Beachcombing
Just before dawn one morning, a deep shuddering came from outside the house. I rushed out into the dark, half-expecting to see a mechanical digger at work. The river was coming back to life. Within minutes of the first tremor, gigantic slabs of ice were see-sawing downstream, buffeting and mounting one another like stampeding animals. Gaining speed, they scoured the banks, felled trees and smashed some steps which had led down to the river. Hundreds of them stacked up on the inside bend, dwarfing the willow and the alder and creating the perfect illusion of a polar sea.
Since the big freeze, only moles had been able to pierce the ground. Their hills had frozen instantly into heavy, crumbless cakes of black earth. A few days after the thaw, when the banks were still littered with ice, it became possible to dig the soil, and for the first time, I had a sense of the remoteness of which concerned friends in the south had spoken. But they had been referring to remoteness from mobile-phone masts, railway stations and restaurants. This was remoteness in four dimensions.
Oxford had been thick with history. A hole dug almost anywhere in the garden would turn up artefacts from several periods of human settlement. The evidence of continuity in the earth conveyed a sense of unshakeable comfort, of occupying a place designed and prepared for human beings. In Liddesdale, any remnants of ancient or modern civilization had been carried off by the tide of boulder clay. No burnt flints or Roman roof tiles were filed away in the soil’s archive, only unworked stones transported by glaciers.
When the river began to perform its cycle of changes, I discovered its power of revelation. Unlike the concrete-jacketed rivers which flood Carlisle, the Liddel is exactly where it wants to be. As a result, it has made a pact with human beings. Invasions are punished with destruction, but in exchange for being left alone, the river brings treasures which can simply be gleaned without the need for excavation.
In the middle of the night, after several days of rain, a cavernous rumbling would begin, punctuated by a thudding reminiscent of a demolition site. I looked out at sunrise one day to see a brown arm of open sea churning past the house six feet above the usual level of the river. There were crashing waves and a nasty-looking undertow where the river seemed to be swallowing itself. A fallen tree, stripped of its twigs, stood up as the base of its trunk caught against a boulder. A wooden bench weighted with stones was waltzing up towards the house. The shingle beach had disappeared.
When the flood had subsided, the beach was reconfigured, spread out into a thin strand with a curving headland but with an extra foot of material on top, neatly sorted, as though by a builder’s merchant, into fine sand, coarse sand, grit, gravel, pebbles, stones and boulders. A two-foot-wide embankment of thatch, ripped from the river banks, stretched away into the alder carr and marked the high point of the flood. Rocks which had teetered along the skittering gravel sat in midstream like small islands where nothing had been before.
After each flood, the shingle beach offered a fresh selection of archaeological evidence, culled from twenty miles of river. The artefacts had been smoothed, smashed and smoothed again. ‘Price 1/3 . . . PREPARED . . . LINCOLN &’ was all that remained of a pot of Clarke’s Miraculous Salve (c. 1910), probably from the same period as the broken neck of a blue ink bottle and a similarly softened shard of a Wilson’s Tonic Beer flask.
As a general rule, the heavier the object, the longer its trip down river and thus through time. A wrought-iron bootscraper and a tie plate (used to attach a rail to a railway sleeper) belonged to the mid-nineteenth century, as did some pipe fencing of a variety I later discovered, falling apart but still in situ, upstream at Kershopefoot. This rule is not absolute. Some weighty objects are naturally well equipped for a river journey. A post-war tennis umpire’s chair, corroded but still usable, had cartwheeled downstream for nine miles to be followed a few decades later – but arriving at about the same time – by a tennis ball, a shuttlecock and a nylon sock embroidered with the word ‘Sport’.
These items indicated human habitation to the north, though few pre-dated the twentieth century: brackets and hinges, corrugated asbestos roofing, a Bakelite vent and a piece of vinyl flooring, pathetically uncamouflaged by its shingle-beach print. A pink rubber hand-grip from a child’s bicycle still enclosed the rusty conglomerate of its handlebar. Agriculture was represented by the metal wing of a tractor, endless twisted ribbons of black plastic used for wrapping hay bales, an assortment of sheep bones and a small cow, bloated and flayed, which lingered for less than an hour before rolling on to the sea. A year later, another flood cast up a large yellow tag marked ‘109’ which, given its size, must have been clamped to a cow’s ear. The only sign of deliberate animal activity was the corpse of a salmon skilfully filleted by an otter. Human predators were represented by a gun cartridge and a waterproof pouch for freshly killed game.
None of this river-borne rubbish is particularly noticeable, and the Liddel is probably as clean as it was three centuries ago, when the poet-physician Dr John Armstrong said of its ‘sacred flood’ in his inexplicably popular poem, The Art of Preserving Health (1744), ‘not a purer stream . . . rolls toward the western main’.
May still thy hospitable swains be blest
In rural innocence; thy mountains still
Teem with the fleecy race; thy tuneful woods
For ever flourish. . . .
The rubbish described above must have been generated by a very small number of people, and it would not be surprising if a local reader of this book remembered learning to ride on the pink-handlebar bicycle or came to claim the umpire’s chair. The ‘swains’ and artisans of Liddesdale occasionally use the river as an industrial conveyor belt but they are not unusually prone to dropping litter. The largest settlement upstream is Newcastleton (home to eight hundred and fifty people), and the total population within jettisoning distance of the Liddel’s banks is certainly less than one thousand. If this equation of detritus and population density is reliable, the amount of garbage transported by the Tyne, the Trent or the Thames must be truly colossal.
In one respect only, the Liddel is an archaeological treat. After three years of sporadic beachcombing, I had assembled a small museum of bricks which I embedded in river sand to form a pavement. Each brick was stamped with the name of the brickworks and sometimes its place of origin. They had come from all over northern England and southern Scotland. There were astoundingly heavy bricks from Accrington in Lancashire, marked ‘NORI’ (‘Iron, whichever way you put it’), noted for their use in the foundations of the Blackpool Tower and the Empire State Building. There were bricks from the Pentland Hills and the Cumbrian coast. Many of them had probably tumbled into the river when the Waverley Line was demolished after its closure in 1969.
The oldest bricks, from the 1870s and 80s, were those produced in Corbridge on the Roman Wall and at the Buccleuch Terra Cotta works in Sanquhar. The name ‘Sanquhar’, imprinted on the bricks, comes from the Celtic ‘sean caer’, referring to the ‘old fort’ above the town. These were the only river-borne reminders of Roman or Celtic civilization. Everything older than the mid-nineteenth century had long since been atomized or ferried off to the Solway Firth, and perhaps those bricks and bottles will turn out to be the last pre-war items to make the journey this far down the Liddel. Eventually, all evidence of human life will have been evacuated from the catchment area, and only the scratched and rounded stones brought by ancient glaciers will remain.
I relished that sense of emptiness, unaware that more substantial treasures would come to light in other ways. The historical coordinates of the place were plotting themselves on a mental map, and soon, that silent fourth dimension would seem more populous and busy than the present.
*
A few weeks after the melting of the ice, the roads were clear of snow and floodwater no longer filled the ditches. Winter seemed to have exhausted itself for the time being. Before it could recover or change its mind, we decided to set off towards the river’s source, up the valley of the Liddel and into the heartland of the reivers.
Food was prepared and information collected: I had assembled various scraps on the history of Liddesdale, its inhabitants and early explorers. The idea was simply to provide mental sustenance on the journey, and perhaps to recreate a past discovery of that world within a world. I had learned about the expeditions of Mary Queen of Scots in 1566 and Walter Scott in the late eighteenth century: they seemed to be the only historical personages to have ventured into that valley with something other than destruction on their minds. Their itineraries would give the ride a goal; the rest would be left to chance and the weather.
We checked the roadworthiness of the bikes and watched the changing sky. Ideally, we would have hired a pair of ponies, but the whispering and ticking of the chains on the sprockets suggested the precision of a time machine, and the light shower which fell from a gleaming sky as we left the house guaranteed a certain authenticity.