pointed out by the Rev. W.L. Sime and the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club in the summer of 1930.
By the time I shouldered my pack (spare socks, pants, a towel, a waterproof, a copy of Colgrave’s translation of the Anonymous Life and Bede’s version, maps, a spare pen and notebook, a fully charged mobile phone, cheese sandwiches, chocolate and a hat) and gone off to look for the ash tree, the sun had climbed and my body warmer quickly became too warm. Despite walking back and forth on the road, consulting reference points on my two overlapping Pathfinders and searching amongst the thickly overgrown hedgerows and field-ends, I could find no sign of the ash tree, or even its stump, and retraced my steps to the farm and the C road, disappointed at a false start, something I had already experienced at Brotherstone.
Almost immediately, I knew that this was an ancient route. When the fraying tarmac swung west at Third Farm, the track grew narrow, made not for modern vehicles but for carts, riders and those on foot. On either side were heavily overgrown but deep ditches, dug to catch the rainwater run-off, and in the middle were the intermittent remains of a crest. Between the ditches and the fields ran long avenues of very old hardwood trees. Some had been blackened by lightning strikes, others had lost their heartwood and were regrowing around the edges, or had sent out suckers or seedlings. The hedges between the trees were broad and very dense, good winter shelter for small animals and birds, and full of summer and autumn goodness, with their harvest of rosehips, wild raspberries, brambles and haws of several sorts. It was impossible to see through the thick branches and abundant foliage.
From the farm at Third, the old road began to climb gently and through field entries I could see long, sunlit vistas to the south, the Tweed and Teviot valleys and beyond them, the watershed ridge of the Cheviots. I met no one on the road, and no farm traffic. The landscape seemed to doze in the sun and, as I began the metronomic rhythm of putting one foot in front of another, my senses began to drift, absorbing little more than the warmth, the scents of the land and its summer glories. On both sides barley fields stretched across undulating, free-draining ground, the ripening, heavy heads rippling in the breeze. Near the top of the rise I had been steadily climbing, the old road crossed a green loaning, a wide path that ran south to north. It had probably been used for driving flocks and herds to the high summer pasture on the flanks of the Bemersyde, Brotherstone and Redpath hills. Its hedges had not been trimmed for many years and the hot summer had seen them soar in height like rows of small trees. As I breathed the clean air, taking my time through this place of, it seemed, complete peace, I wondered why Cuthbert wanted to leave it for the seclusion and austerity of life at Old Melrose. Was there turmoil in his soul? Why was this not enough?
Later in his brief account of Cuthbert’s journey to Old Melrose, Bede described his motivation in a single phrase, ‘he preferred the monastery to the world’. With his servant walking beside him, his horse’s reins in one hand and his spear in the other, the young man, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen years old, presented the perfect picture of the secular, even warlike world. In the Anonymous Life reference is made to Cuthbert at one time ‘dwelling in camp with the army’, probably having been conscripted into the royal Northumbrian host. But he was about to cast aside his spear, hand over his horse to his servant and leave the world ‘for the yoke of bondservice to Christ’. The young man would soon pass from the familiar patchwork of fields, farms and villages and cross into the sacred land.
If I was right about Cuthbert’s road to meet his destiny, it took him through the ancient hamlet of Bemersyde. No trace of the early medieval village is left, but the origins of its name point to real antiquity. It means something like ‘the hillside where bitterns call’, birds that have been described as the Trumpeters of Bemersyde. To the southeast, in a dip between two ridges, lies Bemersyde Moss, a small loch surrounded by tussocky wetland, the perfect habitat for these fishermen, relatives of the heron. The place-name is an example of transference. In Old English, the language of Cuthbert, ‘bemere’ means ‘to trumpet’; its call, instead of the bird itself, found its way onto the map. It is likely that the hamlet existed in the seventh century during the Anglian takeover of the Tweed Valley, and after I had walked out of the tree-shaded lane, the C road I had been following joined a B road bathed in bright sunshine, where its houses clustered.
Most of these are modern, strung out on either side of the road that runs east to west, and their views must be sweeping. Around each are arranged neat and colourful gardens, the deposit of much care and effort. As I passed, a dog leaped up and barked suddenly at a gate and the owner came to calm the old collie and apologise. There was no need, but what struck me was the sense of contentment the lady seemed to have as she talked about the remarkable summer and I praised her beautiful garden of roses, geraniums and hydrangeas and the pots, baskets and borders of rich colour. As I walked off down the road, I wondered about my own choices in life. A comfortable modern house with long views, a decent pension, plenty of time to indulge interests and no need to keep striving, pushing and hoping – all of that suddenly seemed very attractive, something my wife Lindsay and I could easily have opted for.
Instead, of course, we took the harder and, more than occasionally, I think, the dafter path. The joys have mostly outweighed the difficulties, but the life of a freelance and its income is precarious and has significantly diminished over time. More than once, we have had to scrape through a tough year. And at sixty-eight, I worry that my earning capacity is beginning to slacken. More and more often, I look at bungalows like those at Bemersyde and wonder about comfortable sofas, lie-ins on a weekday, playing at writing something I don’t need to finish because I don’t need the money, and joining a book group. But so far these thoughts are fleeting, driven out by the likelihood that I would soon become bored, vastly overweight and possibly over-fond of New Zealand sauvignon blanc, if I am not already. For me at least, for the moment, hard work, no holidays, only the occasional day off and bouts of intermittent anxiety are probably healthy.
And probably inevitable. Just as Cuthbert may have been surrendering to his essential nature, recognising that his piety, his wish to leave the world and strive to know the mind of God, would always prevail over his inherited status as an aristocrat of some sort, so I have begun to realise that I could have lived no other sort of life. I am a risk-taker, someone who sees how well things can turn out and never seriously considers how badly wrong they can go, or if that sounds a little melodramatic, someone who could not bear to be too safe and take refuge in the false securities and certainties of routine. I could not have stayed in a salaried job, served my time until my pension had fattened up, for I would have lost my life if I had wasted all those years just turning up every Monday morning, ticking off the months and years until retirement, wishing my life away.
Instead, I took the risk of depending on myself, not leaning on the support of an institution, and trying to make a living from what was in my head. I don’t much care if that sounds self-aggrandising or even puffed-up; it is nothing less than the truth. I had to be true to my nature – although that sounds a little pat and premeditated. At the time it didn’t feel like that, it was just something I had to do. Even though I had not properly thought out the consequences of diving into the depths of uncertainty twenty years ago, I knew I had to get out of corporate life and accept all the insecurities that came with that decision. And even though the life of a freelance is very dependent on the wishes, whims and appetites of others, those who commission our work or grant money to support it, I suppose I am content with the conditional truth that I have at least been my own man.
But alternative choices can sometimes be surprising and illuminating. At the end of 2017 I met a man I had not seen for fifty years. We played representative schoolboy rugby together in the Borders before he went off to Edinburgh University to take a degree in geology and then a job with De Beer in South Africa. Very dashing, but certainly uncomfortable and almost certainly risky, as well as a radically different choice from mine to stay and make a life in Scotland. When we met for supper in Melrose, I worried that we would have little or nothing to say to each other. In fact, it turned out to be fascinating.
Alone for weeks on end in the African bush, taking sample cores, looking for likely places where diamonds might be mined,
