Mosses, stiles and long Scotch miles

I  climbed up the long hill to the moor to see if the local council had cleared the old route to what was once common land.  The Moss Road is at least medieval and  probably much older.  It allowed the villagers to take their stock, their cattle sheep and goats, up to the moor for summer grazing.   It also provided access to the high bog land where they could cut peat.  Many of the farms around the area still have the right to cut peat.    
The old road was as overgrown as ever but I circumnavigated the whins and rank undergrowth and reached the moor.  Eventually, I arrived at the Long Moss now designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest. An SSSI.

Alder carr

It is a raised bog, home to a variety of plants and mosses; alder and willow carrs like small islands in a sea of heather; snipe who spring up from their watery rests with that characteristic zig-zag flight that tempts the shooters and, in the summer, adders and  small copper butterflies.

The beauty of the moss

Our coast has quite a low rainfall and the survival of the bog, its not drying out in the summer, is apparently due to the sea haars, the dense mists that encroach on to the land in July and August just when the sun is at its warmest.  It is true that a few miles inland, folk will be basking in blazing sunshine while we shiver in swirling wet clouds.    Given the continued existence of the Long Moss or a summer free from mists, I  suspect locals would happily do without their SSSI.
Since it persists, we might as well get some benefit from it. In the past it would have been extensively dug for peat for fuel hence its name.
The old Scots word for a peat bank is a moss.  

 Today, it lies alongside giant wind turbines. Where once cows and sheep grazed, the wind is farmed for energy.   Where people dug their peat for fuel, they now capture the wind to provide their heat and light and at a much greater profit.
Ancient cairns and quern stones amid the heather suggest that the bog is at least partially due to the activities of humans.

Quern

 The felling of trees, the subsequent working for peat, and, recently, the legislative preservation of its current state have all contributed to what is there today. What it was like two thousand or four thousand years ago might have been very different.   The lack of grazing means the establishment of scrub trees and heather. The moss will change as it always has in response to the activity or lack of activity from mankind.

Tibbie Fowler sought and found

Tibbie Fowler o' the glen, there's ower mony wooin' at her
 Wooin' at her, pu'in at her
Wantin' her, canna get her
Silly elf, it's for her pelf
A' the lads are wooin' at her

The Logan family had a long  history of association with the Scottish Crown. A Logan had accompanied the “Good Sir James” Douglas on his ill-fated mission to the  Holy Land with Bruce’s heart.  By 1382 the Barony of Leith had come into their possession.   Good and bad, they  ruled over the port and the neighbouring estate of Restalrig until the early 16th century by which time the lands had been divided amongst three branches of the family.  Sir James Logan, Sheriff or “Shirra” of Edinburgh built his mansion where St Thomas’church stands at the top of Sheriff Brae. The church is now a Sikh temple

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis

The catastrophe of Flodden and subsequent, ill-judged political ventures brought a decline in Logan fortunes until, in the late 16th century, Robert Logan “ ane godles, drunkin and deboshit man” had lost his Restalrig lands to pay his debts. After his death, he was accused of being implicated in the Gowrie conspiracy and the family were outlawed and any remaining lands confiscated. Some of their lands in Berwickshire were later returned to them and the  sentence of outlawry revoked.
Respectability of a sort returned to the family.  Tradition has it that George Logan, a grandson of Robert, married “weel tochered” Isabella Fowler and, with her large dowry, built a mansion at the head of Shirra Brae where he could view all the comings and goings of  Leith harbour.

Isabella was the daughter of  Ludovic Fowler of Burncastle near Lauder.
Burn Castle stood overlooking the Earnscleugh Water  near to where one of the branches of the ancient Herring Road  wound its way from Dunbar to Lauder. Of the castle nothing remains except the name of the farm on the site.

The Herring Road - Burn Castle stood close by

Another version has her as the daughter of a portioner or the owner of a small portion of land at Lochend, now a sprawling housing estate. Lochend House built in 1820 incorporates the gable end of the old Logan stronghold, Lochend Castle.

Lochend House

I think this is less likely given the amount of money needed to restore the Logan fortunes and  rebuild on the old site of Shirra House.
It seems to be the old story of the nouveau riche buying their way into an ancient family name.
One can imagine the folk of Leith, who had not always benefited from their Logan superiors, having a good laugh in the taverns along the Shore as the wags sang their comic songs about the newest lady of the house with her jewels and high heeled shoes and attempts to overcome the deficits of nature

The Shore

She's got pendles in her lugs, aye cockle shells would set her better
High-heeled sheen wi' siller tags and a' the lads are wooin' at her

This must be the Tibbie of the satirical song.

Wilson’s bonny Tibbie Fowler’s five hundred pounds  might have bought a coastal trading boat (blog 30th Jan 2014) but, even in those far off times, it wouldn’t have been enough to build the mansion house in Leith and pay off the Logan debts.
 It is also unlikely that a small-holder at Lochend would have accumulated enough of the  penny siller  to make George Logan throw his hat into the ring with the other suitors.

Ten cam' east and ten cam' west and ten cam' sailin' ower the water
Twa cam' doon yon lang dyke side, there's ower mony wooin' at her

 No, for my money, and for Tibbies’, it has to be Isabella Fowler of Burncastle.

In search of Tibbie Fowler

 So far, my involvement in the revival of interest in Wilson’s Tales of the Border has  been confined to the dramatisation of a few of the Tales.

 http://www.wilsonstales.co.uk/

  I thought I ought to read a few more of what were, in their day, hugely successful publications. The print run extended to thousands of copies for each edition.  Further interest, from my own point of view, was added by the fact that, after John Mackay Wilson’s untimely death, a local doctor, Alexander Carr was asked to produce some stories for the next edition to keep the magazine going.
Browsing through the first volume of what became an extensive collection of tales, I came across the story of Tibbie Fowler of the Glen.   The story has a local setting on the northern bank of the Whitadder river near Berwick, moves to Edinburgh and back to Berwick
In his introduction to the narrative, Wilson equates Tibbie of the Glen with  the Tibbie Fowler featured in the old song sometimes attributed to Robert Burns but actually much older. As with many of the songs of Burns, he polished up an existing folk song.
Allan Ramsay mentions it as the tune  to one of his own songs.

Tibbie Fowler o' the glen
There's o'er mony wooin at her
Tibbie Fowler o' the glen
There's o'er mony wooin at her

Wilson’s story has Tibbie, orphaned at the age of nineteen, beset by suitors, all after her inheritance of five hundred pounds.  She sets off to Edinburgh to work as a nanny to “a gentleman  in Restalrig”  keeping her tocher or dowry money a secret so that she will no longer be wooed  by false swains. 
 The mention of Restalrig may be  significant in the unravelling of Tibbie’s identity.
 Wilson gives explicit details of where Ned Fowler, Tibbies’s father, had his cottage and smallholding.    It stood above a small glen on the north side of the Whitadder river, four miles west of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The Whitadder below Tibbies cottage site looking towards Clarabad

 Despite the rain, the glaur and the clart, I tramped off to find Tibbie’s cottage or at least the spot where, according to Wilson, it stood between Edrington Castle and Clarabad.
The glen, now densely wooded, is home only to roe deer and buzzard with ancient moss and lichen covered trees and new plantings.

Tibbie Fowler's glen

The farmer soon put me right as to the site still marked on farm maps as “Tibbie’s cottage” on a promontory above the river.  The site is apparently also the site of an Iron Age fort.

Site of TIbbie Fowler's cottage

The little bridge nearby is called “Tibbie’s bridge” and the field is called “Tibbie’s field” but of her dwelling, not a stick or stone remains.    There are the decaying trunks of mighty elms, long since cut down, around the edge above the steep drop to the river.
Are they the remnants of the trees planted by Ned Fowler, surely misprinted as “palms” in Wilson’s tale?
“… a shadowy row of palm trees(sic) planted by the hand of Tibbie’s father - Ned Fowler”

Old  trunks - once mighty elm trees

The Tibbie Fowler of the story seems to have been a real person.   In the tale, she marries a sailor, William Gordon and, with her dowry, they buy a brig and prosper in the coastal trade until he is captured by enemy ships and disappears for eighteen months.  Tibbie and her children are reduced to destitution until William returns laden with riches and honours and they settle down in her father’s old cottage - a fairly typical Wilson Tale.
This is not the Tibbie of the song.   Wilson’s Tibbie is a great beauty with cheeks “where the lily and the rose have lent their hue”
 The song makes it clear that the attraction of its Tibbie is her wealth not her looks
Tibbie of the song has jewels in her ears and silver strapped high heeled shoes

 “She’s got pendles in her lugs…
…High heeled shoon and siller tags”

Not at all like the douce Tibbie of Wilson’s tale.

The cynical ,worldly humour of the song is also found in Allan Ramsay’s   Gie me a lass wi’ a lump o’ land and Burns’ Hey for a Lass wi’ a Tocher.  Both imply that beauty doesn’t last but wealth does.
  Kate Dalrymple  has a similar theme.
 These are not the sentiments of romance and virtue rewarded that suffuse Wilson’s Tales.

I think Wilson has conflated two different stories and two very different Tibbies. 
 I’ll have to look further afield for the  Tibbie of the song.    Restalrig might be a  clue.
Why did Wilson mention that specific part of Edinburgh?

More of this anon.  I shall seek some answers in our capital city.

Sunshine on Leith Walk

At last the snowdrops have pierced the cold ground.  There they were, under the hawthorn hedge among the blackbird-pecked windfalls, their green spikes with just a flash of white.   Spring is most definitely here.  In some parts, daffodils are out and rhubarb is sprouting.   Despite all the gloomy predictions, it has been a mild winter so far. No rarities have come to the bird table, unless you count the woodpecker, no long tailed tits, no bramblings, just the garden birds - the tits, great, coal and blue: the sparrows, house, tree and hedge: the finches, green, chaff and gold: the robin, the wren, the blackbird, the collared dove and the wood pigeon.   We had our annual visit from the pheasant, hiding from the guns and the occasional raiding jackdaw but nothing unusual.

Spring having apparently sprung, it was with spring in my step that I set off with LotH for a trip to the capital.  Park-and-ride is the greatest idea yet.  No fighting through traffic, no exorbitant city parking charges, just leave the car at Newcraighall and take a train to Waverley.
Beside the steps to the station platform is a monument to the late Bill Douglas, film-maker, whose harrowing trilogy  My Childhood,  My Ain Folk and My Way Home was made with local  inhabitants playing the parts.  They are worthy of  the revival that was mounted in October last year.   Bill Douglas was born in the depression - hit mining village of Newcraighall in the thirties and grew up in  material and emotional poverty, but escaped by way of National Service and a career in acting then film making.
His films can be seen on YouTube.

Bill Douglas memorial, Newcraighall

LotH left for the shops to undertake what I understood to be some absolutely essential transactions while I set off down Leith Walk to find a book binder to recover an old battered history of the village which has been long out of print.
 This copy was signed by the author so it seem worth preserving especially as he too had been a doctor to the community and, though he was described as a Surgeon in those nineteenth century times, he would have provided a service as physician, surgeon and apothecary not much different from  that of the dispensing country doctor of the late twentieth century. This particular medical man also dabbled in writing so I felt a duty to preserve his efforts.

Leith Walk is long and,while it is all downhill one way, it is all uphill on the way back. It is a  wonderfully cosmopolitan  stroll.
A wide busy road with some imposing Georgian and Victorian     architecture if you look up from the activity at street level, it made a change from the country walks I usually manage.

Imposing frontage

It always pays to look up

 You could eat in almost any corner of the globe in the coffee-shops, restaurants, cafes and takeaways that line the street - Punjabi, Nepalese, Turkish, Tibetan, Indian, Italian, Polish, Chinese, Thai, Kurdish, American as well as organic, and macrobiotic, and vegetarian.  Little local shops have a huge range of services and produce - Fruit and veg., bakery, fishmongers, wine merchants, Halal butchers, Italian and Chinese delicatessens sit cheek by jowl with tattooists, body building gyms, tanning parlours, hair dressers and barbers some offering hair braiding , interspersed with second hand furniture shops, auction rooms, florists, solicitors, estate agents, carpet sellers, picture framers, IT consultants, printers charity shops and a tarot card reader.   Dozens of people all trying to earn a living. To get some money to spend in other shops.
Sometimes city walks can be just as enjoyable and a stimulating as tramping the high moors.
 LotH  having still not completed the shopping trip, another stroll  took me along to the National Gallery to have a look at the Turner water colours.  An experience ruined by the incessant chattering of middle aged, middle class, Edinburgh women who would be the first to shush any one speaking during a play or a concert but seem to think it is acceptable to blether mindlessly while viewing  the work of one of our nation's finest painters.    Silence should be a rule in art galleries.

Midwinter sunrise

The standing stones

The solstice  is just a  moment in time when the maximum height of the sun above the horizon is at its lowest point for the year.  Further north, above the Arctic Circle, it doesn’t rise above the horizon and the dawn doesn’t break.  The winter night is total.
The period of midwinter or Yule has now been subsumed into Christmas  but to the old peoples, it was  the turn of the year.   Although, because of the Earth’s tilt and its elliptical orbit, the days don’t actually get longer for some time after the solstice, it still represented the tipping point, the start of a new cycle.
In our electrically-lit, gas-warmed world it is difficult to imagine just how dark and cold the winter was four thousand years ago, especially how dark it was in the short days of midwinter.  Sunlight would have been precious, a gift to be enjoyed.
I got myself out to the standing stones to experience the sunrise of  midwinter.  The wind from the north seemed to come straight of the polar ice-cap. Walking out in the semi darkness of first light, the rays of the still hidden sun reflected on the  clouds along the horizon, in the bitterly cold wind, I wondered if people had come to the stones at this time thousands of years ago or were they erected for another purpose and I was merely being fanciful.

Sunrise

After waiting and freezing for what seemed like ages, I was rewarded with a spectacular sunrise and, turning round, with an equally evocative moon-set.

Moon-set

What ever the beliefs of the folk who put up the stones, I know that  the feeling of the sun on one’s face in the depth of winter is enough to lift the spirits and dispel the gloom.  The walk back was certainly brisker but the wind was behind me and breakfast beckoned.

.....And battles, long ago

The Cheviot still hides its head

 Still on the trail of the elusive Battle of Piperdean, I contacted the Department of Archaeology at Northumberland County Council  who were most helpful and referred me to the Transactions of The Berwickshire Naturalists, an esteemed body  known locally as “The Nats”.   It seems I was following old tracks for, in the accounts of 1910, there was a report asking the same question …

where was the battle of Piperdean?

Piperdean

The conclusion was that it was fought near Wark on the River Tweed, at a farm called Pressen where, indeed, there is a small valley, on the Pressen Burn, called Piperdean.  The farmer was well aware of the  supposed history of the site.

Piperdean looking east

Piperdean looking west

The explanation given in the Nats report is that Ridpath in his Border History in 1776 confused the battle with that of Chevy Chase, which, in turn, was often conflated and confused with the Battle of Otterburn.
 This is apparently the reason for Piperdean being described as “on the  River Breamish near the Cheviot” but this explanation falls down as Otterburn is nowhere near the Breamish either.

 It  seems there were just so many conflicts across the Debatable Lands as they were known, that folk had difficulty recalling who killed who and where and when.   The date of Piperdean is not even  accurately  known… sometimes 1435... sometimes 1436.
 The violence continued for nearly two more centuries and the farm of Pressen has a fortified bastle -house incorporated into the farm steading.

The crow-stepped gable of the bastle in the farm steading

Now a farm workshop, the massive masonry of the bastle is still  there

Built a hundred years after Piperdean, its massive walls still showed the need for the defence of people and livestock in those lawless days.



The search has been fun and has highlighted some hidden corners of our countryside and its colourful past.

Wikipedia has been corrected…again.

In search of dubious battle

The Cheviot is as hidden as the site of Pepperden

Just outside our village there is the site of a battle, or so it says in Wikipedia.   One of the many raids, skirmishes and sometimes large battles that constituted the Anglo-Scottish Wars between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.  The Battle of Piperdean …1436...was fought between the Scots and English or, to be more accurate between the Douglas and the Percy families.  The Scots won which was unusual.
The Battle of Piperdean… never heard of it… neither had I until I came across a reference to it whilst researching the Battle of Homildon Hill,  which I had heard of, which has a large marker stone near the site, and which the Scots lost.
The Battle of Piperdean.    A different tale.    No local knowledge, no marker, no reference on the RCAHMS website… not a trace… except on Wikipedia.

Piperdean, Auld Cambus

Within a few miles of us there is a field pictured on Wikipedia, with a burn running through it in a small gully that could just about  be called a dean and it is referred to as Piperdean on the O.S. map though, in past, the family who farmed the land called the field and the burn, Piper-ton.



George Ridpath’s Border History  of 1776 quotes the site where the Earl of Northumberland was surprised by the Scots as
“within his own territories at a place called Pepperden on Brammish not far from the mountains of Cheviot”

The Breamish  (Brammish) river is a tributary of the River Till which arises in the Cheviot range  well within the territories of the  Percy family but nowhere near our village.

Interestingly, the famous border ballads Chevy Chase and The Hunting of the Cheviot seem to share the confusion, having been thought to be about the Battle of Otterburn fought in 1388, nowhere near the Cheviot.

Daniel Defoe, journeying through Northumberland in the early 18th century was anxious to see where Chevy Chase was fought, the old ballad having featured in the Spectator in 1711.  He  records in his Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain that he was  shown  site on the side of a hill in the Cheviots where the conflict took place.    He was most likely shown the site of Homildon Hill where Percy and Douglas met in 1402.    The border hills were dotted with such scenes of slaughter for more than a hundred years.
It would seem that these old ballads, which probably conflate accounts of several encounters, contain at least some  details of Piperdean which appears more of a dispute about hunting rights, the continuation of a blood feud or  bloody minded provocation than anything political.


The Percy out of Northumberland
And a vow to God made he
That he would hunt the mountains
 of Cheviot within days three
In the magger* of doughty Douglas
And all ever with him be

* To spite or vex

Hector Boece or Boethius states “it is not known whether he (The Earl) had a commission to invade Scotland from the King of England or whether he undertook the enterprise himself.”
Whatever the reason for the fight, on this occasion, the Douglas won but the site of his victory seems to be lost.
Pepperden is no longer on the map but searching for it has brought me to some beautiful Northumbrian countryside and hidden jewels.





Old Bewick has a tiny Norman church built on what was probably  an Anglo-Saxon chapel.  It has been rebuilt many times, usually after destruction by marauding Scots, but still retains its essential Norman character.
An early 14th century effigy of a lady in the choir may be the wife of the man who first restored the church after the Scots invasions in the late 12th century.
Part of an Anglo-Saxon cross with a piscina is built into the porch and pieces of earlier carved stones incorporated into the restored walls.

14th century effigy

Saxon  carved stone in restored wall

.
It seems strange that a search for the site of conflict and killing, should lead one to such a peaceful spot.




 The Kirk Burn running alongside the church, for old ecclesiastical sites always had a source of water nearby for baptism, is crossed by a stone slab clapper bridge and the churchyard has some wonderful old gravestones and ancient yews.

Carved capitol with green man faces hinting at older religions

A succinct reminder

 The search for Piperdean will continue.