acknowledgements, that it looked like one of the medieval wardens’ lists of reiving families. Each surname is sufficiently well represented in the modern population for the list to be properly impersonal: Calvert, Carlyle, Davidson, Dixon, Dunn, Elliot, Forster, Little, Nichol, Ridley, Robson and Storey.

  For documentary help, I am grateful to the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle Public Library, Tullie House Museum, the Clan Armstrong Trust and, for equally vital assistance, to Bikeseven, Cumbria Woodlands, the Graham Arms, Joan’s Cars, Telford’s Coaches, and the postmen and postwoman of Longtown.

  Alison Robb and Stephen Roberts kindly scrutinized the almost-finished text.

  I was privileged to have as my editor Kris Doyle at Picador. I am also grateful to Starling Lawrence, to everyone at W. W. Norton and to Melanie Jackson. I enjoyed the unstinting support of Paul Baggaley, Nicholas Blake, Wilf Dickie, Camilla Elworthy, Gillian Fitzgerald-Kelly and the whole Picador team. On expeditions to that remote capital of the far South, Rogers, Coleridge & White was a home from home.

  GRAHAM ROBB was born in Manchester in 1958 and is a former Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He is an acclaimed historian and biographer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has won the Whitbread Biography Prize and the Heinemann Award for Victor Hugo, as well as the Ondaatje Prize and Duff Cooper Prize for The Discovery of France. His book Parisians was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller in hardback and paperback. He lives on the Anglo-Scottish border.

  Also by Graham Robb in Picador

  BALZAC

  VICTOR HUGO

  RIMBAUD

  STRANGERS

  Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century

  THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE

  PARISIANS

  An Adventure History of Paris