A Search for Scotland round the houses they found that greedy suppliers were offering a watered-down product and it was to circumvent them that the hydrometer was invented. The urine collectors earned pocket hydrometers. When the supply of West Highland lichen gave out. Macintosh went to see Gustavus Adolphus IV of Sweden and started a prosperous trade importing Swedish lichens. As a result of this enquiry into what things are made of (that is. their chemistry), there were developments in calico printing, waterproofing, and tar. Cochrane wrote a book about chemistry and agriculture (1795). In 1780 the industrial revolution's iron contributed to the agrarian revolution when James Small yoked two horses to his Carron-made iron plough. Previously two horses and four oxen were needed to draw a wooden plough. In 1913 when he published his book, Cadell wrote that it was again 'high time for every patriotic Scot to wake up and consider how best to put an end to this reaction, and resume such beneficent schemes as our enterprising ancestors started long ago'. The peaty water had surged back, as it were, into Blairdrummond Moss. There is a comparison between the Scotland of the 1780s and the 1980s. When life is getting on not too badly, we accept. It is when things are getting desperate that we question. Material poverty pushed our forefathers into asking basic questions about the constitution of matter. Cultural poverty is driving us into asking basic questions about the constitution of our society. A livelier school and university system would show the young that the old structures have broken down and would give them the knowledge which would help them to come up with new initiatives to produce a community which had both stability and freedom. Education is for action. In an emergency similar to ours (the need to rebuild their society from the foundation), just when Karnes was setting about theclearing of the Blairdrummond Moss, the American colonists were sending to Britain for books on political enquiry that would help them to answer tbeir questions. Fawn M. Brodie, in her biography of Thomas Jefferson, wrote, The Scottish Lord Karnes became, along with Locke, his master and guide to the theory of natural rights.' I wish I knew enough about Karnes and Locke to judge what contribution their Old World ideas made to the Declaration of Independence of the New, CHAPTER FIVE Glasgow and Galloway The Only Countryside We've Got' title of film about wasteland in Glasgow When the traveller leaves behind the casde-topped clutter of grey buildings that is Stirling and makes for Glasgow, he is contused with a welter of appearances that won't fit into a pattern. There are television antennae on farmhouse chimneys, sun and shadow on the Ochils, bundles of newspapers awaiting readers of [ne shredding process, scattered litter, kilted schoolboys from fee-paying schools trying to resuscitate a highland tradition, a pit bing, a factory for making kitchen stoves. Then, nearer Glasgow, cooling towers, a liquefied petroleum gas plant, a deserted, small school, and the accumulated untidiness of an industrial area. A generation ago everybody used to redd up when they were expecting visitors; it was churlish not to give them a welcome. Glasgow has lost heart in the effort to make a derelict landscape look presentable or to bother about how her visitors feel. It's like picking your steps through rubbish to reach your host's front door. When we entered the tunnel beyond Cowlairs, a group of lively children, who had been watching the diesel dials and calling out the speeds from the windows just behind the driver's cabin, suddenly saw the yellow and green and red lights of the tunnel and gazed with wonder and one of them said, Isn't that brawl' The farther end of the tunnel was illuminated with what looked like an altar at the end of a long, dim cathedral-nave, the focus of attention. I was as puzzled and mystified as they were and waited for the uncovering of the mystery. What had seemed a lit altar turned out to be a maze of rails illuminated by the daylight at the end of the tunnel. 'Economic forces' (we are told) created the Glasgow desert - the grey, highrise flats, the lower tenements of red and brown brick, 101 A Search for Scotland the streets of blackened sandstone, an abandon of weeds in open spaces, crowded streets that the yellow and green buses traverse on the way out of the city, advertisements for smoking and for giving up smoking. It's an ungainly builders'-yard. They do bits and pieces of tidying, of make-do-and-mend, flattening Bridgeton and the Gorbals, responding to the immediate pressure. 'Accommodation for the homeless!' barks the economic force threateningly and they run up megalithic boxes for megalopolis. 'Speed up traffic!* and they erect nightmarish overways on stilts. They certainly help us to get through the city quickly. We once timed it. From the airport in the extreme of the city, past Ibrox football ground, shipbuilding cranes, the Clyde (a narrower river than 1 expected, narrower than the Tay at Perth), on to the highway and then to the Stirling road, east of the city; twenty minutes. From these elevated roads Glasgow at midnight looks like a child's electric railway on a massive scale, dotted with dangerously slim skyscrapers and myriads of pinpoint lights and throbbing with busy-ness. The Scottish villages where people cling to the tradition of sleeping when it is dark belong to a different civilization. It is glamorous at night. During the day it is plain ugly. What hope have we of mitigating the savagery of greed, or the suction of dividends into some insatiable belly? Something ruthless and non-human has taken over, implacable, inexorable. The foreign traveller might have looked for some surviving enclave, like Monte Cassino in the dark ages, that would still be nurturing the humane values, tempering the wind to the fleeced sheep. What about Glasgow University? Would that be part of its function? I believe not. However reluctantly, the university opts out I walked round the university late at night. From Gümorehili there is a panorama of lights, some densely crammed together, some sparsely spread out, over the city. The dry leaves of a sycamore rustled faintly. It was quiet up there beside the university buildings where James Watt devised his modification of the Newcomen engine. The university is an impressive, slightly oppressive building. Like the education it delivers, it is intended to have a daily, subliminal influence, and the students can hardly escape the cumulative effect that the builders intended. The suppliers ofeducation are intelligent, sensitive, hospitable. More 102 Glasgow and Galloway than newspaper editors they give the impression that they are determined to see themselves in the role of free seekers after the truth, fearless communicators. But a shadow hangs over them. At the end of the day most of them are not on our side. What they communicate is ultimately their masters' voice. They are the insiders. We are out there on our own. In Glasgow you see-human aspiration at its most poignant We seek a group, a comm-unity, in which we can lose our querulous egoism, to which we can give ourselves without qualification. It could be our country. But the minority in power rejects us, alienates us, and we look elsewhere for those sheltering wings. In Glasgow they give whole-hearted allegiance to a football team. Rangers, or Celtic. The Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney said that poetry claps wings to solid nature. That's what football does in Glasgow. When Celtic have scored a goal the massed green-and-white-barred scarves flutter horizontally with the little quick movements of insects' wings and a population takes off into a throbbing, joyous flight. The Glaswegians are warm people, friendly, outgoing. A visitor can sense friendliness in the accent. Unlike many people in Aberdeen who try to ape the English accent, the Glaswegians feel confident and relaxed in their use of the local speech, perhaps because there are so many of them. They are unaware of any need to modify their vowels and trim their consonants, and incomers seek to defer to this homely pronunciation. Incomers, black people, Scottish lowlanders gravitating to the capital, Highland refugees from feudal landlordism, Irish Catholics quickly make an amalgam conforming to theGlasgow formula. In a discussion at a football match a skilful television programme showed how a Rangers-supporting Pakistani and a Celtic-supporting Italian had accommodated themselves to the speech and mores of the city. 11 is a place of condensed humanity making common cause of the restriaions under which they live. In this moonscape jungle, people go crackers, children commit communal murder and seek refuge in heroin. Those who have run amok are imprisoned in a sullen keep called Barlinnie. The open space ourwitfi its walls, as extensive as the space round a Johannesburg compound for black miners which allows room for armed 103 A Search for Scotland tanks to manoeuvre, deepens the feeling of menace. Wells's novel. The Island ofDoctor Moreau, describes an encounter with sub-men who are inaccessible to the human quality that we call pity, and are therefore capable of any cruelty. Shakespeare too was frightened at the fragility of the defence of humanity against their own committing of frightful deeds. He wrote of the stopping up of the access and passage to remorse and to the 'compunctious visidngs' of our natural tenderness. He imagined wraith-like figures, 'sighdess substances', that wait on nature's mischief and in crises assume control of human beings. Glasgow has pushed its luck too far in hoping that in a crisis it can depend on the intercession of human kindness. There are awful murders and awful walling-up of murderers. We are brought up to believe that a dungeon like Barlinnie is a natural part of the landscape like a bridge or a farm steading. The unspoken menace that surrounds Barlinnie is deepened, not alleviated, by the to-and-fro in the vestibule and the front office, the busy-ness of the staff, the voices on the telephone, the presentation of passes, the conversation of warders going off duty. It is an effort to maintain the pretence that this is just another association of human beings going about their normal business. Barlinnie was built in 1880-6. Inside there is a large rectangular area and, on each floor, an open corridor all the way round from which warders can look down into this well. The secondary school in which 1 taught in Fife was built to the same plan and about the same time. Teachers and warders had an uninterrupted view of central hall and corridors, an essential requirement of a house of correction. In both schools and prisons there are compassionate teacher-warders who are permitted to modify the regimen. In Barlinnie a Special Unitwas setup, an oasis in a desert of hostility. í was invited for a midday meal there. 1 didn't know if people round the table were social workers or murderers. 1 discovered that both groups were there, indistinguishable from one another. There was relaxed discussion, more basic and purposeful than several university discussions in which I had taken part One murderer told me that what was wrong i n the Fife school where I worked was that there was 'no discipline'. Over the coffee a prison warder sat back, throwing in a word only occasionally, like a university lecturer encouraging his students to argue things out for themselves. Later he told me that 104 Glasgow and Galloway he had been seconded forhalf a year to Oxford University's department of criminology. 'You'll learn a lot from them,' I said. They'll learn a lot from me,' he countered. He had left school at the earliest leaving date and hammered out of his experience some new ideas on the function of a prison. His self-confidence gives grounds for hope in Scotland's future. A prisoner took me to see his cell and those of his friends. There were pictures, record-players, radios, easy chairs, shelves of books. They were like hotel bedrooms but particularized by the tenant's choice of ornament or furnishing. Elsewhere there were craft rooms and work in progress. It was like a Benedictine monastery. An extensive mural they had made expressed savage criticism of the social system and the people who manipulate it (or maybe also are manipulated by it).. On another occasion the Special Unit put on an exhibition of prisoner art. In paint and clay there were the figures of other prisoners, representations of anger and domination and sex, and pictures of chaffinches that came in from the sky through the bars and stayed a little in the precinct and went back to the sky again. With the help and local advice of Glasgow youngsters, the association called the Third Eye put on a film protesting against a proposal to make a motorway through derelict land in the city. The film was called The Only Countryside We've Got' and showed, in the midst of the ugly city, broom in flower, teazles, ransoms (good for cookjng), horse radish, hogweed, butterbur, comfrey, foxgloves, a tortoiseshell butterfly, a mouse's nest under discarded polystyrene, and a beautiful shot of a derelict motorcar in the snow. But the success of the Special Unit isn't followed through. It's as if an exile from the Hebrides had sown daffodils in the Gorbals or like an industrial firm which feels that its prestige and public esteem require it to set up a research lab and thereafter refuses to take the risk of putting into large-scale production the results of its successful experiments. A Chicago professor said that the USA sets up showplace schools incorporating the latest ideas in pedagogics, thus disarming its critics, but restricts educational initiative to the showplaces. It's a recognized defence mechanism of an established order. Psychologists and criminologists and philosophers study 105 A Search for Scotland Barlinnie but the Scottish prison system is not thereby much modified. The inaccessible, unidentifiable people who make the final decisions about what goes in Scotland don't set much store on the findings of philosophers and psychologists. They don't let academic studies influence their interpretation of reality. Glasgow University's culture is in a different world from the principles on which Barlinnie is run. This dissociation is another evidence of alienation in our society. And so is the convention that it's OK to shout your head off if you're talking about merciless, violent criminals or the 'meaningless, senseless vandalism' of juvenile delinquents; but you must modify your language and tone if you're talking about the people who created or permitted the Glasgow desert, and control our society. They must he dealt with tenderly. The convention on civilized debate comes into operation. Glasgow and Scotland need a more sympathetic study alike of the hard men in the prison cells and the hard men who decree a punitive system of society. I've seen in chief constables and judges and government scientists and air vice marshals and other of society's warders a steely coldness that induces a slight shiver, as if they were frightened of their repressed compassion. Glasgow is the product of a society that doesn't know where.it is going, whose God has led it up a blind alley. Continuing his journey south to Dumfries, the visitor would find evidence of a sum that hadn't worked out properly or that left an untidy remainder. Old prams have been dumped on the railway banks. A sewer vents into the sea. There is a massive power station at the edge of the sea at Hunterston. Coal pits heal over, the earth's skin growing again after having been gashed. There are pipes, black earth, factory refuse. Industrial Man has been bull-dozing his way through the landscape. Earth and rubbish have been heaped into a large container called Tidysite. On the main roads there are lorries transporting calcium hydroxide, nylon salt, sulphur trioxide, caustic soda, timber and frozen vegetables. The country round NewCumnock and Sanquhar isa dull, dreich landscape of reeds and bogland and few trees, of glaur and discomfort. Grey cement additions have been made to the backs of older buildings, white smoke comes from two power stations and black smoke from another tall lum. The dining-car of a railway train is a 106 Glasgow and Galloway comfortable place from which to get an overall picture of the terrain, rumpled, planed, ridged, pathed, the concavities due to undermining, the dumps, humps and howes, and the face of the countryside altering with the play of the sunlight upon it. An unobtrusive message on a table-mat says that the first public diningcar was on trains between King's Cross and Leeds in 1879, when the food was cooked on a coal stove. I wonder what the visiting social anthropologist from New Guinea makes of the news. Maybe he scores up a credit to British Rail for telling their customers about British social history when they might have made a pound or two out of advertising Beelzebub's beer. Maybe the BR educator was on to something more significant than he realized. There is a longing, almost a yearning, in all of us to enter into the experience of the earlier occupiers of these buffet car seats and we seize on these fugitive pieces of evidence about the passengers supping soup that was heated on a coal fire in the galley a hundred years ago. It's the same unspecific longing as makes a Glasgow father ask, 'Where will we go today?' as he gets the car out of the garage on a Sunday morning, and the family decide between the claims of a National Trust casde like Culzean near Ayr or the home of Bonnie Annie Laurie or the traces of Devorguilla and the Red Comyn and Bruce and Burns and Barrie in the red sandstone town of Dumfries, and the opportunity to admire the Victorian sweep of a fine parabola of rails and platforms at its railway station. We seek to make some sort of sense out of our landscape and its configurations, and the story of the people who tenanted it before us and we are frustrated when the clues don't add up to an explanation. Beyond Dumfries, in Galloway, the clues do hang together. It is a land of well-found farms, well-maintained dykes round the fields, prosperous beech-trees, fine tall oaks and sycamores and ash-trees, bright green grass and black catde in the Ur valley and, beyond the river, woods of spruces and larches. It's a humpy.green countryside of twisty roads and white farmhouses. It has a character and identity of its own, as individual as its 'doon-hamer' speech. There is a softer air and lusher pastures than in Aberdeenshire and a different architecture. But there are parts of Galloway where you might be in the north-east, Deesideor Donsidc or Strathspey, woodlands, lochs and water lilies, rounded hills, heathlands and bog myrde and 107 A Searcbßr Scotland crags, the ubiquitous sound of water, standing stones on top of a hill. And, like Aberdeenshire, Galloway has prosaic areas, Newton Stewart is a featureless town in spite of the fine River Cree. It has been tidied up and painted, and flowers have been planted, but it has no sparkle. People have been preserving their drystone dykes, modernizing their houses, reafforesting bare hills, warding off the nuclear scientists and trying to resuscitate an old meal mill. In Galloway the Scottish nationalists are active, confronting the other parties with probing questions, carefully prepared. In a Galloway valley there are scattered sculptures that visitors leave their cars to stroll across to look at. What does the visitor get out of looking at them? The social anthropologist from the Third World could reasonably expect an answer. Part of the answer is that all right-thinking people are supposed to have a place in their lives for art just as television companies are supposed to have a religious slot. In an open landscape on a hillock between two or three trees there is a figure of Mary, pregnant, being told about the son she would bear. There was dignity and kindness and calm about the group, an oasis of peace in a troubled world. Handel used the Hallelujah Chorus in the Messiah (he said) to express the otherwise unutterable feelings he had of the power and majesty of 'the great God himself. But Epstein's purpose was less easily comprehensible. CHAPTER SIX The Borders With a tale he cometh unto you, with a tale that keepeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner. Everyman The region called the Scottish Borders is a magic land. East of Dumfries the thoroughfare from Glasgow to Carlisle is astir with the busy-ness of the eighties. Lorries transport farm equipment, office furniture and fitted kitchens and liquid sulphur and pipes. The cross-section of a lorry-load of pipes is likea honeycomb. Pipes are as much a necessity for survival in ourdecade as baskets were in an earlier century. Change transforms the valley. The railway is electrified to Glasgow. The need forwood has covered the smooth face of the hillside with a ten-days' growth of fir stubble-beard. The old narrow road is redundant and looks rejected; slowly the natural world will reclaim it, will grass and weed it over, and it will become one with yesterday's seven thousand years, until an archaeologist rediscovers it and announces, 'There was a main thoroughfare here once.' A solitary sign expresses a human refusal to be bulldozed by what is called the pressure of events. It says, 'Free range eggs'. Farther east, away from the leaching effect of the main valley into England, the resistance to change is stronger. The traveller is entering one of the most amazing regions in Europe. It's the land between Edinburgh and the Cheviots, the counties of Selkirk, Roxburgh, Peebles and Berwick. I lived for six years in this countryside and loved ÍL It has thespell of a woman who is not all that good-looking but has a fey quality that attracts and holds her admirers. Alexander Gray, poet from the Braes of Angus and academic economist, wrote about the unlikely qualities of his girl that caught and held captive his fancy. A friend 109 A Search for Scotland of mine from Lochinver in Sutherland visited the region and never left it. His Highland brothers couldn't understand this new-plighted troth. The region has no Highland sublimity of scenery, and most of the towns and villages have little grace of architecture. So where does the attraction lie? The region has a unity of place; it is a kingdom on its own, inducing a tough local patriotism in its subjects. We lived on the Melrose Road outside Galashiels, looking across to Galafoot and the Tweed at Abbotsford. Near our house was a plaque in a wall recording that here Walter Scott, ill on his journey home from Italy, 'sprang up with a cry of delight' on seeing the Eildons. The inscription gave a special poignancy to his generalized poem on patriotism. Breathes there the man with soul so dead Who never to himself hath said. This is my own, my native land'? A Galashiels woman told me that, returning from a day in Edinburgh, she felt safe when the train, having climbed up the watershed to Fala, began the descent into the valley of Gala Water. It's an atavistic feeling of being in your own territory again that the Border reivers and moss-troopers felt when, after a cattle-stealing sally, they had won clear of danger and felt bielded by their own Border hills. You don't venture outside the well-kent territory unless you have to, and then you get back as quickly as possible, 'A day out o Hawick is a day lost.' When James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, was trying to make writing pay for his farming, Scott planned to help him, explaining that, to gain patronage, he would have to go to London to attend the coronation of George IV. But Hogg refused because, if he went, he would miss St Boswells Fair. Belatedly we are discovering that Hogg chose the better part. If Scotland is to become healthy, to become whole, we should listen to him rather than Scott, because he got his priorities right The Scott gospel that individual advantage is paramount has eroded communities outwith the Borders, crumbled their cohesion. When Melrose or Gala or Jed or Langholm or Selkirk or Hawick or any other Border club supplies a man for Scotland's rugby team, it's usually a man from Melrose or Gala or.... an amateur (a lover of 110 Tbe Borders the game), and not, as in soccer, a footloose mercenary unrelated to the community. Just as Border wool is reinforced with long fibres that give it continuity, the local awareness of community includes those who lived in these towns long ago. The annual Border festivals keep their memories fresh. There were St Ronan and James IV and David I moss-troopers and Cistercian monks, Thomas the Rhymer and St Cuthbert, King Arthur and Merlin, Agricola and his legion, Covenanter conventicles, all the abbeys, Mary Queen of Scots Montrose, Walter Scott. Their ceremonies crystallize round local figures, usually on horseback, Cornets, Standard-bearers, Callants Braw Lads, Beltane Queens. Some of the ceremonies are recent others have a long history. The Selkirk Common Riding, they maintain, has been celebrated annually for six hundred years. My wife and I rose early one June morning to go to the Selkirk Common Riding, six miles away. At seven the rain had stopped but the sky behind the hills was grey and uncertain. Two hundred people on horse crossed the Ettrick at a walking pace, the standard-bearer leading on a white horse. All the time that the long line crossed, singly or in twos or threes, there was the sound of hooves on the stones of the river bed, muffled by the two-feet depth of water. The scene hasn't changed much in several hundred years -sky, hills, river, and people on horseback. You could imagine, said my wife, that you were watching a band of moss-troopers setting out on a raid. The summer festival of Galashiels is of more recent origin. A group of Gala folk, energetically supported by the doyen of the Scottish directors of education, W. D. Ritchie, set up their own programme of riding the marches and celebrating their history. Down near the rugby ground at Netherdale a raidstone marks the place where Cromwell's soldiers got a bellyache eating sour plums. Resting on a Sunday, they were annihilated by the local men, and 'Sour plums in Galashiels' was later adopted as the motto of the town, and was commemorated in the song. The will-o'-the-wisp of heraldry leads its followers in inconsequential directions. The coat of arms of Galashiels showed a fox lookingupat inaccessible plums on a plum-tree. The caption might have read 'Sour plums', or,as we might more likely have said, 'Sour grapes'. But the La Fontaine 111 A Search far Scotland fable had nothing to do with the Comwell story. The raidstone's origin is equally humorous. A pupil of mine saw it being set up. But none of that takes away from the genuine enthusiasm with which the people of Galashiels enter into the annual celebration of their history. They commemorate the pan that Ettrick Forest played in the union of James IV and his English bride. They ford the Tweed at Galafoot and are received at Scott's house at Abbotsford, thus lightly impressing on the young riders that ancient churchmen used that same ford to get across the Tweed, i don't know why the Borderers are closer to their origins than the rest of us Scots are. In that region 1 have been aware of the presence of the past more acutely over the whole region than elsewhere, John Buchán, who had Border roots, was sensitive to such mysteries and used phrases like 'the blanket of the dark' and 'the gap in the curtain' to suggest a tenuous border between the past and present. Border? Was there something in living in such a sensitive region that heightened awareness? I've listened to a packed gathering in a cinema in Galashiels on a June evening raising their voices in Burns's words to Haydn's music: But Yarrow braes nor Ettrick shaws Can match the lads o Gala Water, Braw, braw lads. Nothing much in the words except their local habitation, but a community was soaring above an earthbound life, buoyed up by infinite longings, losing itself in a surge of generosity and happiness. At times like these we see, albeit through a glass, darkly, the potential of our country and its people. This is how we might be living much of our time and not only in brief escapes into music or poetry or fantasy or whisky. We are like gliders searching for ther-mals to give us a lift. The massed people of Galashiels, singing from their hearts, express a longing for a reintegration of life, a longing to live permanendy on Ů\t sunny uplands. There is a concern for music in the Borders. Ruskin told about a local man, who, as he lay dying, realized that maybe he was the only one who still knew the notes of the old tune of 'Sour plums in Galashiels' and he sent for somebody skilled in musical notation to write it down from his playing. Ruskin said, 'Is not this strange that 112 The Borders a man, setting out on his heavenly journey should be concerned to see that the tune 'Sourplums in Galashiels should not cease from the earth?' Maybe the ancient minstrelsy and the modem festivals spring from the same roots, the desire to make sense of our earthly sojourn. Throughout Scotland, teachers read the ballads to their pupils and tell them that they are a vital part of our Scottish literary tradition. But usually they arc a classroom chore, an exercise in literary appreciation. They are fossils that have been preserved. The mother of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, rebuked Walter Scott about his ballad collecting and publishing. They were made for singin an no for rcadin; but ye hae broken the charm an noo they'll niver be sung mair.' Tamlane gained a place in literature and folklore, and the ancient belief that the fairies paid their dues to hell at Carterhaugh on Hallowe'en was reduced ro a quaint fancy. The Scottish schools sapped the ballads further because they didn't make it credible to the young that their forefathers and foremothers could have believed these things and sung about them with feeling. The beliefs and songs were a natural growth, living things, the yearning of a community of shepherds and weavers to read their experience aright, their fumbling imaginative efforts to find a satisfying explanation of the antic natural phenomena, the ferlies, that were their daily and nightly experience. The ballads reveal the speculations they were lured into in their search for meaning. One spring evening when the moon was flitting in and out of clouds, I walked down the road from Selkirk on the south side of the Ettrick and crossed the river. That's Tamlane country. Near the road was the very place, the farm of Carterhaugh, still holding on to its magic name. 1 was ready to be magicked into acceptance. The setting was right. The lights of Selkirk, the capital of the fairy kingdom, were shining in the distance. Round about were green-brown softly-outlined hills. Barred strato-cumulus clouds half hid the sky and a blue-yellow moon floated behind the cloud-curtain, shining on the water when 1 crossed the Ettrick bridge. The soft sound of the water was clear in the evening air. Behind the walled garden a lightwas on in the farmhouse of Carterhaugh. Telephone wires and poles, a tractorworking late, an aeroplane humming overhead were 113 A Search for Scotland minor intrusions that the setting was able to contain. It was not difficult to feel that a shepherd friend of J ames Hogg, travelling from an outbye hirsel to Selkirk on a moonlit evening, would come under the witchery of the scene. It's difficult for a Border child to know where fantasy ends and perceived truth begins. At ahigh point of the road between Melrose and St Boswells there is a stone commemorating Thomas of Ercildoune (Earlston), the Rhymer. With all the hard realism of Roman letters cut into stone it declares that here Thomas met the Queen of die Fairies and began Scottish literature. What is a trusting youngster to make of that? Thomas Hardy's Wessex countrymen believed that at twelve o'clock on Christmas Eve the cattle sank down to their knees, and Hardy, a sceptic, said that if a childhood friend invited him to go to the lonely barton they used to know and see the oxen kneel, he would go with him, 'hoping it might be so'. We would find a much fuller response from the young if we took them fuller into our confidence, differentiating clearly between the things we know to be true and the things we know to be wishful fantasy and the things about which we make inspired (or Uninspired) guesses. The story of the Romans and their camp beside the triple Eildons, Trimontium, is fairly clear-cut Glimpses of the reality of their sojourn in the Borders are offered by Edinburgh's National Museum of Antiquities. From Trimontium, archaeologists have dug up chariot wheels, a cavalry helmet made of brass, a wooden bucket, pieces of leather tents, horses' bits, blacksmiths' tools. There's a cooking pot with the words Turma Crispi Nigri' (Black Crispy's Squad) indented clumsily upon it, maybe by the cook. Botanists working from pollen grains, archaeologists, historians and other detectives working over the clues dug up at the camp site, have come up with a picture of the Tweed valley when Agricola and the Ninth Legion were there. The heath-covered flanks of the Eildons came down into peat and hag; there were patches of swamp; roads were paths, higher up, twisting round boggy ground to the villages or through deep woods; there were oak, alder, pine, hazel, birch, mountain ash, more trees than now and therefore more mist, a humid atmosphere; in the Tweed there were frequent alternations of rushing water and stagnant willow or rush pools. 114 The Borders There were big and little insects, harsh-sounding birds that caught the fish in the river, beaver, wolf, wild boar, Caledonian bear, reindeer, elk, giant ox. Transport was by packhorse, waggon, and boats on the river. The description of Agricola, written by his son-in-law, Tacitus, can be translated as 'He was a man lacking in force,' or equally as 'He was never aggressive.' He had lived through Nero's reign and probably had seen Nero in his amethyst toga parading through a room filled with the scent of violets and verbenas. Agricoia's Rome was a city of violent contrasts, a city of narrow streets and tumbledown houses and foul-smelling alleys; and of Goering-like extravagance and luxury. The Pretorian Guard in yellow uniforms and red girdles and big earrings rode on their Numidian horses. Hindoos, Arabs and Ethiopian giants paraded the streets. In the gardens were peacocks, flamingoes, swans, ostriches, gazelles, antelopes. A crescendo of musical instruments echoed and drowned out the confusion in men's minds. The populace thoughtthe Christians were cowardly when, confronting the specially-famished Hibernian wolfhounds bounding into the arena, they knelt down in prayer. Men with scourges drove the gladiators on, and their coffins lay ready. The Greeks set up an altar to Pity, but that was something that didn't come into Nero's scale of reckoning. That reality gives us a loom on which to weave our imaginings of what it was like to be a legionary in the Borders when Agricola was there. The great Julius Caesar was as far from them as the Duke of Wellington is from us. A legionary might have had a grandfather who was one of Pilate's centurions and had spoken with Jesus of Nazareth. Some of his older friends might have been massacred in Boudicca's uprising against Rome and he would have recounted the story in the same tones as Boers speaking of Zulus, or Yankees speaking of Indians. 'A good Injun is a dead Injun.'Vesuvius, and the destruction of Pompeii, would be fresh in their memories. That is the furniture of the minds of Roman soldiers serving in the border outposts. We can imagine the conversation over the evening meal as they supped their soup and looked down through the trees on the Tweed. They would be shootinga line about sexual triumphs over local girls. In the irreverent military folklore would bea story of a Balearic slingerwho had yawned in the face of great Julius 115 A Search for Scotland when he was fully launched into one of his pep-talks, orsomebody would exhibit a Palestinian relic, a piece of the coat of a Palestinian construction-worker for which the crucifixion party had diced. I think Agricola would have talked easily to Black Crispy's squad round their cooking pot on an evening. I invited to Galashiels Academy, to talk to the pupils, General Christison who in retirement was growing fruit-trees near Melrose and 1 found him a character like Agricola. He spoke modestly about his experiences in the First World War and about his encounters with Lawrence of Arabia. 1 can imagine a legionary venturing a question about the forthcoming expedition against the Caledonians. 'Sir, why do we have to bring this proud people to their knees?' His reply would have been a model of compromise, the compromise of a sensitive man steeped in tradition. In justification he might have quoted poets who magnified Rome's task in the world, bringing civilization to the barbarians. It is still the function of some literary notables to validate the policy of the government. But deep in his heart he knew (as Tacitus said) that he would be creating a desert and calling it peace. His heart wasn't in it, orat least he had reservations. That's something that history-teachers, like politicians, play down. We owe it to the young to admit to our doubts. 1 have always found the young tolerant when we didn't pretend to omniscience. They would fully understand the experience of Eadwine of Northumberland who in the seventh century extended his rule to the Forth and gave his name to the city which guarded that northern frontier, Eadwine's Burgh. He married his sister to the king of Kent and with her from Canterbury came one of Augustine's Christian propagandists. The Northumbrian Elders, cradled in the worship of Thor and Odin, called a meeting to consider the propaganda. One of them said: So seems the life of man, O King, as a sparrow's flight through the hall when you are sitting at meat in winter-tide, with the warm fire lighted on the hearth, but the icy rainstorm without The sparrow flies in at one door and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other, vanishes into the wintry darkness whence it came. So tarries fora moment the life of 116 The Borders man in our sight, but what is before it, what after it we know not If this new teaching tells us aught certainly of these things, let us follow it. Thirteen centuries later we are still groping and credulous. What we can tell the young ,s.this. When the Christian sings, 'I know tha my Redeemer hveth he doesn't really know. Anyway, not in the sensein whic,we habitually use the word W H^Lgin* I L the Nonhumbrrans. for a certainty that is not yet availaEhe Norrtmrnbnan Elder advised, 'If this new teaching tells aught c«! tainly of these thmgs, let us f0„ow it; The hum/ « ^ growmg out of its childhood, domg without the props of fZ stones, trying to p.ece together, as through a glass, darkly, the J-dence available to it. It is to the advantage of the young to under. stand how the propaganda for some doctrines came i influence peope. in the year Ó27, the thoughts and feelings of Z Northumbrians were finely balanced, and when that happens it £ľ!« rVmí? W( aiyheb*^ *°P'e don't likewWmin long ,n the hrnbo of indecis.on. Two arguments persuaded the Elders to sw.tch thetr votes away from Thor and Odin, the Norse gods m aVourofthenewgod.Oneargumentwasthatthenewgod could tell them with certainty what happened before they were born and what w.11 happen to them after they die. The other argument came from a dis.llusioned priest of the Norse gods. He said that all his assiduous worship of the Norse gods hadn't brought h,m as much favour and fortune as had been given to others who í ľ ÍT m ľ'"1,.1" theirwor*hiP These arguments pre-varfed and the Northumbnans were convened to Christiany ChriTZTT1- 0SWf' "Ť* m the P»W»