Walking the Border by Ian Crofton

Author:Ian Crofton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

When spring returns in all her wonted pride,

The shepherd’s distant pipe is heard no more,

Yet here with pensive peace could I abide,

Far from the stormy world’s tumultuous roar,

To muse upon thy banks at eventide.

Thus William Lisle Bowles, sonneteering in 1789. We too found ourselves musing upon the river’s banks at eventide, and brewed a cup of tea the better to aid our musings. The shepherd’s distant pipe remained unheard, but the world’s tumultuous roar was apparent in the form of a Fed-Ex van on the B6350.

As it was indeed eventide, and there was still some way to walk to Coldstream, we eschewed the pathless banks of the Tweed for the tarmac joys of the Cornhill–Kelso road, running east in parallel to the river. It was a weary plod, past Carham, past Wark, both places redolent with history but now small, sleepy backwaters without even the benefit of a pub. On our right rose Gallows Knoll and Gallows Hill, the names attesting to the means by which power and ownership were once maintained in these parts.

It’s been over a thousand years since Carham hit the headlines. In 1018 (or perhaps 1016) Malcolm II, king of Scots, allied with Owen the Bald, the last king of Strathclyde, defeated the Northumbrians under Earl Uhtred – ‘a young man of great energy most suited to war’ – at the Battle of Carham. Some said the Scots thereby gained Lothian, fixing the Border along the Tweed, although others believe Lothian was already de facto Scottish territory. The chronicler Simeon of Durham, in his Historia Ecclesiae Dunelmensis, gives a somewhat histrionic account:

In the year of our Lord’s incarnation ten hundred and eighteen, while Cnut ruled the kingdom of the Angles, a comet appeared for thirty nights to the people of Northumbria, a terrible presage of the calamity by which that province was about to be desolated. For, shortly afterwards (that is, after thirty days) nearly the whole population, from the River Tees to the Tweed, and their borders, were cut down in a conflict in which they were engaged with a countless multitude of Scots at Carrun [Carham].

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