Driving through the debateable lands - porous and permeable borders - reivers, smugglers, drovers
Early autumn, sunshine and morning mist, driving through the shifted border lands to see the lie of the land. Eastwards with Hadrian’s Wall, the border of AD 122; northwest to Jedburgh and Hawick and southwest along the 1237 Solway-Tweed border through Liddesdale.
This is the first time in four months that I’ve ventured over the border, although I see the other side every day. I’ve thought about it a few times: to see the Tour of Britain arrive into Castle Douglas; to look for my Scottish ancestors in Fairlie; to see the firth from the other side. I've thought about the border more - the referendum outcome and its aftermath, only two weeks after my relocation forced that - in a few years I could, in the ideas of some, be living within a few miles of the frontier of the European Union, as well as on the frontier of the roman empire.
Sunny Cumbria gives way to misty, cloudy, mizzly Northumbria, Steel Rigg’s panorama magnificent with rolling cloud behind the ridges. A factory chimney makes a dark cloud superimposed on nature’s lighter ones. At the first crossing of the Tyne, a fisherman casting in the middle of the river; by the city crossing a group of canoeists. A few days later on the radio, I heard the Tyne is now the best salmon river in England and Wales.
Having filled the car with flatpacks, I head north towards the now-distant border. The North Pennines through Redesdale to the Cheviots are rolling, lumpier and less bleak than Shap or Orton fells, but just as empty-looking, distinguished by firing ranges and grouse moors, and the site of the battle of Otterburn in 1388. As a child we knew about the permeability of the border and the ability of the border reivers to traverse it to raid livestock. But I'm not sure how much of the context we understood and I've been trying to sort that out whilst thinking about this border and other borders.
Edward I's invasions into Scotland from 1296 marked the start of 300 years of conflict in a significantly militarised zone that continued until the union of the crowns. The invasions and the allegiances of the landlords on either side of the established border left local populations well-armed and happy to plunder from their farther neighbours, without pissing in their own backyards. We understand that to mean raiding across the border, but they probably also raided other families on their own side, but less frequently - it was easier to evade punishment under another country's law than your own, even if the law of the Marches was set out to deal with cross-border crime. Some raids were economic, stealing cattle for food during the autumn raiding weeks after the summer grazing was done; some raids were tribal blood feuds; some raids were political acts.
But the porous border allowed people to cross easily for ordinary business as they do in most of the world - taking goods to sell at markets, for pilgrimage or education. Even in borders with checkpoints, local people routinely cross each day to carry out their normal business. The 300 years had periods of heightened Troubles and periods of calm, and the militarisation ebbed and flowed along with England's inclination to fight with France.
If this land was the intra-Irish border in the time of the Troubles, most of the 23 road crossings would be closed, with crossings at perhaps only the three major roads. But the big empty spaces in the middle and west Marches could still be crossed by those who knew the lie of the land, who knew the mosses and the hills and how to ride them, just as they were 500 years ago.
Across the Solway, smugglers brought goods into Scotland, an economic act driven by the differences in customs regimes between the countries. The sea border harder than the land border, but less bloody. The union of the crowns led rapidly to the end of reiving, with the vigorous removal of some of the notorious reivers and gentrification of others. Instead, the cross-border droving trade grew (along with smuggling, until the union of the parliaments), especially in the west Marches, for the next 300 years, until superseded by the railways.
The border is marked by a viewpoint, a chance to look down on Scotland. Car parks with a burger van and a huddle of bikers. Ten miles on, at the sudden and unexpectedly striking Jedburgh Abbey - saved for a future visit - I head west and then southwest via Hawick towards Liddesdale. A leaflet from the last century tells the bloody stories of the Liddesdale Armstrongs and gives me some idea of where to go to return to the great border city. Liddesdale is deserted - I pass only two other vehicles on a single track road with very many passing places. Looks like a great place to wander and lose oneself, and perhaps to wild camp - note for future reference. Empty and probably quite bleak in winter but very appealing today.
Suddenly a railway engine - this must be the heritage part of the Waverley line. The line has been restored from Edinburgh to somewhere north of Hawick, re-opening last year, but it's not clear whether it's likely to come back down here.
Crossing into Dumfries, a sign for a Carlisle estate agent - knowing that the purchase process is different in the two countries, I hadn't expected that, but maybe for the estate agent the difference isn't so great - just operating a closing date and working with the buyer's solicitor more than with the buyer? I hadn't thought of Carlisle being the urban population centre in the western borderlands south and north - I expected the border to be harder than it maybe is. But I could easily enough live here and travel to Carlisle to work, crossing the border daily (and be able to vote in any second referendum). When I got to Newcastleton, running out of fuel, I wondered which country the nearest petrol station was in, and where Newcastleton looked for its big town, supermarkets and estate agents - to Hawick or to Carlisle? Detoured towards Gretna on the offchance of fuel, thinking still of the power of the border and the differences in legal systems, the reason the English know of Gretna.
Crossing back into Cumbria, to the east a rainbow with one foot in each country; later, turning south of the firth, a half rainbow rooted in Eskmouth.
Sunday 13 November 2016
Wednesday 2 November 2016
Searching for moonscapes, finding microworlds
Back in the days before free pixels, when I took 40 photographs in a fortnight, not an hour, when you waited weeks to see the pictures you'd taken, the first time I went to Fleswick Bay my photographs came back a month later with a picture of the moon's surface.
Being out west, I walked over St Bees south head to blow away cobwebs and look for moonscapes. I expected wind and got autumn sunshine, too hot in my fleece layers. The last time I was here, on a blustery November day with the carpenter, we huddled in the lee of the lighthouse, determinedly eating our picnic and taking our first ever selfie to prove it.
After a beachful of round pebbles, dog-walking families and sandcastle builders, a heavily eroded cliff path, a headland of miniature memorials, bright gorse and big, big views. The clifftop fairly busy with the dog-walking families, the new path inland from the collapsed one not wide enough for passing in gangs.
To the west, the sea, Snaefell and the Isle of Man; to the north, Criffel and the Galloway hills; to the east the Western fells; to the south, Black Coombe and the Factory. This is where my parents grew up, the views they grew up with, there throughout my childhood but not ingrained on my mind - I can map the western valleys, but not the western fells. The post-industrial coastal towns are different from the eastern market towns in my mind, and I'm certainly snobbish in the way I think about them. When the Gap was open earlier this year, there was talk of the north-south divide in the county, but the east-west divide (with a dialect divide going back to the different varieties of Vikings) was more present in my childhood. As an adult I recognise the importance of the west - far more populous than the east, economically important, but harder to reach.
Over the cliffhead and down to the beach, past an array of discarded plastic in which I can see little to collect, even as a frequent forager of other people's discards.
My Cumbria Coastal Way guidebook, published in 1994, says "Fleswick Bay was once the haunt of smugglers, and it is easy to imagine the small dark caves concealing kegs of brandy and bottles of whisky. The bay is a good place to look for semi-precious stones such as agates and has a wonderful sculpted sandstone shore."
My moonscape is no longer in a cave - the cliff must have receded and the caves shrunk, leaving my moonscape outside. In what remains of the cave, 100-year-old public school boy graffiti, in elegant script, and just one moonrock.
Limpets had gathered in the craters of one outside moonrock; back in the cave I arrange pebble eggs in the shallower crater cups of the younger indoor moonrock.
And then out into the light for a quick look at the barnacle rocks, huge lumps of sandstone crusted grey with barnacles, barnacles on barnacles, barnacles on limpets. One rock has lots of inch-wide dark circles, looking from a distance like indentations, drip cavities, but with no cliff cover to provide the drips. But the darkness isn't shadow - each indentation is a mussel-nursery, two or three dozen tiny mussels crammed together in their cradle, protruding slightly, ready to open when the tide comes in. Some of the indentations are slightly larger, mussel-free, still with water. Something dark and spherical, like a large marble, below the water in one - thinking it might be a baby urchin, I gave it a prod and got an unexpected squidge. I'd forgotten about sea anemones. And as looked further the rocks were covered in slightly bigger pools, very round, looking manmade as though scoured in concrete. Something about the geology of the sandstone leads to very round pools and very round pebbles. The pools contain pink and green seaweeds, dark red anemones, indigo mussels, yellow-white limpets, and astonishing microworlds.
Next year, when I stop making things from other people's patterns, I'll make embroideries of Fleswick beach - barnacle rocks of linen thread on linen cloth stained with Egremont Red, and lots of dense French and bullion knots, and circular rockpools, tiny aquaria peered at through a light surface veil.
I went over an eroded cliff to see the unexpected moonscapes that had amazed me as a child when the photos came back, and found an eroded cliff had exposed my moonrocks to the light. I walked over fallen pieces of cliff and found unexpected microworlds that amazed me as an adult. My world has changed and the coast has changed, and Fleswick Bay has new wonders to discover.
Being out west, I walked over St Bees south head to blow away cobwebs and look for moonscapes. I expected wind and got autumn sunshine, too hot in my fleece layers. The last time I was here, on a blustery November day with the carpenter, we huddled in the lee of the lighthouse, determinedly eating our picnic and taking our first ever selfie to prove it.
After a beachful of round pebbles, dog-walking families and sandcastle builders, a heavily eroded cliff path, a headland of miniature memorials, bright gorse and big, big views. The clifftop fairly busy with the dog-walking families, the new path inland from the collapsed one not wide enough for passing in gangs.
 |
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| St Bees beach with Black Coombe | The old path |
 |
 |
| Bright gorse | Looking south beyond the Factory |
To the west, the sea, Snaefell and the Isle of Man; to the north, Criffel and the Galloway hills; to the east the Western fells; to the south, Black Coombe and the Factory. This is where my parents grew up, the views they grew up with, there throughout my childhood but not ingrained on my mind - I can map the western valleys, but not the western fells. The post-industrial coastal towns are different from the eastern market towns in my mind, and I'm certainly snobbish in the way I think about them. When the Gap was open earlier this year, there was talk of the north-south divide in the county, but the east-west divide (with a dialect divide going back to the different varieties of Vikings) was more present in my childhood. As an adult I recognise the importance of the west - far more populous than the east, economically important, but harder to reach.
 |
| View south with gorse |
Over the cliffhead and down to the beach, past an array of discarded plastic in which I can see little to collect, even as a frequent forager of other people's discards.
My Cumbria Coastal Way guidebook, published in 1994, says "Fleswick Bay was once the haunt of smugglers, and it is easy to imagine the small dark caves concealing kegs of brandy and bottles of whisky. The bay is a good place to look for semi-precious stones such as agates and has a wonderful sculpted sandstone shore."
 |
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| Fleswick beach south |
Fleswick cliff north |
 |
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| Fleswick cave | Barnacles |
My moonscape is no longer in a cave - the cliff must have receded and the caves shrunk, leaving my moonscape outside. In what remains of the cave, 100-year-old public school boy graffiti, in elegant script, and just one moonrock.
 |
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| Posh graffiti | More posh graffiti |
  |
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| Moonscape 1986 (approx) |
Moonscape 2016 |
 |
 |
Limpets had gathered in the craters of one outside moonrock; back in the cave I arrange pebble eggs in the shallower crater cups of the younger indoor moonrock.
 |
 |
| Limpets | Eggcups |
And then out into the light for a quick look at the barnacle rocks, huge lumps of sandstone crusted grey with barnacles, barnacles on barnacles, barnacles on limpets. One rock has lots of inch-wide dark circles, looking from a distance like indentations, drip cavities, but with no cliff cover to provide the drips. But the darkness isn't shadow - each indentation is a mussel-nursery, two or three dozen tiny mussels crammed together in their cradle, protruding slightly, ready to open when the tide comes in. Some of the indentations are slightly larger, mussel-free, still with water. Something dark and spherical, like a large marble, below the water in one - thinking it might be a baby urchin, I gave it a prod and got an unexpected squidge. I'd forgotten about sea anemones. And as looked further the rocks were covered in slightly bigger pools, very round, looking manmade as though scoured in concrete. Something about the geology of the sandstone leads to very round pools and very round pebbles. The pools contain pink and green seaweeds, dark red anemones, indigo mussels, yellow-white limpets, and astonishing microworlds.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Next year, when I stop making things from other people's patterns, I'll make embroideries of Fleswick beach - barnacle rocks of linen thread on linen cloth stained with Egremont Red, and lots of dense French and bullion knots, and circular rockpools, tiny aquaria peered at through a light surface veil.
 |
 |
| Winkles | Barnacle textures |
I went over an eroded cliff to see the unexpected moonscapes that had amazed me as a child when the photos came back, and found an eroded cliff had exposed my moonrocks to the light. I walked over fallen pieces of cliff and found unexpected microworlds that amazed me as an adult. My world has changed and the coast has changed, and Fleswick Bay has new wonders to discover.
Tuesday 1 November 2016
Seaglass and limpets
Fell road and factory - dunes and rockpools - pebble and seashells - what a beach should be
To Seascale to see if the beach is deserted. My grandparents lived in Seascale from the 1950s, my parents were married there, we went there in summer, for half terms and for Christmases. Driving from Cockermouth, took an impulse turn onto the fell road, the road that routinely made me car sick as a child, the road Grandad attempted to drive up in the snow one winter despite the Road Closed signs.
To the left the western fells, to the right the sea appearing, on the iPlayer Southernality singing a song about driving and freedom and escape And from the mountains to the sea... don't it feel like Heaven is close. And in front, in the dip between two hills, the Lune Gorge moment for heading west, as the Factory appears on the shoreline with the Morecambe Bay wind farm beyond. We still call it the Factory, a family folklore word from when it, and Grandad, manufactured electricity. Nowadays it's the Site.
At the beach, after a detour to visit Grandma's bench, I went to look for the dunes. When the world was smaller and my legs were shorter, they seemed to be further away along the beach than they are today. And they are much diminished - just about possible to picnic in the first one, but I'm sure there were more and deeper dunes 40 years ago, that a family group of six or more could happily picnic in.
The rockpools are largely submerged by a tide that behaves correctly here - six and a quarter hours in, six and a quarter hours out, not this head-of-the-firth two hours in, thirteen hours out thing. The beach is fairly busy with families with dogs at the start of half term. Sometime after I'd left, in the early 1990s, the people left the beach as the Sellafield scares started. My book of the Cumbrian Coastal Way, published in 1994, describes an air of neglect, and for some years that seemed a fair description to an infrequent visitor, lessened from what it had been.
I remember being back here sometime, probably with my brother, alone on the evening beach drawing alpha-beta-gamma particle was here signs in the wet sand. I remember making flippant jokes to southern student friends about glowing in the dark. I remember my ambivalent anger at the disuse of a great beach, my uncertainty about the Factory and nuclear power as a member of the Green party and a member of a family that worked there. Knowing its importance to the Cumbrian economy and - working alongside academic experts on energy policy - knowing about the long-term costs.
As I've always done, I picked up handfuls of pebbles - smooth eggs of St Bee's sandstone, tiny fragments of mussels, limpet, periwinkles, cockles, tellins, razorshells, towershells. One day I will take a handful to Julie Gibson and ask her to make me a mosaic picture of Seascale beach.
Sand dunes for picnics, wet sand for castle-building, dry sand to wiggle toes in, rockpools to investigate, smooth pebbles and seashells, marram grass and thrift, wormcasts and bladder wrack, seaglass and driftbricks. Everything a beach should be. With the optional extra of a nuclear reprocessing plant.
To Seascale to see if the beach is deserted. My grandparents lived in Seascale from the 1950s, my parents were married there, we went there in summer, for half terms and for Christmases. Driving from Cockermouth, took an impulse turn onto the fell road, the road that routinely made me car sick as a child, the road Grandad attempted to drive up in the snow one winter despite the Road Closed signs.
To the left the western fells, to the right the sea appearing, on the iPlayer Southernality singing a song about driving and freedom and escape And from the mountains to the sea... don't it feel like Heaven is close. And in front, in the dip between two hills, the Lune Gorge moment for heading west, as the Factory appears on the shoreline with the Morecambe Bay wind farm beyond. We still call it the Factory, a family folklore word from when it, and Grandad, manufactured electricity. Nowadays it's the Site.
 |
 |
| From the mountains to the sea... | Heading West |
At the beach, after a detour to visit Grandma's bench, I went to look for the dunes. When the world was smaller and my legs were shorter, they seemed to be further away along the beach than they are today. And they are much diminished - just about possible to picnic in the first one, but I'm sure there were more and deeper dunes 40 years ago, that a family group of six or more could happily picnic in.
 |
 |
| Rockpools from the dune | Snaefell |
The rockpools are largely submerged by a tide that behaves correctly here - six and a quarter hours in, six and a quarter hours out, not this head-of-the-firth two hours in, thirteen hours out thing. The beach is fairly busy with families with dogs at the start of half term. Sometime after I'd left, in the early 1990s, the people left the beach as the Sellafield scares started. My book of the Cumbrian Coastal Way, published in 1994, describes an air of neglect, and for some years that seemed a fair description to an infrequent visitor, lessened from what it had been.
I remember being back here sometime, probably with my brother, alone on the evening beach drawing alpha-beta-gamma particle was here signs in the wet sand. I remember making flippant jokes to southern student friends about glowing in the dark. I remember my ambivalent anger at the disuse of a great beach, my uncertainty about the Factory and nuclear power as a member of the Green party and a member of a family that worked there. Knowing its importance to the Cumbrian economy and - working alongside academic experts on energy policy - knowing about the long-term costs.
As I've always done, I picked up handfuls of pebbles - smooth eggs of St Bee's sandstone, tiny fragments of mussels, limpet, periwinkles, cockles, tellins, razorshells, towershells. One day I will take a handful to Julie Gibson and ask her to make me a mosaic picture of Seascale beach.
Sand dunes for picnics, wet sand for castle-building, dry sand to wiggle toes in, rockpools to investigate, smooth pebbles and seashells, marram grass and thrift, wormcasts and bladder wrack, seaglass and driftbricks. Everything a beach should be. With the optional extra of a nuclear reprocessing plant.
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