NINE

The Long Riders

HIGH ON A RIDGE in the Border hills a posse of six riders suddenly appears against the horizon. Their leader carries a flag fluttering in the morning breeze, and as their silhouettes move slowly against the sky and the horses carefully pick their way through the heather, a fearful memory stirs. Once off the ridge and threading their way down a diagonal path, with the flag framed against the green hillside, hundreds of riders flood into view behind the posse. Sometimes a metal bit or a silver browband glints in the sunshine. From a mile away, without any obvious detail of the twenty-first century, the image of the horsemen is somehow not comfortable and, in open country, perhaps even threatening. As more and more riders breast the ridge, they create an indelible impression of something very ancient.

Once at the bottom of the hillside, the riders disappear from view down onto the valley floor. Before they are seen again, the drumming of hoof beats can be heard. First the gold tip of the flag appears, then the standard bearer and his followers thunder through the grass, racing across the centuries to meet their waiting supporters. When they gallop nearer, they are smiling and not screaming war cries. They kick on their horses, stand up in the saddle with horsewhips held in the air, yelling hurrahs at the hundreds of people who have come to cheer them on. Those who listen closely to the hoof beats can hear the noise of history.

On the first Friday after the second Monday in June every year a forgotten part of British Celtic culture comes alive for a morning in the Scottish Border country. Celebrated for at least 500 years and probably another 500 before that, the Selkirk Common Riding remembers passions and skills much prized by the Celtic warriors who exploded from their heartlands in central Europe around 750 BC. Horses were at the core of early Celtic culture, and one of the few deities whose images are regularly identified was Epona, goddess of horses. She is almost always shown seated on a horse, often side-saddle, and her name may be the derivation of the word ‘pony’. The armies who defeated the Romans and the Greeks did not march to victory against the legionaries and hoplites. They rode.

On 16 June 2000, the Standard Bearer of the Royal Burgh of Selkirk led 420 riders around the boundaries of the common land belonging to the town. An annual inspection of the boundary markers of territory is by no means unique in Britain, but what happens nowhere else but in the Scottish Borders is the gathering of very large numbers of riders to complete the rituals. These ceremonies have only recently become that – four years ago the resemblance between the modern Selkirk Common Riding and a force of light cavalry patrolling the hills was no resemblance at all. That is exactly what it was.

In the 1120s David I, King of Scotland, recognized that Selkirk had common land, and between 1315 and 1536 this grew into a huge area, more than 11,000 acres to the north and south of the town. Adjacent landowners constantly tried to occupy parts of it and to move the boundary markers ever inwards. These threats gave rise to the ancient purpose of the Common Riding – to chase off the grazing sheep and cattle of neighbouring lairds, and to check at least once a year that the boundary markers had not been moved. Streams, stones and cairns were and are still used to mark where Selkirk’s land lies. Sometimes big hardwood trees formed part of the boundary, and the Selkirk men would cut or beat the bark to mark it so that they could recognize the same tree again next summer. It is the origin of the phrase ‘beating the bounds’.

Protecting Selkirk Common was often dangerous. The town’s Provost, John Muthag, and his fellow baillie, James Keyne, were ambushed and killed while riding to Edinburgh to the Court of Session to prove Selkirk’s ownership of its land. During the seventeenth century the townspeople were often forced to take up their weapons and ride out to fight the retainers of the encroaching landowners who surrounded them. The common was very valuable – as a source of winter and summer pasture, as arable land, for the digging of peat and for stone and turf for building. In 1606, 340 townspeople rode and walked out to drive off the sheep and cattle of the lairds who had tried to take over the south common, and a few years later the Scottish Privy Council, which contained many titled names, wrote to the Provost of Selkirk to insist ‘that in the riding of their marches, they behave themselves in a peaceable, modest and comely manner’. Selkirk ignored the letter and went on fighting for its rights. By 1681 the human and legal costs began to take their toll and a compromise was reached. In return for relinquishing their claim to all of the land, the surrounding lairds were given part of the common in a final settlement. From that time onwards the Common Riding became less of a paramilitary exercise and increasingly more of a ceremony.

Selkirk may well be the oldest common riding, but it is not the only one with ancient roots. At Hawick, Lauder and Langholm huge cavalcades of riders are led by a Cornet and his Right and Left Hand Men, and in other Border towns there are several younger or revived versions of essentially the same ceremony. Flags are everywhere and the military atmosphere unmistakable, but the rituals also express the quintessence of these towns’ identity, and these places are never so much themselves as when the riders clatter out on a summer morning to beat the bounds. In Hawick the crowds roar after the Cornet as he gallops with colours flying, ‘Aye in common!’, ‘Always held in common!’, and at Langholm a man stands up behind a sitting rider on the rump of a strong horse and cries the ancient rights of the Langholm Fair. It is a defiant list of what the townspeople have the right to do and where they have the right to go. The cheering is deafening.

The common ridings are intensely political and repeatedly assert the freedom of communities to act in concert against powerful magnates, against central government and against any who would challenge their rights. On these summer mornings emotions are near the surface. At the commemorations of world wars and ancient battles fought half a millennium ago many people weep openly for their dead, and in the still centre of the ceremonies there are silent moments filled only by the tick, tick, tick of memory. Cornets and Standard Bearers have ridden the marches for hundreds of years, and every midsummer they go where their fathers, mothers and grandfathers went before them, in exactly the same way and at exactly the same time. These little towns forget nothing. Distilling more than a thousand years of shared experience into the shape of a journey on horseback, they use the common ridings like an invisible clock.

The roots of these ceremonies are partially datable and traceable, but it is the ethos of the folk memories and the sense of unselfconscious, living tradition which means that these remarkable ceremonies must be included in the story of Celtic Britain. As in Padstow with the ’Obby ’Oss on 1 May, there is real abandonment at the common ridings, widespread drunkenness and a sense of a huge party to which everyone is invited but which is also unintelligible to outsiders. Uniquely in the Borders, the link with the Celtic past is not through people alone, but through people and their horses. The ubiquity of these in a Border summer ceremonies is a vivid reminder of the Celtic culture of Britain in a place not thought to be Celtic at all. In fact, the Scottish Border country has a profoundly Celtic past, but what initially perplexes is the fact that it was not a Gaelic past. Even though Gaelic-speaking dynasties came to the Scottish throne and ruled north of the Tweed until the fourteenth century, the Celtic culture of the Borders has almost nothing to do with their influence. It is much older and has powerful links not with the Highlands or central Scotland, but with Wales and the Welsh language – exemplified by the fact that the native population spoke P-Celtic, a version of Old Welsh. The Celts left behind a rich cultural legacy which was obscured by later shifts of people and power, and has been almost entirely forgotten.

As often, the ground is strewn with clues and memories and, providing the correct lexicon is to hand, these can quickly be seen for what they are. Place names such as Kelso, Peebles, Penicuik, Dalkeith and even Edinburgh and Glasgow are all Welsh in origin, and some of them, like Dalkeith, which sounds so Scottish, describe the landscape as it used to appear to P-Celts. Dalkeith is from the Old Welsh, Dol-coedd and it means ‘the field by the edge of the wood’. In the early seventh century, when Anglian war bands entered the Tweed basin, they changed some names to suit themselves but left many to speak of the P-Celtic peoples they settled amongst, and over whom they gained political control.

Defeated peoples rarely have a voice, but 600 years after the Anglian takeover, the Celts of the Borders found a bard to remember and record something of their vanishing culture. True Thomas, Thomas of Ersil-doune, perhaps best known as Thomas the Rhymer, was composing poetry in English eighty years before Geoffrey Chaucer. Because manuscript versions of his work did not appear until the fifteenth century, his early appearance has sometimes gone unremarked, or been confused. Thomas cast himself in his stories and has often been thought a mythic figure as a result, but he was real enough, living some time between 1210 and 1290, witnessing legal documents and holding land near the Border village of Earlston, called Ersildoune in the medieval period. He got the name True Thomas because he claimed to be a seer, a prophet who predicted the death of Alexander III in 1286, the Wars of Independence that followed and much else. Very consistent in the body of oracles is his wish to see the defeat of the Sais, the Saxons, and the return of the Celtic peoples to the thrones of Britain. Some of this is probably an adaptation of older prophecies to new politics, as, towards the end of Thomas’s life, Edward I of England attempted to drag Scotland into the Plantagenet empire, but, as a prophet, Thomas stands squarely in a clear Celtic tradition and his utterances would not have been out of place at the court of a Welsh prince or an Irish king. Much later the Gaelic Highlands unexpectedly adopted him as a messianic figure whom they redubbed Tomas Reumhair, Thomas the Wanderer.

His defining work is usually titled The Romance of Thomas the Rhymer, and it concerns a journey to Elfland. Out hunting on the Eildon Hills near Melrose on Hallowe’en, or Samhuinn Eve, Thomas meets a beautiful woman riding a white horse in splendid harness. She fixes him with a bewitching eye and points out three roads.

Oh see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the path of righteousness,
Though after it but few enquires.

And see ye not yon braid, braid road
That lies across yon lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness
Though spme call it Heaven.

And see ye not that bonny road
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to Elfland
Where you and I this night maun gae.

Full of triple choices and hinging around a lightly disguised sexual relationship between Thomas and the Elf Queen, this is a tale of a Celtic Otherworld seen by a prophet who slipped through a crack in time on Samhuinn Eve, on Hallowe’en, when the barriers between the earthly and spiritual worlds are lowered. It is more than an echo of the Celtic past of the Scottish Border country: it is a clear link to that past. Thomas of Ersildoune may have been a collector of stories and prophecies from the remnants of an Old Welsh-speaking community still surviving in the up-country in the twelfth century.

His adventure with the Elf Queen began in a significant place, a place where the old gods were close. Around the summit of Eildon Hill North lies the circuit of a huge rampart and inside it are the remains of 300 hut platforms. This was a sacred site where Celtic festivals were celebrated on the quarter days, when fires were lit and people climbed the hill to be closer to the sky gods. When the Angles came to the Tweed valley, they observed the rituals of the Celts and called the hill Aeled-dun or Fire Hill. The Romans had a more prosaic name for the group of three hills that seemed to rise so suddenly out of the flatlands around them – Trimontium – and they built a large army camp and military depot at their foot. Having pacified and accommodated the horse-riding Celtic tribes they found in the Tweed basin, the Romans turned their attention to the troublesome Picts in the north. Hadrian and Antonine lent their names to walls which attempted to contain them but eventually, by the beginning of the third century, imperial strategists evolved a policy of supplying and sustaining the Celtic warriors based in the Borders as buffers between Britannia and Pictland. It worked reasonably well, but by 367 it had broken down and failed to staunch significant Pictish incursions into the southern provinces. To stiffen the buffer states of the Borders, Roman prefects backed by squadrons of cavalry were assigned to them. Hidden in the earliest kinglists are P-Celtic versions of their names: in the Strathclyde genealogies Cinhil was Quintilius and Cluim was Clemens, in Galloway Anhwn Donadd was Antonius Donatus and in the Tweed valley Padarn Beisrudd was Paternus Beisrudd. The last is particularly interesting because it is a Roman name with a P-Celtic nickname attached: it means Paternus, the Man with the Red Cloak -probably a serving Roman officer.

These prefects were important in that they helped to build a series of powerful military kingdoms in southern Scotland which later became a focus of resistance against the incursions of Germanic tribes after the Romans finally abandoned Britannia in 410. The expedition of one of their successors, Cunedda, is eloquent testimony to where important political decisions were made in fifth-century Britain. With a large cavalry force of perhaps 1,000 warriors, auxiliaries and spare remounts, Cunedda left the Tweed valley and rode down to Wales to expel the Irish who had invaded and settled in the Lleyn Peninsula and elsewhere in the north. It is the only example of anything resembling Roman statecraft in fifth-century Britain, and it originated not from the southeast of England but from the Borders, and crucially for this story it was accomplished on horseback.

In addition to these early traditions of cavalry prowess, there is persuasive evidence that Britain’s most famous horse-riding hero, Arthur, or King Arthur as the romantics style him, also originated in the Tweed Valley and that he and his war bands beat back the Germanic invaders for a generation. Arthur is quoted as a byword for bravery in a long poem composed in Edinburgh in Old Welsh around the year 600. Known as The Gododdin, it tells the tale of 300 cavalry troopers who rode south to Catterick in North Yorkshire to confront the army of the Anglian kingdom of Deira. The bard, Aneirin, reserves some of his most highly coloured language for the snow-maned and swan-breasted horses of The Gododdin, but their beauty did not save them, and the Angles cut the Celtic cavalry to pieces in a victory so emphatic that a generation later they were in the Tweed valley installing their chieftains in old Gododdin fortresses. Arthur’s spectacular base at Marchidun, near Kelso, got a new name as it was taken over by a man called Hroc and became Roxburgh.

The Angles fought on foot and their only interest in the cavalry traditions of the Scottish Border country can have been to neutralize them. This they unquestionably did, but they could not entirely obliterate an equestrian culture ingrained for almost a thousand years. It would reassert itself in incendiary fashion towards the end of the Middle Ages.

When Thomas the Rhymer prophesied the death of the childless Alexander III, he could not foresee how the consequences of dynastic failure would afflict the Borders. The Wars of Independence followed, and even though Robert Bruce established his family’s right to kingship with a stunning victory at Bannockburn, it did not bring an end to conflict. Scotland, and the Border in particular, continued to suffer appalling depredations throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Terrible battles were fought – at Halidon Hill near Berwick in 1333 thousands of Scots were felled by the murderous hail of English arrows. Each generation seemed to suffer from disaster. In 1349 the Black Death decimated Carlisle’s population and Roxburgh was occupied by an English garrison for more than 100 years. By 1483 Berwick had become permanently part of England. As armies crossed and recrossed, by 1500 civil order had broken down over a wide area on both sides of the frontier, and clanship began to present the only hope of security to many people. The days of the Reivers were dawning.

Clanship may be a slightly misleading term, since it implies a connection with the clans of the Highlands of Scotland, but even though the competing concepts of duthchas and oigreachd had a much more muted expression in the Borders, all their military and some of their social aspects were present in the south. A near obsession with genealogy was something shared both by Border families and Highland clans, and it was often seen by outsiders as a Celtic characteristic. When the Welsh flooded into London in the wake of the Tudor succession in 1485, Sir Thomas Overbury took a dim view of them, and particularly deplored their constant and bewildering references to kinship and ability to recite their pedigree and stated that ‘he accounts none well descended, that call him not cousin’. What Overbury did not realize was that in Celtic society, the identity of a cousin was more than a mere family connection – it might be a matter of life and death.

In the Borders after 1500, it most certainly was. Border Scots phrases still in currency betray an attitude that has changed little since that time. These speak of the central importance of family, blood relationships and the necessity of precision in describing these. A Borderer who enquires if someone is ‘freen tae oo’ or ‘friend to us’ is not asking a question about fondness, but wanting to know if someone is related – a cousin, uncle or whatever. The modern innocence of the question remembers old enmities: to most sixteenth-century Borderers their only friends were family, and the only bonds that would bear the weight of trust were those of kinship. Spelling could be of the essence because sometimes it differentiated in a very specific manner between cadet branches of the same family, and one family at least required a mnemonic to aid recollection. T. S. Eliot would have been amused at the early use of poetry in such a hard-bitten Border family as his. This is how the Eliots remembered who they were and where they came from:

The double L and single T
Descend from Minto and Wolflee,
The double T and single L
Mark the old race in Stobs that dwell,
The single L and single T
The Eliots of St Germans be,
But double T and double L
Who they are, none can tell.

The verse reveals a vital accuracy about place of origin, and this is a habit which has also endured. Partly because of the wide currency of a few characteristic surnames such as Armstrong, Grieve, Graham, Murray, Scott, Elliot, Kerr and a few others, a place is often still attached to a surname for clarity – this also happens in Wales and the Highlands. Sometimes, the place can be a town, but that is not always sufficiently specific – Armstrong of Langholm covers a large group of people – more often a nickname added to a place provide sufficient accuracy for all. Everyone knows who Bindie McCombie of Kelso is, but no-one knows any more what Bindie means. Bangtail Irvine of Hawick got his name so long ago that everyone has forgotten how.

In the Scottish Border country there is a phrase which explains and excuses much, ‘It’s aye been,’ or It’s always been like this,’ is not so much a comment, as a philosophy of life. In his novel Weir of Hermiston, Robert Louis Stevenson applied this form of social conservatism to all Scots, but his character was really talking about the Borders:

This is the mark of the Scot of all classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good and bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.

If a profound interest in genealogy marks Border society as Celtic, it is its 2,500-year-old love affair with the horse that make it uniquely so. From its beginnings in central Europe, the horse had been at the heart of Celtic culture, and Epona, the mare-goddess, was widely revered. The link between horses and warfare was enduring and indelible in the Borders. It reached across a millennium to connect the horse warriors of pre-Roman, and fifth- and sixth-century British Celtic society with the Border Reivers of the sixteenth century.

For all of the sixteenth century a huge tract of Britain, perhaps a tenth of the total landmass, became in essence a separate state. Between the Solway Firth and the North Sea, much of Galloway and Cumbria, almost all of Northumberland and the Scottish Border counties found itself the unchallenged domain of the Border Reivers, the cattle-rustling, horse-riding bandits immortalized by Walter Scott and others. Under their rule, the Borders became utterly ungovernable, a place where the writs of English and Scottish kings were ignored and where for more than 100 years no outsider ventured unarmed. Until 1603 and the Union of the Crowns, powerful families like the Armstrongs, the Carletons, the Scotts, the Fenwicks, the Elliots and the English and Scottish Grahams ‘shook loose the Border’ in their own phrase, and created an anarchic state on the edges of England and Scotland. In a series of shifting alliances the Reivers raided as far north as Edinburgh and as far south as York. These were the Badlands where concepts and words were introduced to the language like ‘blackmail’, ‘red-handed’, ‘gear’ and, most ominously, the word ‘bereaved’.

Warlords like Walter Scott of Buccleuch, who could put 4,000 men in the saddle in a morning, organized their private armies on a kinship basis exactly like the Highland clans of the north, while the English Grahams had more loyalty to the Scottish branch of their family than anyone else, no matter their nationality. It was a cattle-based economy where herds were grazed on the open hills guarded by horsemen or lookouts from fortified tower houses. Only in the east and the Eden valley around Carlisle was arable cultivation carried on with any consistency. The Reivers lived not by farming or even by efficient stocks-manship, but by plunder.

Willie Armstrong of Kinmont and Auld Wat Scott of Harden were two of the most infamous Border Reivers. Both were active in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and unquestionably knew each other. Wealthy and resourceful warlords like these maintained fortified stone towers (many are still standing, now fortified by grants for restoration as dwelling houses) that could be quickly barred and defended for short periods. Armstrong had his tower at Morton Rigg, very near the border and about ten miles north of Carlisle. He was fond of raiding in Tynedale and in 1593 he gathered a force of 1,000 horsemen and rode over the hills and down into England to rustle 2,000 head of cattle from the farms in the valley. In common with other Reivers, Armstrong’s gang took everything of value that could be carried or could be driven before them back to Scotland, and on a foray in 1584 they stole £2,000 worth of goods. The Border Reivers called this sort of loot ‘gear’, and have bequeathed the term to modern thieves.

By 1600 Armstrong had joined a band of outlaws called Sandy’s Bairns. These were ‘broken men’ who had left their kindred groups for whatever reason and come together into the sort of gang famously found on the American frontier 250 years later. Armstrong was also active in blackmail at this time. The Reivers invented the word, if not the idea, and, nothing to do with the post, it comes from mail, meaning a rental payment. In essence, it was a protection racket run by men who had as little love for other families as they had for either government.

Willie Armstrong was a powerful man. He could raise 1,000 men to follow him at short notice and lived the life of a ruthless warlord, raiding on the Border for at least twenty years. And he probably died an old man and in his bed.

Auld Wat of Harden added some dark humour to the grim days of the Riding Times. Raiding out of Teviotdale on a smaller scale than Armstrong, he is said to have ridden past a haystack on the way home from a successful foray and said, ‘Aye, if ye had four legs, ye would not stand there long.’ Married to Mary Scott of Dryhope, a local beauty known as the Flower of Yarrow, Wat Scott had many quarrelsome sons, and when one of them was killed by a rival family, he locked them all in a dungeon to prevent any hot-headed vengeance, and then rode to Edinburgh to obtain a grant of the murderer’s lands in redress.

These men were ruthless bandits and whatever romance was later woven, not least by Walter Scott, a descendant of Auld Wat, around their moonlit raids, nothing should obscure their savagery or mendacity. This period marked a reversion to ancient atavisms: it was a society not subject to murder and robbery, but organized around both. By contrast, people were murdered and robbed often in Shakespeare’s London in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, but it was not accepted as a way of life. One Reiver left a unique testament that underlines the cold, hard facts of life on the Border at that time. Awaiting execution for his crimes, Geordie Burn gave this statement to Robert Carey, the March Warden, who wrote it down:

He voluntarily of himself said, that he had lived long enough to do so many villanies as he had done; and withal told us, that he had lain with about 40 men’s wives, what in England, what in Scotland, and that he had killed 7 Englishmen with his own hands, cruelly murdering them; that he had spent his whole time in whoring, drinking, stealing and taking deep revenge for slight offences. He seemed to be very penitent, and much desired a minister for the comfort of his soul.

Feuds between rival families were common, and ferocious. In Annandale the Johnstons and the Maxwells (aided by the Moffats, a troublesome bunch) killed and stole from each other for six generations. The Scottish crown deplored the lynch law that ignored the efforts of their sheriffs to impose justice. In the sixteenth century eighty punitive expeditions were mounted, and all of them failed. Even when a great Reiver prince was captured, it had little lasting effect. James V entrapped Johnnie Armstrong, Laird of Gilnockie, near Canonbie, at what purported to be a parley at Carlenrig Chapel in Teviotdale in 1529. When the King’s men surrounded Armstrong and his thirty-six followers, the Reiver tried hard to talk his way out of the trap. When a noose was placed around his neck, the rope slung over a stout branch and he was set on his pony, Armstrong made a last, eloquent plea to James V, but the King turned his back and Johnnie shouted after him in anger, ‘What a fool I was to seek grace from a graceless face.’ And then a sergeant whacked the pony’s backside,

In order to sort out disputes without bloodshed, regular Truce Days were arranged by the Scottish and English Wardens – these were royal appointments often held by notorious Reivers. In 1596 at Kershopefoot, twenty miles north of Carlisle, Willie Armstrong of Kinmont turned up, wanting to argue some matter or other which has gone unrecorded, but as he rode away north a group of English Reivers broke the truce and overpowered Armstrong before taking him to Carlisle Castle to claim reward from Lord Scrope, a new Warden sent by Elizabeth I.

News of the abduction spread like wildfire. In a century or more no truce had been so flagrantly broken. Occasionally fights had broken out but nothing so deceitful had ever been done before. Walter Scott of Buccleuch was Keeper of Liddesdale and he wrote formally and, unusually, very courteously (his letter survives) to Lord Scrope. Even after a second, slightly more strained letter, no satisfaction was forthcoming.

Buccleuch decided to act. Carlisle Castle was one of the strongest in England but he reasoned that since an armed raid was the last thing Scrope would expect, that was exactly what should be done. First, Buccleuch gathered intelligence about the state of the castle’s defences and exactly where Willie was being held. Then he contacted the English Grahams and the Carletons for help. Willie Kang Irvine acted as fixer and go-between and after some preliminaries a deal was struck. Even though the Carletons were actually Deputy Wardens of the English March, royal authority meant nothing to them, and Scrope was an unwelcome recent posting by Elizabeth I.

At Langholm Races, Lance and Thomas Carleton told Willie Kang that they had bribed some of the castle guard to open a small postern gate near Willie’s quarters, but they also insisted that the raid be undertaken soon since they had serious worries about security. A date was hurriedly set and Buccleuch, a Border warlord who had thousands of horsemen at his command, chose to ride with a party of only eighty, including the notorious Gilbert Elliot and Auld Wat of Harden. In the bright moonlight the raiders picked their way carefully through the hills, even though the Grahams had guaranteed them safe conduct, and they went quietly, anxious not to raise any alarm. They approached Carlisle’s walls under Stanwix Bank, which screened them from any sharp-eyed sentry. Then, taking only a dozen men, Buccleuch left the main body of his small force and stole into the town.

From a serving girl paid by the Carletons the raiders knew where Kinmont Willie was and, as important, he knew that they were coming. Buccleuch found the postern gate, got it open, crept up the stairs to the room, took hold of Willie, pulled him down, out and onto a spare horse before the alarm was raised. Then the raiders rode hard, clattering through the streets for the Irish Gate, which their comrades had forced open. Two hours after sunrise they were back in Scott territory with Kinmont Willie leading the celebrations. A ballad offers even more drama. When Lord Scrope gave chase, Buccleuch is said to have taunted him:

He turned him on the other side,
And at Lord Scrope his glove flung he -
’If ye like na my visit in Merry England,
In fair Scotland, come visit me.’

Perfectly executed, with brio and bravery, the rescue of Kinmont Willie was a fitting end, the last great raid of the Border, the Reivers’ last goodnight. Seven years later the Union of the Crowns abolished the frontier, and James VI and I hanged, imprisoned, deported and ennobled enough of the Reivers to bring this extraordinary period in Britain’s history rapidly to a close.

1637 was an annus mirabilis on the Border. In all the marches, from Carlisle to Berwick, there were only thirty-seven executions. No-one could remember such a peaceful time. This happened because entire families, like the Grahams, had been removed from the Borders. Many were transported to Ulster, and from there sailed on to a new life in America, where they prospered. Eleven of the first fifteen presidents of the USA were Ulster Scots. The writer George MacDonald Fraser noted an extraordinary cameo in 1968 in his brilliant history of the Border Reivers, The Steel Bonnets, which provided a reminder of the hard men who had terrorized the Border. At the inauguration of President-elect Richard Nixon, there was a moment when he shook hands with Billy Graham. Beside him stood the outgoing President, Lyndon Johnson, while behind him was the figure of the astronaut, Neil Armstrong. All Border names of Border descent borne by the square-jawed, hard-bitten men whose families had been at the core of this amazing period in British history.