Of romance and Romans in Scott’s beloved Borders

No region anywhere could have had such a promoter and chronicler like Scott. I am well aware that sometimes his take on history was somewhat fantastical, as shown in the Tales Of A Grandfather, but you could forgive him anything for penning such lines as these:

“O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;

And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,

He rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,

There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.”

It has long been my favourite Scottish poem not written by Robert Burns, and to me it sums up the romance of this area of Scotland where I was fortunate enough to live for 10 years.

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As promised last week, having completed my series on Scotland’s ancient towns, I am starting a much shorter series on the ancient history of the Scottish Borders, a region of Scotland that has been crucial to the whole nation’s development over the centuries.

For avoidance of doubt, though the actual Border has varied at times, I will be sticking to people, places and events that happened in the present Scottish Borders area with mentions of Dumfries and Galloway when necessary. I will start with a general overview today and then move on to the ancient towns over the coming weeks.

Before I tell the story of the ancient Borders, I am going to start with acknowledgements for as regular readers know, I always try to cite my sources. In particular, I am indebted to Scott, whose Minstrelsy Of The Scottish Borders did so much to preserve the lore of the region.

I consulted, among many works, Rutherford’s Border Handbook, published by John Rutherford in Kelso in 1849, and Castles And Historic Homes Of The Border by Alexander Eddington published in 1926.

(Image: Andrew Mellor)

Above all, I acknowledge the magisterial book The Borders, A History Of The Borders From The Earliest Times by that kenspeckle Borderer Alistair Moffat, the author, broadcaster and former director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe who did such valuable work on the Great Tapestry of Scotland which is now housed in the Scottish Borders at Galashiels.

The blurb for that book sums up a lot of what I feel about the Borders: “This is the story of a part of Scotland that has played a huge role in the nation’s history for thousands of years. The hunter-gatherers, who first discovered the bounty of the ancient Wildwood, the Celtic warlords, the Romans, the Northumbrians and the Reivers, who dominated the Anglo-Scottish borderlands for more than three centuries, have all had their part to play in the constantly evolving life of the area.”

The Scottish Borders region has been so important in Scotland’s history precisely because it is next to England. Today I am concentrating on the ancient history of the area, and it is very ancient indeed – so much so that we rely on the work of geologists and palaeontologists to tell the early Borders’ story.

In his great poem A Parcel o’Rogues In A Nation, Robert Burns wrote:

“Now Sark rins over Solway sands,

An’ Tweed rins to the ocean,

To mark where England’s province stands-

Such a parcel of rogues in

a nation!”

That line across the island of Great Britain between the Solway Firth to the west and where the River Tweed approaches the North Sea in the east has been the Border between England and Scotland since time immemorial. It may upset Unionists but the Border is ample proof that England and Scotland are different countries and indeed were once on different continents.

Geologists had long known that rocks in Northern England were considerably different from rocks in Southern Scotland but it was only relatively recently in the 1960s that the reason for this variation became accepted.

In the early stage of this planet’s development, there was a single land mass which scientists called Pangaea.

This supercontinent broke up over tens of millions of years and what is now Scotland was part of continent called Laurentia alongside North America. England was part of another microcontinent, Avalonia.

Again over a period of millions of years, continental drift saw Laurentia and Avalonia collide and there was what geologists call a “soft docking” that fused Scotland to England, roughly along the Solway-Tweed line. That all happened more than 400 million years ago, and after that came many millions of years of volcanic activity followed by ice ages and erosion that gave the Borders its distinctive scenery.

It wasn’t until after the last ice age about 10,000 years ago that Britain began to be colonised by people who crossed the land bridge from Europe and began to migrate northwards. These hunter-gatherers – Alistair Moffat says they should be called gatherer-hunters as they did much more of the former than the latter – were the first people to occupy the Borders, in the forested area which Moffat calls the Wildwood, probably about 4-3000 BCE.

As the Stone Age morphed into the Bronze Age, agriculture developed and it is probable that the Borders area was populated by Celtic tribes who built dozens of hill forts across the region. They were led by warriors which further suggests unrest in the area, but there was also an organised society with a priestly class and given their links to other areas they were probably not surprised when the Romans arrived.

Julius Caesar’s invasions in 55 and 54 BCE as well as that ordered by the Emperor Claudius in 43CE did not reach as far north as the Borders, but in 79CE, the appointed governor of the province of Britannia, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, marched north with his legions.

We know a lot about Agricola because his son-in-law, Tacitus, wrote an account of the general’s campaign in Scotland, and allowing for hagiography, it does contain lots of information about the Borders, though of course nobody at that time knew it was the border of anything.

Over the course of five or six years, Agricola’s forces pushed further north and Tacitus intriguingly suggests that the border between the Roman Empire and the land they named Caledonia might have been set between the Forth and the Clyde.

Tacitus wrote: “The fourth summer he employed in securing what he had overrun. Had the valour of our armies and the renown of the Roman name permitted it, a limit to our conquests might have been found in Britain itself. Clota (Clyde) and Bodotria (Forth), estuaries which the tides of two opposite seas carry far back into the country, are separated by but a narrow strip of land.

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“This Agricola then began to defend with a line of forts, and, as all the country to the south was now occupied, the enemy were pushed into what might be called another island.”

How different Scotland might have been had Agricola’s border line survived, and of course the Romans had another attempt at making such a border with the Antonine Wall between the Forth and Clyde, begun under the Emperor Antoninus Pius in 142CE. Consisting mainly of turf, that wall lasted just eight years after completion and was abandoned by the Romans who suffered relentless attacks from the native tribes of Caledonia, the land north of the wall.

There was already another wall in existence, begun in 122CE by the emperor Hadrian, and thus Hadrian’s Wall effectively defined the border between the north and south of Great Britain.

The commanders at Hadrian’s Wall established various outposts linked by decent Roman roads. The largest of these was at Trimontium, a Latin word which means three hills. Those summits were the Eildon Hills and Trimontium was a large establishment housing cavalry, soldiers and camp followers at what is now Newstead. You can find out all about Trimontium as there is a fine museum established by the Trimontium Trust in Melrose.

Trimontium sat on Dere Street, the main road north in Britannia, and over the space of more than 100 years, various fortifications were built on the site until it was abandoned for good in 184CE.

The people of Caledonia, who were called the Picti by the Romans, allied with the Scots – originally from Ireland but increasingly located in their ancient kingdom of Dalriada in what is now Argyll – and the Angles from the Continent to assail Britannia, and very suddenly around 410CE the Roman armies simply departed from the island of Great Britain. They left behind many thousands of Romano-Britains but the British Isles were now in control of native tribes and invaders from Continental Europe such as the Angles and Saxons.

As with the rest of Scotland, we know little about what happened to the Scottish Borders in the Dark Ages between the departure of the Romans and the end of the first millennium, but we can surmise from place names how the western side of the region was part of the Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde while the eastern side increasingly came under the control of the kings of Bernicia which was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom established in what is now north-east England and south-east Scotland.

Sometime around 603CE the Scots tried to move into Bernician territory but according to the Venerable Bede’s chronicle, King Aethelfrith’s army defeated that of Aedan, King of Dalriada at the Battle of Degsastan – maddeningly we do not know the exact location of this battle which turned out to be hugely important as it stopped the eastern expansion of Dalriada.

Later in the 7th century, Bernicia and the Anglian kingdom to its south, Deira, joined together to form Northumbria which stretched from the Firth of Forth as far south as York. The Borders was such an integral part of Northumbria that a great internecine war took place in the region in the year 761. The Battle of Eildon – “Eldunum near Mailros” according to one chronicle – in that year saw King Aethelwald Moll defeat and kill a potential usurper, Oswine, brother of King Oswulf who had been assassinated the previous year.

Under Northumbria, the Borders region saw settlements develop and farming become the way of life for most inhabitants. Christian missionaries came from St Ninian’s church at Whithorn and most especially from Iona and the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to convert the native people. Almost all of the Borders was Christian by the end of the first millennium.

In 843, the King of Dalriada, Kenneth MacAlpin, joined his kingdom to that of the Picts to form a new entity that was the forerunner of modern Scotland.

It would become known as Alba and while the kingdom of Strathclyde remained independent, the direction of travel for the new country was set and the rich arable lands of the Scottish Borders were a magnet for the kings of Alba. The exact date and location have never been conclusively proved but around 1018, the forces of Strathclyde under King Owen the Bald joined the army of Malcolm II, King of Scots, to defeat Northumbrian King Uhtred of Bamburgh at Carham on Tweed in what is now Northumberland.

Historians still debate the legacy of the Battle of Carham – did Alba acquire Lothian with that win? – but I have long been convinced that it was a defining victory for Scotland and the Scottish Borders as it made sure that the limits of England were delineated.

Next week I will show how one King of Scots changed the face of the Scottish Borders.