Silence
In 2013, for the first time in more than three hundred years, the borderlands felt the tug and pressure of the two great nations on either side. It was as though something previously believed to be immovable had shifted and could no longer be taken for granted. At church, in the village hall, on the roads and lonnings and on the cross-border 127 bus, there were quiet, anxious conversations which contrasted with the strident voices on the radio.
Far away in southern England, there was only the faintest perception of what was coming, and the polls suggested in any case that a referendum on the question of Scottish independence, to be held in September 2014, would result in a clear defeat for the Scottish nationalists. But in Scotland – in Glasgow and Edinburgh and parts of Perthshire – I had seen entire streets festooned with Scottish flags. Some windows were entirely blotted out by the cross of St Andrew.
A special kind of history was evolving on both sides in which every battle and belief was tattooed with an indelible dividing line. The Debatable Land belonged to a different history, curiously in keeping with the spirit in which its present inhabitants faced the gathering storm. A few Border families had had their ‘bravehearts’ and unionists, but to most borderers, as to their twenty-first-century Liddesdale descendants, ‘independence’ in the current sense would still have meant subservience to a state.
With the two nations fighting an increasingly bitter political battle, these expeditions into the land that was once neither Scottish nor English should have become a picturesque irrelevance, yet they took on an incongruous urgency. The boundaries of the Debatable Land might soon be resurrected as a frontier, and it seemed more important than ever to discover the age and origins of the country between the two kingdoms.
All I knew, however, was that, despite the persistence of its boundaries, and apart from two temporary Roman camps, the Debatable Land had been uninhabited from the end of the Bronze Age to the age of Grahams and Armstrongs (here). Two place names – Wobrethills and Brettalach – might refer to an aboriginal British population, but the assortment of material evidence was ridiculously meagre: a rein-guide, a jug, a buried hoard and two drowned cows.
In the face of this silence, there was nothing more to be said. At that distance in time, the historical vista was as impenetrable as the moors and mosses when a Liddesdale drow has descended. That vast gap in the archaeological record was a discovery in itself, but there were no human voices to explain the emptiness, only the river of the ‘loud dale’, proclaiming the ancient boundary with its noise.
* * *
One morning in early summer when it was just warm enough to write out of doors, I was sitting on a bank above the Liddel making the final changes to a book on the surveying skills of the ancient Celts. The sheet in front of me was a reproduction of the only ancient map on which the approximate location of the future borderlands can be surmised. Ptolemy’s map of Britain, created in Alexandria in the second century AD, consists of one hundred and sixteen place names dotted about a hopelessly distorted outline of the British Isles. The section which appears to cover what are now the Borders shows a small scattering of towns, rivers and estuaries.
In a fantasy film, the map could be fed into a computer and forced to yield its secrets with the magic word, ‘Enhance!’ But even a fantasy computer would struggle to make sense of Ptolemy’s map: many of the places have never been identified and the names that can be attached to real sites appear to be wildly misplaced.
Over in the Debatable Land, I heard a rumble above the rushing of the river. A flock of sheep had just seen their hay being delivered by the farmer and were galloping towards the feast. At that moment, I realized that if the map did by some remote chance contain any usable information about this far-flung corner of the Roman Empire, there was a means of finding it out.