Walking the Border Read online

  Walking the Border

  First published in 2014 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Ian Crofton 2014

  The moral right of Ian Crofton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978 1 78027 207 8

  eISBN: 978 0 85790 801 8

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

  Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  1.

  Conundrum

  Borders, barbed wire and bonny bairns

  2.

  Rumours of War

  Gretna and the Solway

  3.

  No One Bothers About the Border

  Sark, Scots’ Dike and the Waverley Line

  4.

  Waste Ground Without Habitation

  Penton to Scotch Knowe

  5.

  Utter Desolation

  Scotch Knowe to Deadwater

  6.

  Amongst these English Alps

  Peel Fell to Carter Bar

  7.

  A True Perambulation between the Kingdoms

  Kirk Yetholm to the Tweed

  8.

  Grey Waving Hills

  Carter Bar to Chew Green

  9.

  The Bonny Road

  Coquet Head to Clennell Street

  10.

  Moss-Hags and Oozy Peat-Flats

  Skirting the Cheviot

  11.

  Until the Night Came Upon Them

  Flodden Interlude

  12.

  A Pleasant Pastoral Stream

  Coldstream to Horncliffe

  13.

  Across the Hill of Pigs

  Horncliffe to the Sea

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Illustrations within the text

  p. x Hadrian’s Wall

  p. 16 Sandbank at the mouth of the River Sark

  p. 34 Fencepost by the River Sark

  p. 66 Bluff by the Kershope Burn

  p. 82 Iron post by Clark’s Sike

  p. 103 On Deadwater Rigg

  p. 104 The Kielder Stone

  p. 115 Looking back to Deadwater Fell

  p. 116 By Bowmont Hill

  p. 132 Near Chew Green

  p. 146 The Pennine Way along the Cheviot watershed

  p. 155 Windy Gyle

  p. 156 Paving stone on the Pennine Way

  p. 170 The Flodden Memorial

  p. 202 The English bank of the Tweed at Callerheugh

  p. 218 The Union Bridge

  Black-and-white plates

  Mudflat at mouth of the Sark

  Gravestone in Gretna

  MoD munitions dump at Longtown

  Dead moles on a barbed-wire fence by the Sark

  Sign by the old Waverley Line on the English side of the Liddell Water

  Clark’s Sike

  The toll pillar on the Bloody Bush Road

  Border wall on the eastern flank of Larriston Fells

  Border stone between Peel Fell and Carter Fell

  The Border stones at Carter Bar

  Clennell Street below Windy Gyle

  The Border fence on the west side of the Cheviot

  Skull on the Border fence on Bowmont Hill

  On Branxton Hill during the Flodden Ride-out

  Approaching Flodden Cross on the 500th anniversary of the battle

  Coldstream High Street during Civic Week

  Fireworks at the end of Coldstream’s Civic Week

  Masonry at Norham Castle

  Sticker on the back of a road sign, Cornhill on Tweed

  Road sign on the English side of the Tweed

  Graffito in Berwick

  Colour plates

  By the mouth of the River Sark

  The M6 crosses the River Sark

  Looking down on the Sark from the Scottish side.

  The old Waverley Line, south of Liddel Water

  Following the Kershope Burn towards Scotch Knowe

  The crook-maker at Dalston Fair

  In Kielder Forest

  My campsite on Deadwater Rig

  Jenny Storie’s Stone, on the flank of Peel Fell

  The view south from Carter Fell into Northumberland

  Dere Street by Coquet Head

  Carham Burn

  The proprietor of Coldstream Crafts

  View from Ba Green

  Children watch the horses pass on Coldstream High Street

  Four generations of Peebles Cornets

  The Coldstreamer lowers the Earl of Home’s standard

  Inside Rajdhani Spice, Coldstream

  Mr Forman, butcher of Norham and custodian of its castle

  The torchlit procession on the last night of Coldstream’s Civic Week

  Dreeper Island and Kippie Island

  Fisherman’s hut near Paxton House

  Border wall near Halidon Hill

  Full moon over the North Sea

  ONE

  CONUNDRUM

  Borders, barbed wire and bonny bairns

  It’s, well, a more or less borderless world. And that’s as it should be.

  Except for the borders where they check your passport for hours, the child’s small voice says from the other end of the table.

  – Ali Smith, There But For The (2011)

  I don’t know how many times I’ve crossed the Border. Maybe a few score times, maybe several hundred. I never counted. Sometimes I’ve known the moment, sometimes not. No one’s ever stamped my passport.

  The first crossing would have been some cold spring night in 1955 or 1956. Every year my mother would take us south from Edinburgh to spend Easter with our grandparents in the Isle of Wight.

  In what felt like the middle of the night we’d be stirred out of bed with low lights and whispers. Still in our pyjamas we’d be bundled into jumpers and coats and a taxi, and drive off into the urgent dark.

  Waverley Station in the steam age was a cavern of black walls, black girders, blackened glass. Even the locomotives were soot black, not the red, blue or green of engines in picture books. Yellow lights glared through smoke and steam. Everything was in motion, nothing certain. The air shook with shouts, whistles, hisses, the din and clang of metal on metal.

  Tottering along the platform half asleep, one hand in my mother’s, my other hand let go its burden. Panda slipped between train and platform. The loss was incomprehensible, irrecoverable, complete. I was too tired to cry.

  Once in the tiny sleeping compartment, my mother pulled down the blinds, lowered the cover over the basin, tucked me and my sister toe-to-toe in the bottom bunk, our heads at either end. Foot-fighting soon gave way to half sleep, rocked by the jerk and rattle of the train. And so, sideways, we travelled southward. And somewhere, at some point in the dreamlike dream of sleeping and waking and sleeping through a night punctuated by the rhythm of rails, sleepers, points – somewhere, at some point, I crossed the Border for the first time.

  When the sleeper attendant knocked in the early morning with tea and biscuits, he told us we would soon arrive in London. I had no idea what that meant.

  Other crossings have followed: by rail
on the East Coast Line or the West Coast Line; by road on the A1 north of Berwick, or by Coldstream Bridge over the Tweed or the hill pass of Carter Bar, or the A7 south of Canonbie, or over the Sark on the M74 as it flows imperceptibly into the M6. In the days I worked for Collins Publishers in Glasgow, I would sometimes take the early morning shuttle to Heathrow, changing countries somewhere high above the Solway Firth or the Irish Sea. ‘Anything to drink, sir?’ a flight attendant would ask. ‘Coffee, please. Black.’ I’d’ve been up too early for breakfast, could only cope with a coffee. Some businessmen on the flight would order a double vodka.

  Hurtling towards Edinburgh on the East Coast Line, you’ve got to have your wits about you to spot the England–Scotland Border. There is a sign, but it flashes past in an instant. The guard makes no remark, the passengers remain unmoved. North of here you won’t pay for your prescriptions or your university education or your care in old age. You can walk where you want without fear of prosecution. And if you find yourself in court for some other misdemeanour, a jury may judge you neither innocent nor guilty, but conclude instead that the case against you is merely ‘not proven’.

  In contrast to the rail routes, all the main road crossings have enormous signs welcoming you to either Scotland or England, the former streaked with the Blue Saltire, the latter adorned with the Cross of St George. ‘Welcome to Scotland’, the former says. ‘Fàilte gu Alba’. No one has spoken Gaelic in these Border regions since the Dark Ages – if then. In the west it might have been Welsh, in the east Pictish or Anglo-Saxon.

  The summer of my walk, as the temperature rose in the independence debate, small posters began to appear on the back of road signs on the English side. They bore a Cross of St George and the slogan ‘HOME RULE’. The local authorities were incensed. They’d have to pay taxpayers’ money scraping them off. The English Defence League was suspected, but did not claim responsibility. Nothing they’d like better, one suspects, than to cut off the Celtic Fringe.

  On smaller roads, the Scots keep up the national welcome, but on the English side you’re more likely to be welcomed to Northumberland or Cumbria, with no mention of the country you’re entering. The only place there’s any real fuss is at Carter Bar, where there’s a magnificent view north over Scotland, a snack bar in a caravan, and a man in a kilt who stops picking up the litter when a coach party appears, hoists his bagpipes aloft and bursts into a medley of popular tunes. He has a sign:

  This is my livelihood

  Please leave a tip.

  The Italians and the Americans and the Chinese queue up to have their photograph taken with him. His face is as stony as the Border Stone beside him. Only the tourists smile.

  One of the last walks I had with my father, in his nineties, was up the path from Holyrood to Salisbury Crags. It was a grey, damp winter day. I kept my eye on the old man as he negotiated the wet paving stones, stick in hand. We slowly rose above the newly-opened Parliament. He was a fan of the building, I was not. It was too fussy for me, with too many unnecessary ornamentations, though it sat well in its setting. But my father was always thrilled with ‘modern architecture’. In the 1960s he’d drive us out to see Livingstone New Town when it was still being built, show us the new Napier College, its glass and steel and concrete enveloping the old stones of Merchiston Tower. He’d taken us to see Basil Spence’s new Coventry Cathedral, built next to the charred ruins of the medieval cathedral that had been blitzed in November 1940. It was a symbol of postwar reconciliation, he told us. His sister had married a German just after the war, and he’d introduced his German nephew to mountain-climbing. He was of the generation of 1945, the generation that looked forward to a new and better world, a world in which the modernist, collectivist, internationalist project in architecture was to play its part. He shared in the vision of a united Europe, one that would succeed the old empires and prevent the ‘balkanisation’ of the continent, in which smaller and smaller groups of shriller and shriller nationalists would insist on their separation from (and superiority to) their neighbours.

  And yet – if it is an ‘and yet’ – he was very much in favour of Scottish devolution, and of the Scottish Parliament as an institution as well as a building. Scotland was not his country, but it was the country he and my mother adopted before I was born. They loved Scotland – its landscapes, its people, the richness of its past – and saw the Scottish Parliament as a revitalisation of a country that had been demoralised and impoverished under Thatcher. But at the end of the day, if he had still been alive, he would have voted for maintaining the Union come September 2014. Complete independence would have been a balkanisation too far. Had he lived, he would have had the opportunity to vote. His son, exiled in London for a quarter of a century, won’t need to make that difficult decision.

  I have never been prevented from crossing a border. The nearest I’ve come to it was in 1970. I was fifteen and driving with my older brother into Derry/Londonderry at the end of a family holiday in Donegal. At the edge of the city, just inside the border between the Republic and the North, there was an army roadblock. The barrier was down. Soldiers armed with FN automatic rifles ordered us out of the car. We stood at the roadside half-thrilled, half-terrified, under the watchful gaze of a lance-corporal up on a grass embankment. He was shielded behind sandbags and had his finger on the trigger of a Browning medium machine gun. The soldiers searched the car. Boot, bonnet and glove compartment were opened, door-pockets rifled, seats lifted. Even my brother’s spectacle case was opened. Then they waved us on. No smiles, no thank-yous. I’m not sure if they said a single word. It was all done by gestures. Now I knew what it was like to be under armed occupation.

  In the past, borders right across Europe were manned by armed guards. They still are if you are arriving from outside Europe. The combination of uniforms and guns, or even uniforms on their own, can be intimidating. It is dehumanising for anybody who comes under scrutiny. Are you who you say you are? And even if you are, will we allow you to pass? Or will we put you in handcuffs, hold you uncharged in a cell, send you back to where you don’t want to go?

  Five years after my visit to Northern Ireland I was travelling alone on the overnight train from Munich to Belgrade. I shared the small old-fashioned compartment with an elderly peasant couple. He wore a black suit, white shirt and no tie. She was also dressed in black, and kept her hair wrapped in a red headscarf. In those days many Yugoslavs worked as Gastarbeiter in West Germany, so I guessed this elderly couple had been visiting their children, maybe even their grandchildren. The separation must have been painful, but no doubt the money sent home was welcome.

  Though I had no Serbo-Croat and they had no English, we understood each other well enough. The man cut chunks off a cold leg of lamb with a fierce-looking knife and offered them to me. I passed round the bottle of Swabian red my aunt had given me for the journey.

  The old couple were canny enough, when darkness fell, to stretch out on the banquette seats facing forward and facing back. I’d been out in the corridor, a daft laddie peering up at the mountains as the moon rose. So I was left with the option of either sitting upright on one end of a banquette, or the floor. I chose the latter, and so spent the night sideways, in and out of sleep, rattling through the Alps and into what was then communist Yugoslavia.

  I woke in bright early morning light with a boot pressed on my head. ‘Bassbort,’ a mouth way above the boot demanded. Between the boot and the mouth there was a shiny brown leather pistol holster. Careful not to make a sudden move, I extracted my head from under the boot and dug out my passport. In those days I had long hair. The guard looked at my photograph, then at me, then at the photograph. My hair had grown several decadent Western hippy inches since the photograph had been taken. He looked like he’d just found something deeply unpleasant on the sole of his boot.

  Although in those days all the ports and roads and railway lines between European countries had border and customs controls, there were still places you could cross frontiers with
out anyone paying you any attention. In the Alps the borders often follow the crests of high ridges, and on mountaineering trips I have often crossed between France and Switzerland, or France and Italy, or Italy and Switzerland without noticing. On occasion, when climbing a ridge, I have followed the actual border for hundreds of metres with one foot in one country and warm sunshine, and the other foot in another country and icy shade. The only marks of man are metal crosses on summits, or, lower down, cairns and flashes of paint marking a path. In those days, when there were still border controls on the roads, if you descended to a mountain refuge or a village in a different country from the one where you’d started your climb, no one asked to see your passport, no one asked whether you had anything to declare.

  Since the creation of the single EU market in 1993 and the borderless Schengen Area in 1995 you can travel from Spain to Finland, from Norway to Sicily, without being stopped at a single frontier. In the whole of western and central Europe, only Fortress UK (bound together in this instance with the Republic of Ireland in the ‘Common Travel Area’) maintains border controls with its continental neighbours.

  Perhaps it’s living on an island that makes Britons so untrusting of outsiders. Ironically, we were all once outsiders. We think of the Celts – ancient Britons, Welsh, Gaels, Picts – as the aboriginal inhabitants of these islands, but there were people here long before they arrived, some of whose languages may survive in certain ancient river names, including that of the River Tweed. After the Celts came the Romans, then the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, the Vikings, the Normans. In later centuries there were French Huguenots and Central European Jews, Italians, Irish, Germans and Poles, Jamaicans, Barbadians and Guyanese, Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Cantonese.