As I was walking...

A walk in the peace and tranquility of the Cheviots brings you upon a succession of hill forts dating back to the Bronze age and makes you realise that the status quo has not been the norm for most of the span of  the human occupation of these lands. Indeed they were, for centuries, the Debateable Lands and, before that, were fought over by Romans, Britons, Angles, Vikings who morphed into the kingdoms of  Bernicia then Northumbria then to Scots and English… always raiding and warring.
Long before that, the peoples of the Bronze and Iron Ages felt the need to defend themselves from incursions by their neighbours.
From the remains of the defensive structures on the tops of the hills, you can look down the valley of the  river Glen to the site of the Anglo-Saxon capital of Yeavering or Ad Gefrin as Bede called it.  Nothing remains to be seen of this royal residence destroyed in the wars between Mercians, Britons and Anglo-Saxons.

The valley of Glendale and the site of Ad-Gefrin

Yeavering Bell and the remains of a hill-fort

The landscape is dotted with churches built like forts, pele towers, bastle houses and markers to old battles and skirmishes.
The older parts of most of the village churches have massive thick walls to resist fire and assault; some have associated towers as refuges for the incumbents and the church plate.

Massive 15th C walls in a church

Pele tower  on a church

 Raiding and looting by the reivers from both sides of the disputed border must have made life a stressful business for the folk of the valley in the  fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

 The old saw was -
“If they come, they winna come
And if they dinna come, they’ll come hame” -
meaning if the Scots came reiving, the cattle out on the grazings wouldn’t be seen again but if they didn’t, the cattle would  come  safely home.

Bastle house ( steps and lower doors are later additions)

Full blown battles between Scots and English armies were frequent during the wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, culminating in the disaster for the Scottish side at Flodden, though even that defeat didn’t stop the Auld Enemies from continuing their aggression until the  Union of the Crowns in 1606.
One such battle, Homildon Hill, is marked by a Bronze age standing stone.  It was here that   Harry Hotspur of the Percy family captured Archibald 4th Earl of Douglas as recounted in Shakespeare’s  Henry IV part I

“..on Homeldon’s plains. Of prisoners Hotspur took,
Mordake the Earl of Fife and eldest son to beaten Douglas…”

Homildon stone

The fact that Hotspur refused to give up his prisoners to his king and, a year later, Douglas was allied with him in a rebellion against Henry shows how fluid loyalties were along the border to anyone other than family.

 The ordinary folk  just had to defend themselves as best they could in their fortified houses and pray in their churches as  the tides of war washed over them.    What are, today,  merely interesting aspects of rebuilt and reshaped buildings or piles of stones  were once the means of survival.
Tribal allegiances, power struggles, destruction and looting, rapine and havoc, we  see them still being played out on our T.V screens with the defenceless masses caught in the middle.   Strange to think it was once thus in these peaceful hills.

Even in 1940, defence was still needed. Pillbox at road junction