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

Fungi...the Bogeymen?

 Now is the time of the Fungi, the time for those otherworldly  beings to come…

“Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly…..

 …..We shall by morning
         inherit the earth             *           

         

The mycological world is an alien one, the stuff of legends and myths.  There is something disquieting, slightly disturbing, about fungi. Mushrooms especially the bland supermarket staples are fine but the others… even the ceps, the chanterelles, the meaty field mushrooms…they all carry that hint of danger.
What if they are not what they seem?

Horn of plenty

Then there are the tales of magic mushrooms, of “trips” and “highs”.. but which are the right ones and which are the traps for the unwary?  Masters of deception, many have their deadly doppelgangers.
Witches and shamans have long been associated with the fungi and their properties...and fairies, from a time when the wee folk weren’t the  pretty little bundles of joy of our modern children’s stories but vindictive sprites.  The penalties for stepping into a fairy ring could be severe.. early death or, at best, a life of “want and woe”.
They are neither plant nor animal but something quite different. Consumers of the dead, fragile yet resilient, pale yet vivid, they are part of that dark chthonic realm, the realm of the gothic and the macabre.

 Shaggy ink caps or Lawyers wigs

The woodlands that give shelter and sustenance to  huge numbers of fungi are threatened by their microscopic cousins.   Larch, chestnut and elm have all been attacked and now the  ubiquitous ash is their latest victim. The giant elms have all but gone from our hedgerows, forgotten, and, with them, the micro- environment they sustained.   Will those magnificent ash trees be next?  What will our countryside and, indeed, our towns, look like if we lose our ash trees.
Yggdrasil the world tree, the sacred tree that Odin hung on for “nine long nights” in Norse mythology was an ash tree.   Its wood is so good a fuel that our word for the remains of a fire share its name.  It is the last to come into leaf and the first to shed them.  Let us hope they survive.

Doomed?

*
Mushrooms   Sylvia Plath