Whatever Happened to the English Borders?

This flyer recently arrived in my letter box. Since I wholeheartedly agree that ‘the Borders is a special place with a great future’, I got rather excited at the prospect of a Borders Party. At last, someone has recognised the special problems of living on the border and started a party which will just stick up for this area and not be dictated to by either Edinburgh or London! I looked up their website. Alas, it was immediately clear that the Borders Party is only concerned with the Scottish Borders and has no candidates in Berwick. I fired off an email demanding to know why in that case they had bothered to deliver leaflets to Berwick. From the party’s headquarters in Jedburgh its leader, Nicholas Watson, sent me a cheerfully apologetic reply, explaining that this was an unavoidable consequence of taking advantage of the Post Office special rate for delivering to every address in a postal district. ‘We have raised a few eyebrows in Biggar as well’.

Berwick on Tweed has the postcode TD. This is a cross-border postal district which covers a fair amount of land on either side of the river Tweed (from which the code TD is presumably derived).  This is a source of enduring annoyance to some English loyalists who resent the fact that Berwick was not allocated to the NE (for Newcastle) area which covers all the rest of Northumberland, and see the anomalous postcode as an expression of a lack of commitment to the far north of the county by English local government. On a practical level, having a cross-border postcode sometimes throws up deliveries of junk mail which is irritating not merely for being unsolicited but for being addressed to the residents of another country. The RNLI exhorts  me to ‘support our Scottish lifeboats’. All of the supermarkets assure me that their milk is obtained 'from local Scottish farmers’. Meanwhile, there used to be a textile recycling bank outside our local Asda which promised that ‘everything donated in Scotland is recycled within Scotland’. Interestingly,  Asda stuck a large notice on it saying that this bank was unauthorised and should be removed, and eventually it was. I couldn’t say whether this was a corporate response to local sensitivities, but none of the recycling banks there now make claims about working in any particular geographical area.

What upsets me at a deeper level however is the increasing appropriation of the term ‘Borders’ by the Scottish end of the area as their exclusive property. When I was growing up in north Northumberland it was accepted that England had border country and that we were living in it. Historically the town of Alnwick has been considered to be the southern limit of the Borders, leaving a stretch of around forty miles regarded as the English Borders. There was a popular sense that the English and Scottish Borders were essentially a common region and that people living on either side of the line had more in common with each other than with the dominant urban areas of either country.

This started to change in 1996 when the name of the local government authority in south-east Scotland was changed from those of the historic counties it covers to Scottish Borders Council. This has led to a routine ambiguity, in speech at least, about whether the term Borders refers to the local government area covered by S.B.C. or to a loosely defined geographical region, and seems also to have hastened the disappearance of the term English Borders from popular use. The formation of a Scottish political party called the Borders Party looks like the ultimate expression of this. To be fair, Mr Watson did say in his reply to me that he feels Scottish politicians should recognise the shared heritage and common problems across the border more than they do. But I still resent receiving a flyer that promises ‘candidates in every part of the Borders’ when I have no possibility of voting for one myself.

The Birds

It’s that time of year again in Berwick. The time when the seagulls are busy producing baby seagulls. The mating, nesting, breeding season. Whatever you want to call it, it means the season when they never stop screeching by day or by night. For seagulls any man-made structure near the water is just another cliff. All three bridges and any house within striking distance of the estuary are in a bird’s eye view handy nesting sites thoughtfully provided by humans. I know I’m very lucky to live beside the sea. But when I lie awake at 3 am listening to the ceaseless shrieking of the gulls circling around my roof, I sometimes wish I didn’t. When I do go inland for the day, I find myself wondering what that strange silence is. Isn’t there something missing?

Checking out the online reviews of local tourist accommodation, I noticed that complaints about the noise of the seagulls feature regularly. Quite what the unhappy visitors expect the hotel proprietors to do about this is not clear. Go out and shoot the gulls, perhaps? Some locals have been known to do this but when undertaken by amateurs it is illegal. According to the strict letter of the law, as interpreted by the wildlife columnist of the Berwick Advertiser, destroying nests is also forbidden except where the nest is causing serious inconvenience which the property owner cannot reasonably be expected to tolerate. This is a loophole into which many nests have disappeared. The photo here was taken two years ago and the nest shown was destroyed soon after by persons unknown. Since this particular pair had chosen to set up home right on the harbour wall, a most ridiculously unsuitable place, it is likely that their removal was officially sanctioned.

Before you judge Berwickers too harshly for this, let me tell you that sentimentality about seabirds does not long survive living in close proximity to gulls. Their behaviour has convinced me that Michael Crichton was right in his Jurassic Park speculation that birds evolved from velociraptors. They have no fear of humans at all and are absolutely ruthless in their pursuit of food. Someone I know claims that a seagull mugged him for his cornish pasty. I was once mobbed by gulls while ill-advisedly eating chips on a bench beside the river, to the point where I dropped the box and fled. I have seen gulls swooping on leftovers on plates at outdoor cafe tables. And I thought myself lucky that they’d allowed me to finish what I wanted first.

Needless to say, all this indiscriminate consumption of food that neither birds nor velociraptors evolved to eat leads to messy excretions. The subject of seagull droppings rouses Berwickers to frenzies of loathing. Cars cannot be kept clean, neither can windows. The gulls like to amuse themselves by waiting until the window cleaner has finished his round before circling back to target the sparkling panes. Last summer I allowed myself to be lured by an attractive view into forgetting one of the elementary rules of life in Berwick: never stand still underneath any object on which a seagull is able to perch. The result was that I had to return home with undignified haste and put all my outer clothing straight in the washing machine.

Most bizarrely of all, my first attempt to decorate the window sill of my new home with a vase of flowers resulted in a gull taking up residence on the outer sill and pecking persistently and noisily at the glass. The look in its eye was chilling. The eventual shattering of the glass seemed inevitable. I surmised that it had been attracted by the sight of flowers which it viewed as useful nesting material, and removed the vase to the far side of the room. This seemed to do the trick; at any rate the gull departed. Since then no vegetable matter of any kind has been visible in my windows during the spring. But I still wouldn’t be surprised to see a crowd of gulls crashing into my bedroom in a Hitchcockian bid for final supremacy. 

Hadrian's Wall

This week Debatable Land has travelled to the furthest limit of its range and brings you a photo from the heart of Newcastle upon Tyne. I am very fond of Newcastle and I urge you to visit it sometime, but describing its many attractions is outside the remit of this blog. The reason I’m going there now is to clear up the confusion about the location of Hadrian’s Wall. The term ‘the land north of the wall’ is sometimes used in loosely the same sense as ‘the debatable land’, but it has a much more precise meaning.

A remarkable number of people, and not just overseas, are under the impression that the ‘Roman Wall’, built by Emperor Hadrian in the year 122, followed the same route as the modern boundary between England and Scotland. This is NOT repeat NOT the case. For a start, nations in the modern sense did not exist anywhere at that period, let alone those of England and Scotland. The island of Britannia was still divided up into the territories of different tribes. Monarchy in a form we would recognise it emerged a few hundred years later and then for a few more hundred years after that the Scottish kings tried to push the border of their territory further south while the English kings tried to push it back north.

The Romans built a bridge across the river Tyne (Pons Aelius) and  a fort at the north end of it. Then they built a big wall on the north bank of the river, and eventually extended it across the whole width of Britannia. Yes, that is how Wallsend got its name. To complete a total defence against any attack by land or sea they later built forts on either side of the estuary of the Tyne, Segedunum and Arbeia, respectively located in what are now Wallsend and South Shields. The Wall itself survives only in some sections further west, but the line of it runs right through the centre of Newcastle. The main train station is situated about a hundred yards south of the line of the Wall, so if you walk towards the city centre after arriving there you are already technically in ‘the land north of the Wall’, even though drinking a latte in a packed shopping mall may not be how you imagined this barbarian territory.

The plaque in the photo is attached to the wall of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle, a thriving private library and cultural centre which could not be further from the stereotypes, both ancient and modern, of the Barbarian North. The red paving stones it refers to are a bit grubby now, but can still be distinguished by anyone who is sufficiently interested. Sadly very few visitors are. Step inside the library, find a copy of Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth and read the dramatic scene where the hero, fleeing from hostile tribesmen, hammers on a gate in the north face of the Wall and demands admission ‘in Caesar’s name’. Then thrill to the knowledge that that Wall was located right underneath your feet. 

From Russia With Loyalty Cards

This is the most interesting arrival in Tweed Dock over the last few weeks: the Alexander Tvardovsky, registered at St Petersburg and flying the Russian flag. Since in these security conscious times the harbour gates are covered in notices warning of Restricted Access to Unauthorised Persons, I had to get the best photo I could manage by poking my camera between the dock railings. A number of other locals were doing the same thing, to the amusement of the solitary crew member who had been left on deck while the dock crane did its work.

Tweed Dock is located on the south bank of the estuary, which strictly speaking is Tweedmouth, not Berwick. Just as a matter of interest, Tweedmouth, unlike Berwick, has never been part of Scotland. Many centuries ago Berwick was the most prosperous port in Scotland (which is one reason why England wanted to get its hands on it) and early photography recorded the quayside there still thronged with ships in the 19^th century, but no commercial vessels sail from the north bank today.

Business in the south side dock has picked up over the last couple of years and is now relatively brisk. At the moment a new ship seems to appear every few days. Some of them are regular callers on their route up and down the east coast with mundane cargoes of fertiliser and cement, but some of them are relatively exotic and trying to identify the flag is always fun.

Tweedmouth has been a seafaring community for a long time. In the graveyard of the parish church, just across the road from the dock, are many headstones commemorating maritime connections.  A number of them describe those buried there, men who survived the sea long enough to be interred at home, as ‘master mariner’. Some graves though preserve only the names of those buried far away. One of them is sacred to the memory of a man who ‘died at Petersburgh’ in 1829 and another to one who ‘died at Dantzic’ (now Gdansk) in 1866. It is as if the 20^th century interlude when free travel between Britain and Eastern Europe was impossible was a mere blip, and now the ageless imperatives of trade have once again brought Russians and Poles to Northumberland and sent Britons off travelling east.

During the severe winter weather in late 2010 I saw three young men shouting cheerfully at each other in Russian as they pushed the most heavily laden shopping trolley I have ever seen from a nearby supermarket to a ship moored in the dock. The nonchalant ease with which they manoeuvred it down a snow-covered hill was a clue to their national origins. The trolley looked as though the addition of so much as an extra packet of crisps might cause the wheels to buckle. It disappeared inside the No Unauthorised Access area, bearing enough food to sustain the crew all the way back to the Baltic.

'Bought and Sold for English Gold'

This week’s photo is not as pretty as previous ones, but there is a good laugh concealed in it. This is the inscription above the door of the Kelso branch of Royal Bank of Scotland. Kelso is a market town on the north bank of the Tweed about half an hour’s drive west of Berwick. A spot of googling reveals that the Latin motto ‘ditat servata fides’ translates as ‘faithful conduct enriches’. If only RBS had borne this in mind more recently than 1934! As the whole world now knows, it has spent the last few years discovering to its cost that irresponsible conduct impoverishes. So much so that, instead of the Royal Bank being poised to take its place as the financial flagship of an independent Scotland, one of the biggest issues to be hammered out in the event of a Yes vote in the referendum will be how its huge debts will be divvied up between Scotland and England.

Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, used to be a banker before he became a full-time politician, and so is presumably well aware that it was a financial crisis which forced Scotland into union with England in the first place, back in the 18^th century.  It was this event which prompted Robert Burns to write the line I’ve used as the title of this post.  The independent Scottish currency of that time continually lost value against the English pound sterling. Whether the same would happen again, I could not possibly presume to speculate.

The Royal Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Scotland and the Clydesdale Bank issue their own banknotes. Cash machines north of the border dispense notes issued by one of these three banks. At the moment the difference between English and Scottish banknotes is purely in their design. There is no question of their actually being separate currencies. Whether this will change if Scotland becomes independent is still unknown. At one time the SNP hankered after joining the euro, but in light of the current crisis in the eurozone that option looks a great deal less attractive.

Naturally, both English and Scottish notes circulate indiscriminately around the Borders. Any shopkeeper in Berwick will take a Scottish note without a second glance, and  the self-checkout machines in the supermarkets here accept them without so much as a beep. The further south you go, the more likely you are to find them treated with suspicion, and, even though Scottish notes are officially legal tender throughout the UK, I usually try to avoid having any on me when travelling south of Newcastle. I was once standing in the queue in a Berwick supermarket when a visitor from Down South received a Scottish tenner in her change. She inspected both sides of it closely and held it up to the light. She enquired of the cashier if this was a Scottish note. The cashier confirmed that it was. The customer asked if it could be exchanged for an English note, as she might have trouble spending it back home. The cashier obliged. After the anxious southerner had taken her shopping and left, some dry remarks were passed among the queue.

If Scottish banks break free of sterling, those of us who regularly shop cross-border may be obliged to give up cash altogether and stick to the international currency of plastic.

The Seal Folk

This seal has been attracting attention recently in Berwick. It has taken to lying on this sandbank beside the old bridge at low tide. From its size it seems to be one of last autumn’s babies. Some observers have seen an adult seal, probably its mother, swimming near it, and there has been speculation on whether its mum lets it out to play for a while and then comes to fetch it home for its tea. Once comfortably installed on the sandbank it is reluctant to move, and a friend reports that she watched the tide rise right up to its nose before it finally started swimming.

Seals are a frequent sight in the estuary of the Tweed over the winter months. They congregate to breed in the autumn on the Farne Islands, a group of small islands a few miles off the coast of North Northumberland. As they hunt for food they follow the fish which are brought into the estuary by the rising tide, and so they are most often seen at high water. I was once lucky enough to see a seal lying on its back holding a fish between its flippers and apparently tossing it up and down just for fun.

There have probably been seals off the coast of North Northumberland and South East Scotland for as long as there have been people on the land. There are many stories describing Saint Cuthbert’s relationships with wildlife during his time living as a hermit on Inner Farne (where he died in the year 687). It is said that the power of his preaching was so great that even the seals came to listen to his sermons. This story may have arisen from the typically inquisitive behaviour of these intelligent mammals. It is common to see one or two seals near the quayside holding position with their heads above water and staring intently at people on the shore. On several occasions I have been the object of their interest, and it has always given me a privileged feeling of encountering another species in a relationship of equality, each of us in our natural habitat, wondering in a friendly way about the other. It is easy to imagine the seals on the Farnes bobbing along to listen to St Cuthbert’s spiritual advice. 

The Edge of Europe?

Here is a picture of another bridge over the Tweed. This one spans the water between Cornhill and Coldstream, and at this point the river forms the English-Scottish border. On the left side of the picture: Scotland. On the right: England.

There is an old building at the north end of the bridge known as the Toll House or Marriage House, which until the mid nineteenth century was one of a number of venues for marriages of runaway English couples taking advantage of Scotland’s more flexible arrangements for marriages without parental consent and without prior notice. The best known of these is of course Gretna Green, at the western end of the Borders, and, because the border slopes down from east to west, conveniently further south and thus a shorter journey for English lovers. Minor differences between the marriage laws of England and Scotland still exist, but now that most young couples are happy to set up home together with or without parental consent, the Marriage House has not seen an elopement for a long time. It seems possible though that if Scotland votes for full independence it could find a new use as a passport and customs post.

The Vote No campaign is already warning that independence would mean full passport controls between Scotland and England. This seems implausible. A very few hours of driving around the Borders will make it obvious that, as generations of monarchs before the Act of Union were well aware, this frontier will never be fully defensible. Even if the powers-that-be set up checkpoints on every road and bridge, there are an awful lot of fields and woods through which any reasonably able-bodied illegal migrant could easily stroll. Not to mention the possibility of splashing their way across the Tweed a few hundred yards upstream from this photo, where the guards wouldn’t be able to see around the bend.

Such scenarios become even more startling if we take seriously the argument that an independent Scotland would lose its membership of the European Union as part of the United Kingdom and have to re-apply for membership in its own right. Could the bridge in this picture become the boundary of the European Union? It is difficult to imagine, but history teaches us that the unimaginable sometimes happens.