Polling Stations
Less than a fortnight before the day of voting, an opinion poll showed for the first time a majority in favour of Scottish independence. The southern English seemed to discover at the last minute that the land of tartan and haggis was not a picturesque appendage but a nation with a will of its own.
Ambassadors had been sent north from Westminster to offer blandishments and to explain the economic arguments for remaining a part of the United Kingdom. They seemed to believe that this was above all a matter of public finance. Some of the English emissaries struggled to adapt to the foreign form of debate. On local radio, an angry discussion took place on the subject of agricultural subsidies. The Scottish representative of farming interests brought it to an abrupt end: ‘Well, I don’t care about arguments anyway. I’m a nationalist, and that’s that!’ Perhaps this was the spirit in which the twenty-four Scottish knights had stymied the twenty-four English knights when they walked along the borderline in 1245.
In and around the Debatable Land, there was a feeling of horror at the ineptitude of the ‘No’ campaign. Its leader, nominally a Scot, always looked like a man who had just stepped out of a taxi in Whitehall. English politicians seemed to be ventriloquized by Scottish satirists: they acquired a snooty, patronizing tone and mispronounced Scottish place names. English commentators referring to the independence debate endlessly repeated the words ‘dour’ and ‘canny’, as though the only two words of Scots in their vocabulary happened to be an adequate description of that wily, tight-fisted race of surly foreigners.
One day, some men arrived to cut the high branches under the electricity wires which run through the woodland. One of the men was Northern Irish, the others came from either side of the border. As usual, we stood for a moment looking over into Scotland. In previous years, there had been banter about customs posts and whisky smuggling. Now, the mood was more sombre. The question was simply, ‘What do you think about it?’ I observed that if a dis-United Kingdom left the European Union and an independent Scotland re-joined it, retaining the free movement of labour, then these remote stretches of the Liddel, where the reivers used to come and go, would be an ideal crossing point for illegal migrants. This was no longer considered a subject for mirth.
On a Friday morning, we walked to the unmarked bus stop. A mile to the north, the 127 bus ran along the southern slopes of the Debatable Land and, after picking up its last Scottish passengers, dropped down towards the border. On the bus, there was something I had never experienced before but which I imagine must be the mood that follows a declaration of war. A storm cloud had risen from the muddled history of the Borders and was solidifying into something permanent and unreal. The future of the United Kingdom was about to be decided by one-twelfth of its population, and the Debatable Land might be partitioned once again. No one knew exactly what the consequences would be, and although mass deportations were unlikely, the people of the Anglo-Scottish borders, like their sixteenth-century ancestors, felt the state’s impending weight, its enormous power of interference.
This borderless community was unrecognized and, faced with the dictatorship of a popular vote in place of a parliamentary democracy, unrepresented. The ‘No’ camp had come to be associated with reason and the ‘Yes’ camp with passion. But passion itself had been redefined as loudness and intransigence. There was as much passion in the Borders, but it took a different form: this was fear at its most contagious, a collective fear which could see no source of guidance or solace.
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On the day of the vote (18 September 2014), we cycled to every polling station in or on the edge of the Debatable Land. It was a thirty-three-mile round trip. The polling stations were far apart and, for some people who live in remote areas without the use of a car, inaccessible. I saw voters entering and leaving the village halls – a witness, I thought, of a historical event but in reality a ghost which lived in a house on the border, whose family was Scottish but whose Scottish name was nowhere in the register of voters.
The first voters we saw were two women standing outside Canonbie Public Hall. They were discussing local news while an English Springer spaniel waited patiently on a leash. Both women spoke in southern English accents. In cities to the north, they might have been more guarded, but there was never any doubt that in the Borders a majority would vote ‘No’ to secession. Even the referendum debate had failed to generate any noticeable Anglo-Scottish antagonism.
On the mile-long main street of Newcastleton, there were ‘No’ posters in many of the windows. We cycled on to Hermitage Castle and turned up the single-track road which leads to the pass between Liddesdale and Ewesdale. A mile up the valley, at the point where Mary Queen of Scots rode down to Hermitage Water, a farmer had festooned the front of his house with a two-storey-high Union Jack which seemed to mirror the vast arch of the castle.
This was the spirit of defiance which had come to be associated with the ‘Yes’ campaign. We saw it again in Langholm, where voting was taking place at the Buccleuch Hall. On the edge of town, road signs announce Langholm as the ‘Birthplace of Hugh MacDiarmid’, the Communist poet who twice stood as a candidate for the Scottish National Party, but on 18 September, travellers entering Langholm on the A7 were greeted by a gigantic municipal banner bearing the single word, ‘No!’
Apart from the banner and an elderly man distributing nationalist leaflets in Buccleuch Square, it would have been hard to tell that a chapter of Border history was being written. In the north, statues had been decked with patriotic flags and scarves; in Rowanburn, the effigy of ‘Lang Sandy’ the reiver was unadorned and the only hint of nationalist fervour was a Welsh flag fluttering outside a cottage across the road. At Gilnockie Hall, voting took place under the painting of Johnnie Armstrong riding his horse across the Esk. On the edge of a wood in an almost uninhabited part of the Debatable Land, the Gilnockie polling station was as quiet as the nearby abandoned railway. A farmer was driving away; a face appeared at one of the windows, saw the bicycles and shrank out of sight. No one else came. After fifteen minutes, we headed back to Canonbie, crossed the river into England and, along with the rest of the country, waited for the result.
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In an age when elections are so minutely tracked and recorded that they might almost be held for the benefit of statisticians, there is no way of knowing how the people of the borderlands voted. Information from a particular polling station is never available (the ballot papers are mixed before counting), and, on this occasion, there were no exit polls. The figures for each electoral ward usually provide a comprehensive view of voting patterns, but the referendum was organized by region, not by ward.
The two regions adjacent to England are vast: Scottish Borders (1,831 square miles), which extends to within eight miles of Edinburgh, and Dumfries and Galloway (2,481 square miles), parts of which lie more than eighty miles from the border. Within those two regions, for every person who voted for independence, two voted against. Throughout Scotland, the ‘No’ vote was 55.3% and the ‘Yes’ vote 44.7%. The only other area with a lower ‘Yes’ vote was Orkney (32.8%). In the borderlands themselves, to judge by anecdotal evidence and a clear split over the whole country between urban and rural voters, the ‘No’ vote was certainly much higher.
In Liddesdale and the Debatable Land, there was little talk of the referendum in the months that followed. Few people wanted to discuss it: they were glad that it was over. But instead of evaporating, the fear became foreboding. The ‘Hands Across the Border’ cairn at Gretna was vandalized more than once and there was a feeling that, sooner or later, despite the vote, the two countries would be severed.
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More than a year later, not long after Christmas, a friend from Newcastleton came to repair some storm damage to the house. He pointed at the oil tank (oil is our main source of heating after firewood) and said, ‘I hope you’ve ordered some more: it’s half what it cost a year ago!’ Oil prices had plummeted and were still falling. Since revenue from North Sea oil had been a mainstay of the nationalists’ economic plan, this was hailed as a retrospective victory for the ‘No’ campaign, confirmation that an independent Scotland would have foundered in debt. In the event, it proved only that economics had not been the main concern for nationalists. Opinion polls showed practically no difference in support for Scottish independence.
The house has a third potential source of heating apart from oil and wood. The river occasionally delivers small lumps of coal to the shingle beach. Along a curved line below the hanging woodland, moles push up pebble-sized pieces of coal from a depth of about two feet. These black nuggets burn quite well in the wood stoves and could conceivably be mined. In the 1820s, adits were dug into the riverbank cliffs and there was a proposal to lay rails so that horses could take the coal up to the level ground where the railway was later built.
The seams of carboniferous limestone form part of the vast Canonbie coalfield which underlies much of the former Debatable Land on both sides of the border. Shallow pits were once worked all over the area, from Carwinley Burn to Peter’s Crook and Liddelbank. Industrial mining began in the late eighteenth century. There were two pitheads – one at Rowanburn and one at Blinkbonny, joined by an inclined plane. The workable seams were exhausted by 1922, but mining companies have been hovering over the area ever since.
One day, some people who live on the edge of Canonbie noticed a piece of white paper nailed to a tree. The Buccleuch Estates had given permission to a multi-national mining company to extract coalbed methane from the coalfield. Nineteen drilling sites were marked on the printed map. There might eventually be as many as a hundred, and there would certainly be pollution, noise, heavy traffic and lasting eyesores. The fragile tourist trade would be wrecked.
There was near-unanimous resistance and a protest group was formed, but many farmers and householders are tenants of the Buccleuch Estates and were afraid to voice their opposition. The modern descendants of the reivers are generally law-abiding, social-minded folk. The response of the Buccleuch Estates was a reminder that the image of the borderer as a troublemaker was largely a creation of the landed gentry and the representatives of state interests. The CEO replied to the ‘vociferous minority’ in the Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser. There was no hint of compromise or compassion, merely the wish to silence ‘those vociferous voices who don’t want to see any economic development in the area’: ‘I have little sympathy for that because it behoves us all to try to create economic development.’
The region of the Debatable Land is popular with fracking and wind-farm companies because of its small, scattered population and, despite the appearance of remoteness, its proximity to ports and major trade routes. A plan to send electricity pylons twice the normal height marching across the southern Debatable Land was recently dropped – for the time being – but the northern half, with its unique history and landscapes, may soon be devastated by the construction of multiple wind turbines in the Tinnisburn and Newcastleton Forests.