The Debatable Land Read online

  One section of the border, however, mattered a great deal to the people who lived along it in the Middle Ages and long before. Near its south-western terminus, it split into two, describing an area known as the Debatable Land. Here, the line became a zone and the border acquired a third dimension. Not only was this bulge of unclaimed territory anomalous, its northern and western boundaries were also a frontier of a different kind: it was impossible to recognize them simply by looking at the landscape.

  This relic of a distant age was more minutely described in documents than the rest of the border, and it stretched so far back in time that it was already ancient when the forty-eight knights of England and Scotland nearly came to blows on the banks of the Tweed. These boundaries survived because they remained engraved in the minds of the local people. Yet to the medieval officials who policed the border, the Debatable Land was synonymous with anarchy. Somehow, that enclave of lawlessness overrun by murderous savages with no respect for private property had retained its intricate contours.

  Since this was also the boundary of our property and a manageably small area for exploration, I decided to find out all I could about the people who had unexpectedly preserved the integrity of the Debatable Land. I knew that Carlisle had a reputable museum, built on the site of a Roman fort. It seemed a good place to start. After a month on the border, I had made only one brief return trip to the capital of Cumbria, and I was quite ready now to think of it as a city.

  For three mornings in a row, there was a hard frost. Since the roads were icy, I decided to try out what remained of public transport. But on the fourth morning, we woke to a brilliant covering of deep snow. Local radio on both sides of the border announced the closure of schools and the cancellation of buses. No tyre tracks would spoil the whiteness which surrounded the house. In a city, the silence after a heavy fall of snow has a softening effect, but in a place which is normally peaceful, it suggests a hesitation of nature, a holding of breath rather than repose. It took a few moments to realize that what gave the silence its air of imminence was the fact that the river, too, had been hushed and that thin sheets of ice were inching out from the opposite bank.

  5

  ‘The Sewer of Abandoned Men’

  Water pipes usually survive a freeze until the temperature reaches minus six degrees centigrade. That November, the night-time drop in temperature was sudden and extreme. The following morning, the thermometer showed minus sixteen degrees and for the first time in living or even recorded memory, the Liddel froze and the two countries were joined. A band of Scottish sheep, grey against the snow, nuzzled the riverbank in search of grass and seemed to threaten invasion.

  The cold did not relent. Even the postmen were unable to reach the house. Every day, we scrunched through the snow for half a mile to reach the road and to see whether any mail had been deposited in the black rubbish bin placed there for the purpose. Sometimes, the only tracks on the road were those of deer and pheasant. That particular stretch is not included on the council’s list of highways to be cleared, and so the nearest negotiable route for postmen and anyone else now lay more than a mile to the south.

  Our only visitors were a gamekeeper holding a brace of soft, dead pheasants and a man with some squirrel traps which he asked us to place in likely locations, since the border is also a frontline in the war between native red squirrels and imported greys. Both men wanted to make sure that the new people without a car were surviving the Cumbrian winter. We had enough food for an imaginative cook but wine supplies were running perilously low and we were preparing for a Lenten Christmas when news came that the twice-weekly bus from the Scottish village of Newcastleton2 was going to attempt the journey to Carlisle.

  The bus stop is purely a matter of convention: there is no shelter and no sign, only a misplaced milestone at a meeting of two roads. From that wind-lashed spot, the view extends across the valley of the Liddel. If the drenching mist has cleared the tops or is reluctant to rise from the river, an occasional vehicle can be seen threading its way along the hillside until it disappears back into the pine forest. A small white rectangle is either the bus bound for Dumfries in the west or the cross-border 127 from Newcastleton.

  That morning, in the crystal-clear air, the far side of the valley could be seen as though through a pair of binoculars. A buzzard was soaring over the whiteness, but nothing moved on the road. At last, a white rectangle appeared, then vanished as it plunged into the valley towards a narrow bridge and a gear-stripping climb. Several minutes passed in silence. Then the little bus was rattling over the old railway bridge and accelerating towards the invisible bus stop with no apparent intention of stopping.

  A wild-looking man was at the wheel, somewhat out of scale with the diminutive vehicle. He might have been a Celtic charioteer who had been forced to commandeer a child’s toy. I saw several faces at the windows as the bus roared past. A few yards up the hill, it juddered to a halt. I walked smartly to the door, half expecting it to drive away. ‘Ye thought ah wisnae goan tae stop, didn’t ye?’ said the charioteer. Half a dozen women were already on the bus. They were smiling, evidently quite happy with the service. Perhaps this was how Scottish bus drivers usually behaved as soon as they crossed the border. I asked for a return to Carlisle, and as the driver stabbed his ticket machine, I heard him say distinctly ‘Caer-liol’. Either he was a student of historical etymology or the medieval form of ‘Carlisle’ was still in use.3

  By the time the bus left Longtown, it was carrying a roughly equal number of Scottish and English passengers. The few men sat together at the back, but there was no division between English and Scots. The women exchanged news and gossip and enquired after the health of mutual acquaintances. Someone’s roof had collapsed under the weight of the snow; a farmer had been out since before dawn, rescuing sheep from a snow drift. Some of the passengers talked about the shopping they hoped to do in Carlisle.

  The cross-border 127 bus is the ghost of a train. When the Waverley Line was closed in 1969 after more than a hundred years of service, the people of the Borders were promised that transport links would always be maintained. Buses would run – weather and road repairs permitting – on the route of the old North British Railway. As a result, even without snow drifts, floods or subsidence, the journey from Newcastleton is now a dangerous excursion. Forty-four-ton logging trucks race along the winding roads carting timber from the Kielder Forest which should have gone by rail. Sheep and cattle trucks from Wales and the Scottish Lowlands, piloted by weary drivers, sometimes run off the road or collide with other vehicles. Not long after we moved to Cumbria, a 127 bus was crushed by a livestock wagon on the road to Carlisle and a young woman from Newcastleton was killed.

  Promises made at the time of the railway closures have no legal force. The government’s devil-take-the-hindmost policy expected rural populations to acquire a motor car or to move to a city. No one who rides the 127 bus could doubt its social worth, but a council’s finance department, especially when faced with the complexity of a twenty-four-mile bus route which runs through three counties – one English and two Scottish – is incapable of computing the value of a transnational village hall on wheels. Now and then, a Carlisle council official whose car stands outside the council offices in a subsidized car park creates a list of ‘savings’ by proposing the eradication of various rural bus routes, including the cross-border 127.

  *

  The rest of the journey passed without major incident, while the driver kept up a running commentary on all the minor incidents which occur when trying to drive at speed through slow-moving traffic. We crested the hill in the shabby-genteel suburb of Stanwix, and there, looking south over Carlisle, I glimpsed what must be, despite some defiantly unimaginative modern buildings, one of the most beautiful views from any English city. Beyond the river Eden at the foot of the Roman vallum, the castle and cathedral rise over a rabble of Victorian and Edwardian brick houses while the snowy mountains of the northern Lake District give the scene the air o
f a frontier town.

  Since moving to Cumbria, I had seen Carlisle only once, through the windows of a car. On one of the five days in the week when the bus doesn’t run, a taxi had driven me to the studios of Radio Cumbria next to the museum and across the road from the castle. We had taken the shortest route, which is not the finest approach to Carlisle. In 1973, a four-lane inner ring road cut the city off from its castle. Gesturing at the great sandstone fortress with its moat of modern traffic, the driver had asked,

  ‘’Ow long has that been there, d’yer think?’

  ‘About a thousand years?’

  ‘A thousand years and still standin’ . . . And ’ow long d’yer think that was there afoor it began to fall down?’ (pointing to a decrepit concrete and glass pedestrian bridge).

  ‘Not quite so long?’

  ‘I’ll give yer a clue: it’s called the Millennium Bridge.’

  That December morning, I saw a different Carlisle. The bus driver deposited his passengers opposite a Victorian covered market with a roof which briefly reminded me of the former Halles of Paris. Heading for the museum by a roundabout route, I walked through several quarters reminiscent of different places hundreds of miles apart: the cobbled back lanes of a northern industrial town; a cathedral close in the south-east of England; a residential district of Georgian townhouses and shrubby gardens which might have been a down-at-heel suburb of Edinburgh; the medieval square of a market town in the Midlands. In English Street, the biting wind and squabbling seagulls were reminders that Carlisle was once an inland port. Even with snow on the ground, pavement cafes testified to the hardiness of North Cumbrians.

  I entered the museum by the older of its two entrances, under the city council’s coat of arms with its motto from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: ‘Be Just And Fear Not’. At the top of a staircase, the automatic doors swung open.

  There were two compartments from an Edwardian railway carriage. A little girl was settling in to the plusher of the two, rummaging in her handbag and preparing for a long journey. The chugging of a locomotive came from a small ventilation grid above a recreated guard’s van filled with packages and suitcases. This was the soundtrack of the 1936 documentary film, Night Mail, whose director had preferred to show the crossing of the border forty miles to the north of Carlisle – the fleeing scarf of steam rushing through the dawn-dappled fells of the Beattock Pass rather than over the wetland wastes of the Solway Firth where the actual border lies.

  A further gallery, devoted to the social history of Carlisle, conveyed the impression that nothing much had happened in the twentieth century. A video screen displayed the main events – floods, railway closures, pageants and mayoral parades, visits of royalty and pop stars. ‘You were up in Carlisle fairly recently,’ an interviewer was reminding the Beatles in November 1963. On the pavement outside the theatre, the fans looked sturdier and less awe-struck than their southern counterparts, and I wondered whether the skinny lads from Liverpool would have survived a stampede of Cumbrian lasses.

  The exhibit I had come to see was an introduction to the world of the Border reivers. A map showed the geographical distribution of all the reiving clans. These kinship groups of the borderlands were referred to as ‘surnames’ or ‘clans’. They first emerged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, at about the same time as the clans of the Scottish Highlands. (It was only much later that the term ‘clan’ was reserved for Highlanders.) The area where we now lived had been occupied mostly by Armstrongs and Forsters, with Routledges, Nixons and Nobles to the east, Grahams and Storeys to the south, and Elliots to the north. I recognized the surnames of several of our neighbours and of people who had lived in our house in the late nineteenth century: John Armstrong the blacksmith, John Graham the labourer, John Elliot the printer.

  The shires on either side of the border had been policed by government officials known as wardens. Their duties consisted of defending the Border forts, administering justice and obtaining redress from their opposite numbers after a Scottish or an English raid. The first wardens were appointed in the early fourteenth century, and the office was maintained until the Union of the Crowns in 1603. They received no salary: it was expected that, as landowning borderers, they would naturally defend their own property and thus the national frontier. Eventually, the Border shires were grouped into six marches: West, Middle and East (fig. 1). As an extreme case, Liddesdale had been treated as a march in its own right.

  I picked up a worksheet for schoolchildren titled ‘Nasty Nixon’s Reivers Trail’. ‘Nasty Nixon’ was a cartoon sword- and gun-wielding maniac in a steel helmet and a leather jack (a quilted doublet reinforced with plates of horn or metal). On my copy of the worksheet, the questionnaire had been correctly filled in as follows:

  Wardens.

  What criminal activities did the March Wardens (like our modern police force) try to stop the Reivers from performing? Tick any that you see.

  Murder

  Kidnap

  Theft of cattle and possessions

  Blackmail

  A diorama in a glass case smeared with small fingerprints showed a band of reivers with raised lances galloping across a river towards a pele tower made of stones the size of Rice Krispies. ‘Peles’ or ‘peels’ were originally the pales (stakes) used to construct the earlier, even less congenial towers of timber and clay. The stone towers were nearly windowless and their walls so thick that they took up almost half the ground plan. In that miniature world of modelling clay, herdsmen were chasing hairy cattle into the walled courtyard known as a barmkin or barnekin, which also contained some wattle-and-daub cottages.

  As I peered at this absorbing scene of naked banditry, the sound of screams and clanging metal came from a darkened room around the corner. A video had begun to play.

  Like a child’s nightmare, the faces of reivers with jagged teeth and terrible hair floated out of a blasted landscape of bog and ruin. These were the medieval Armstrongs, Elliots, Nixons and Nobles, some of whose descendants were presumed to be watching the video. The satanic night-riders of the borderlands, the Scottish voiceover explained, spent their worthless lives stealing their neighbours’ animals, setting fire to their farms and lopping off their limbs. In sunless towers of stone, women cowered night and day, awaiting the inevitable. The only female face in the rain-drenched inferno was that of a tear-streaked widow lamenting the murder of her husband:

  Nae living man I’ll love again,

  Since that my lovely knight is slain;

  Wi’ ae lock of his yellow hair

  I’ll chain my heart for evermair!

  The Border reivers ‘blighted the life of the whole area’. To them, according to the voiceover, we owe the words ‘blackmail’ and ‘bereaved’. They were such a rampant evil that the Archbishop of Glasgow excommunicated them en masse in a Great Monition of Cursing issued in 1525. (Though I didn’t know it at the time, the curse was commissioned from the foul-mouthed, heretic-burning Archbishop by Cardinal Wolsey, who must have assumed that the borderers attended church and cared about their immortal souls.) A long excerpt is inscribed on a boulder placed in the pedestrian underpass which leads from the museum to the castle. Some local people have called for its removal, blaming it for the floods and the poor performance of Carlisle United football team. It still has an air of potency:

  I curse thair heid and all the haris of thair heid; I curse thair face, thair ene, thair mouth, thair neise, thair toung, thair teith, thair crag . . . and everilk part of thair body, frae the top of thair heid to the soill of thair feit, befoir and behind, within and without.4

  And so on, for fifteen hundred words, in which wives, children, servants, household goods, farm tools and ‘all that is necessary for sustenance and welfare’ are bundled up in the same Christian execration and committed ‘perpetualie to the deip pit of hell, to remain with Lucifer and all his fallowis . . . first to be hangit, syne revin and ruggit with doggis, swine, and utheris wyld beists, abhominable to all the warld’.5

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sp; The conclusion of the film would probably not comfort a traumatized child but it does provide a cathartic moral. The mayhem and carnage are attributed to the weakness of national government. The stateless reivers – ‘Scottish when they will, and English at their pleasure’ – were a creeping fungus which thrived on the blood-sodden moors of Anglo-Scottish strife. The suffering of the innocent ended only when the two nations were united under one monarch and ‘the lion and the unicorn lay down together in peace’.

  The screen turned black. I turned round and, in the theatrical murk, saw something I had missed when entering the gallery: a magnificent animatronic sculpture of a Scottish lion and an English unicorn. Their flesh had fallen from their rusted bones, yet the horn of one and the tail of the other were still erect. Prisoners of their own aggression, they seemed to have hammered one another into scrap metal. The fact that the mechanism had ceased to function made it all the more poignant.

  These were the reivers I had read about in books. The film had evidently been properly researched. The region in which we were intending to live for at least as long as it took to forget the ordeal of moving had been inhabited by what sounded like a distinct species, ‘from their cradells bredd and brought up in theft, spoyle and bloode’, their only trade and livelihood ‘stealing, which they accompte not shame, but rather a grace and creditt unto them’. This was the view of the third Earl of Cumberland, who, to his dismay, was granted the lands on the edge of the Debatable Land where our house now stood.

  The Earl was writing in 1604, when the Union of the Crowns under James VI of Scotland seemed to promise an end to the anarchy. In 1759, when the memoirs of one of the last English wardens were published, the Border Reiver was well established in British history as the natural denizen of a remote frontier zone on which the sun of state had shone but weakly: