9

The Scottish Borders

The View from the North

The sense of a landscape also depends on where you’re seeing it from. To be more precise, I have always viewed the Scottish Borders from an English perspective, and this despite the fact that half my family has roots north of the border (I would tell you my mother’s maiden name if it didn’t undermine my digital security). In my experience, roots and ancestry take second place to education and upbringing – and I suspect it was ever thus, for many people.

To me Hadrian’s Wall is not just an archaeological monument, it marks the southern edge of the Borderlands. Although my rational self has long told me I was wrong, my emotional self continued to view the country north of Hadrian’s Wall as hostile outlaw-land. Then one day, about twenty years ago, I decided to take a closer look over the edge of my own little conceptual box labelled England. And what I discovered entranced me.

Of course I had visited Scotland before that moment, many times. But for these visits, mostly to Edinburgh, Glasgow and Orkney, I had travelled either by air or by rail, and although a long tunnel wasn’t involved it might as well have been for all I was aware. As I recall, it was a day in September, 1995 or ’96, and we were on a visit to archaeological sites in the north, possibly when researching for an idea that would later evolve into Britain BC. We were driving north along the Great North Road (the A1) and decided, on a whim, to fork left just outside Morpeth onto the A697. I wanted to follow the A1 along the Scottish east coast, but Maisie was definite: she wanted to head due north. As roads go, this was certainly ‘one less travelled’. It went relentlessly uphill and the houses, trees, hedges and banks around us slowly dropped away, to be replaced by drystone walls, distant small farms and sheep. Maisie was delighted, as it was the route her Scottish father used to follow when they stayed with the family in Moray, northern Scotland, on their summer holidays. Free from the traffic of the A1, we were now travelling through the sort of open uplands that are familiar to anyone acquainted with Hadrian’s Wall. You could call it ‘classic’ Northumbrian hill country. As a sheep farmer, I think of it as the home of the hardy, white-faced Cheviot breed.

We continued to head north, and as we started down the slope into the Tweed valley, I was amazed at the luxuriance of the landscape, the lush greenness of everything: such a vivid contrast with the country we had been travelling through, to the south. The valley seemed more populated too: there were more farms and houses. We crossed the Tweed, which forms the border between England and Scotland, at Coldstream, a town that has given its name to perhaps the most famous regiment in the British Army.

The valley of the River Tweed has a character all of its own, whether in England or Scotland. There are villages, small market towns and many farms. The countryside features fields and meadows, grazing and arable, together with woods, spinneys, hedges and copses. It’s not typical of the bleak, open and much-fought-over uplands of the Borderlands, as portrayed by romantic novelists and many Hollywood film-makers. Landscapes in reality are often more complex than their popular images. But surely, and this is something I’ve heard repeatedly throughout my professional life, weren’t things simpler in the past? I don’t think so: quite the reverse, in fact.

I knew that the Scottish Borders had a very rich prehistoric past, and I was also aware that the area enjoyed considerable prosperity in Roman times. More recently it has been shown that this prosperity extended into the post-Roman centuries, too. Analysis of ancient pollen and plant remains has shown that the landscapes around Hadrian’s Wall did not revert to impenetrable woodland at the end of the Roman period. Fields and grazing continued to be used and maintained. Celtic Christianity was introduced to Scotland by St Ninian, who founded a monastery at Whithorn, near Newton Stewart, in Dumfries and Galloway in the early fifth century. Excavations there have revealed imported Mediterranean pottery of the fifth and sixth centuries, closely similar to finds from Tintagel and other trading posts along the western approaches.1 These finds, and other evidence, suggest that Whithorn was far from isolated and was part of wider trading and cultural networks.² Fine abbeys are very much a feature of the Scottish Borders at Coldingham, Dryburgh, Jedburgh, Kelso and Melrose, so we should not characterize the entire area as war-torn and somehow dysfunctional simply because it faced disruption for some three hundred years, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.³ Raiding and rustling were never welcomed, but the fact is that people coped with and adapted to these conditions. Only the largest-scale, bloodiest attacks had the power to bring daily life to a halt and these, mercifully, were relatively few and far between.

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as being somehow more lawless and less regulated than our own times, but I think we should be careful in jumping to such conclusions. If anything, their rules and conventions could often have been stricter: being framed within the context of the tribe and family, transgressors could expect rapid, often summary justice. National borders mattered far less than a family’s or clan’s sphere of influence, which could change from one generation to another. So to what extent is our understanding of the medieval Scottish Borders, as a blood-soaked landscape of free-wheeling outlaws, justified? I think the answer lies in the landscape itself, and how it was farmed. Cattle, and later sheep, formed the basis of the regional economy; but as forms of wealth go, cows, bulls and bullocks are very mobile – and easy to steal. So first a word about rustling.

Cattle rustling normally happened at a convenient time to the rustlers, in other words, at quiet times of the farming year; and it was always about more than just stealing. Very often it was carried out by young men, who did it to prove or show off their manliness – either to impress suitors or as part of a play for political power. Most livestock farmers would have taken special measures to look after the animals they valued most highly. Very often these would be prize bulls or rams or the best breeding cows and ewes. These would be the beasts that were given extra protection, sometimes in the lowest storey of a tower house. Today, these tower houses remain the defining feature of the Border landscape, a reminder of its turbulent medieval past.

Often known as Peel towers, they were built between 1200 and 1700, both as refuges in villages and hamlets far from a larger castle, and as places from which warnings could be sounded in times of trouble. Sometimes they were built in lines, so that warnings could be spread rapidly, from one to another, by flags and beacons. A line of Peel towers was built through the Tweed valley in the fifteenth century as a response to raiding parties from the Scottish Marches. The best known of these raiders were the so-called Border reivers (pronounced ‘reevers’), who operated on both sides of the Border. They would extract protection money from their potential victims, mostly small landowners. These fees were known as ‘black mal’; and by 1552, ‘blackmail’. ‘Mal’ was a Norse word for agreement.4

One – quite late – example of a Peel tower is Barnes Tower, on the Tweed, a short distance upstream of Peebles. Peebles was one of the principal towns of the central Borders. It was served by the roads that followed the river from Berwick and Coldstream to Edinburgh. The tower was built in the late sixteenth century as part of an earlier chain that ran the length of the upper reaches of the Tweed. Its outward appearance was severe: a square tower with roughly plastered walls and small windows, with no hint of ornamentation or decoration. The main hall was on the first floor, with the ground floor reserved for livestock, a dairy, food storage and the practical aspects of feeding people. A very short distance away from the tower is the charming mid-Georgian house that was built in the more peaceful times that followed the 1707 Acts of Union between England and Scotland. It is a small and very elegant country house, built in 1773, whose park and gardens grace the gentle slopes leading down to the river. It provides a wonderful contrast with the brooding tower, which still seems to lurk rather furtively within the trees, just a little distance away. But make no mistake, those plain tower houses were not built for appearances. They were all about saving lives, both human and animal.

Raids by reivers were one thing, but sometimes the cross-border attacks were mounted on a larger, more serious, scale. The devastation caused by such an organized cross-border attack was brought very vividly home to me when I directed excavations for Time Team in Edinburgh, in the gardens of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. We were looking for evidence for the earliest building of what is now the Royal Palace when, to our great surprise, we came across scarlet-orange layers within the make-up of a palace wall. There could be no mistake: this was clear evidence for a serious fire, which pottery and other evidence suggested had happened in the early to mid-sixteenth century. Of course, you cannot automatically assume that evidence for burning is necessarily linked to an act of violence – bakers’ ovens can catch fire at any time – but there was much to suggest that this particular burning was a result of an English army’s attack on Edinburgh, in 1544, led by the Earl of Hertford. This attack was part of the mid-sixteenth-century war between England and Scotland that followed shortly after the birth of Mary Queen of Scots in 1542. The birth of a Scottish heir would have been an ideal opportunity for Henry VIII to have united the kingdoms of Scotland and England by a diplomatic marriage. But with Mary’s father, the Scottish King James V, dead, Henry tried instead to conquer Scotland in a massive invasion. Known as the ‘Rough Wooing’, Henry’s aim was to destroy the ‘old alliance’ between the Scots and Catholic France, but he failed. As was the way of the time, Mary was taken to France to marry the dauphin, just four years later, in 1548.

I found the exposure and excavation of those fire-reddened stones strangely moving and actually did most of the work on them myself, despite frequent calls to appear on-camera. There’s something fascinating about discovering what looks like a potentially direct link to a known historical event. The next day was the end of the shoot and I decided to drive back home, through the Borders. I stopped at an ancient-looking inn in Peebles, where I enjoyed lunch with some very convivial people – all complete strangers. After the meal, as I was heading back towards the hire car, it slowly dawned on me that the darkness that had coloured my appreciation of the Borders had lifted. I felt far more relaxed. Maybe it was the lesson I had learned from those fired stones: that we English had much to answer for. I honestly don’t know what it was – perhaps simply the generosity and warmth of the people. But I realized I could now enjoy this landscape from the north, as well as the south. And that I loved both views.