There are three Walls in Scotland, all built for the same reasons. The best known is Hadrian’s, but the Antonine is still a visible scar and more than a footnote in history books. The one no one mentions nowadays is the Scotch Dyke.
Built in 1552, a decade after the events of this tale, the dyke marked a final agreement by England and Scotland concerning the Debatable Land. Two parallel ditches flank an earthwork bank a dozen feet wide and the height of a man, which runs for about four miles west from the Esk and once cut the Debatable in half, to keep the Scots away from Carlisle. At either end was placed a boundary stone marked with a cross pattée.
Little remains these days. There is no monument to it and even maps omit it – but it was, literally, the defining moment when the Debatable Land was officially incorporated into the territory of both countries.
The Borderers ignored it, of course. They thought it no more than a nuisance to moving stolen cattle back and forth, and continued to raid and counter-raid much as they had done before, right up to the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and even beyond. They simply went round one end and back the other. Which tells you all you need about the nature of the Borderers, on both sides of the Divide. When they decided to abrogate responsibility for a stretch of Border land, both countries agreed that there would be ‘no firm raisings’ – in other words, no-one could build houses or fortresses.
Since the point of the Debatable was that no-one was prepared to police it, the imhabitants ignored that – the result, among others was Canobie, nowadays the village of Canonbie, the 16th century equivalent then of a Wild West frontier town. Even today there are scarcely more than four hundred inhabitants – though it is much more peaceful.
Similiarly, Hollows Tower was built with no reference to ‘firm raisings’ and still exists, built in stone and perched above the Esk – it is now called Gilnockie and is the Armstrong Museum; you can even get married in it these days. There is a mill near there too, but it belongs to the much later wool industry; there never was a powder mill.
The Armstrongs of Hollows – now Gilnockie – have no doubt been maligned here and were no better nor worse than other Names in the area. The Laird I have here is fiction, but the father I give him was not. Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie was the Lord of the Borders and his fate at the hands of the king is as described. He had five sons, not just the one I shamelessly use here – but the sheer power, defiance and outlaw nature of the Armstrongs was too good to pass up for this story.
Powrieburn is complete invention, as is everyone in it – though Tinnis Hill is not, and remains as defiantly Faerie as when I saw it on my travels.
Batty and Will are also imagined, though Batty’s past as one of the Kohlhase family of Saxony is real enough. The story of the Kohlhase horses is well-known in Germany and has been made into several films. I also placed Batty at the Siege of Florence, all part of the embryonic wars of religion on the continent. Michelangelo was there, as described and arranging the defences.
Hepburn, the Keeper of Liddesdale, Arran the Regent, Thomas Wharton and Wat Scott are all real, as is the the plot to kidnap the new-born Mary Queen of Scots, fomented by Henry VIII following the death of King James and the refusal of the Scots to fall in with his plan to marry the baby to his son, Prince Edward. Such a hare-brained scheme was never implemented, but the delicious what-if of it was too good a plot to ignore. After all, another wild plot of Henry’s was put into operation and succeeded – the assassination of Henry’s implacable Catholic foe, Cardinal Beaton.
The Borders was – and is – a beautiful, wild, bleak place. And though their hospitality to strangers is improved, there remains a hardy, suspicious, brave breed still living in the Debatable Land.
I hope I have done them all justice.