found that he had spoken to no one for long periods. Instead, he began to read the novels of Walter Scott in publication sequence, and not only worthwhile in itself, it was a habit that reconnected my friend with the Borders. The famous Scott quote, ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!’ was precisely apposite. My friend’s mother is still alive and he flies north from his home on the coast near Cape Town to the Scottish Borders at least two or three times a year. His connection to our home-place is powerful. As is mine. When I resigned my job, there was no other choice I could consider except to come home, to return to the sacred land.
Continuity and attachment to place are rarely more evident than in the story of Bemersyde House. Turning downhill from the hamlet, I passed its gates and saw the sixteenth-century tower house in the distance. The same family has lived there for eight centuries since it came into the possession of a Norman warrior called Petrus de Haga. By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the name had changed slightly but become so established that Thomas the Rhymer could recite:
Tyde what may,
Whate’er betyde
Haig shall be Haig of Bemersyde.
And so it has come to pass. Alexander, the grandson of Field Marshal Earl Haig, the commander of the British army on the Western Front during the First World War, now lives in the old house.
Below the gates, the road begins to run down gently off the ridge and becomes deep and heavily shaded, a sign of real antiquity, since it has sunk far below the level of the fields beside it simply because of the centuries of feet, hooves and wheels, the tread of people, horses and the ruts made by carts. Powerful knots of tree roots cling like octopuses to the high banks and their thick foliage shades the road for a few hundred yards. It eventually leads to an oddity, a dissonance.
When the sixteenth century and the Reformation signalled the end for Scotland’s monastic communities, abbeys often fell under the control of commendators, usually aristocrats who eventually appropriated their lands. The holdings and power of many aristocratic families are built on the patrimony of the church. The Erskine family, earls of Buchan, were given Dryburgh Abbey and much of the nearby property that had been gifted to the monks over many years. By the early nineteenth century, David Stuart Erskine, the 11th earl, had become fascinated, even obsessed by Scotland’s history and heroes. He founded the Society of Antiquaries, whose collections formed the basis of those of the national museums of Scotland. Walter Scott knew Erskine well and was uncharacteristically ungenerous, saying that he was a man whose ‘immense vanity obscured, or rather eclipsed, very considerable talents’. On that sunny day below Bemersyde, it seemed to me that an understanding of what made good art was not amongst them.
The deepened lane leads downhill to a brown sign on the left that points to ‘Wallace Statue’. At the end of a winding wooded track, perched on a high, precipitous bank, is a monstrous red sandstone sculpture of one of Scotland’s great heroes. William Wallace, the victor of Stirling Bridge in 1298, stands twenty-one feet high on a ten-foot plinth, staring sightlessly westwards over the Tweed Valley. Made by a local sculptor, John Smith of Darnick, no doubt to a precise prescription from the Earl of Buchan, it could never be mistaken for the work of Michelangelo. In fact it is profoundly ugly. Holding a broadsword almost as tall as himself in one hand and a shield bearing the device of the Saltire in the other, the hero looks more than a little gormless, a slightly puzzled expression above his bushy beard, as though he were lost. On his head, and therefore difficult to make out from thirty-one feet below, a version of an iron helmet that owes more to the Wehrmacht than anything medieval has some sort of winged creature attached. Perhaps a pigeon. Mercifully, the hardwood trees around this thoroughly duff object have begun to hide it. From a distance, to the west, all that can be made out is the head – until autumn sheds the friendly leaves.
Further down the road to Dryburgh Abbey I came across something much more eloquent, a fragment of cut stone that was definitely more pleasing, clear confirmation that people had walked and ridden this way for very many centuries. Easy to miss in the left-hand verge, hard against the edge of the tarmac, sits a cross socket. Now filled with rainwater, it once held a tall and impressive cross that offered a place to pray and that marked a boundary. Abbeys, priories, convents, churches and other places of pilgrimage often lay inside a wide precinct whose outer limits were fringed by crosses set up by the sides of the roads that led to the sacred sites. Around Coldingham Priory on the Berwickshire coast, founded in the mid-seventh century and a place Cuthbert visited, there were at least three crosses at three approaches: Applincross, Whitecross and Cairncross. No more than this unconsidered little stump survives from Dryburgh, but there must have been others. When Cuthbert rode past it, he left the temporal world and entered holy ground.
Before a long avenue of trees wrapped the road in shadow, wide vistas to the south and west opened over the rich, pale yellow of ripening barley. Rain was gathering in the west, a grey veiling drifting across the hills of the Ettrick Forest and the shelter of the deep lane made it difficult to judge where the wind blew. I quickened my pace downhill to Dryburgh, noticing that gaps in the trees to my right showed what an ever-present landmark Eildon Hill North was. It seemed to be following me around the landscape.
Dryburgh is the only one of the four Border abbeys not found in a town and consequently its fabric is more complete, having suffered much less at the hands of stone robbers. After the Reformation, the masonry of the great churches at Kelso, Melrose and Jedburgh could be seen in the walls, and no doubt the foundations, of nearby houses. Sheltered by stands of ancient trees – one yew is said to have been planted by the monks in the early twelfth century – and surrounded by a vallum, a ditch deepened in modern times to keep out grazing and browsing animals, Dryburgh Abbey is a very romantic ruin, and also strange, other-worldly.
Many years ago I made a television series called The Sea Kingdoms, the story of Celtic Britain and Ireland. We filmed in Cornwall, Ireland, the Western Isles and in Wales. On our way out to St David’s in Pembrokeshire, surely the only cathedral village in Europe, we took a detour to a place associated with another early holy man, St Justinian. According to the map, near the coastal hamlet was an interesting series of prehistoric remains, a small stone circle and a dolmen, a megalithic tomb of two upright stones that supported a horizontal capstone. I thought some shots of these against the sea might be useful in opening credits.
The landscape was patterned by a warren of narrow paths threaded between rocky outcrops and tall clumps of impenetrable gorse. It was easy to become disoriented. Near the dolmen, we came across an unexpected small cottage with a fenced front garden full of colourful wooden objects: stripy posts, a large doll and a cart. Bunting fluttered on some of them. As our camera and sound men gratefully put down their kit, my director and I knocked on the door. Perhaps we were trespassing and needed permission to film. There was no answer at first, and then I began to make out a low drone, almost like a growl but not something that sounded like a guard dog. When there was no answer and we retreated, it was replaced by a high-pitched whine, a keening that slowly built up but did not seem to come from the cottage.
After exchanging glances, we walked back to the dolmen, wondering what we might meet around each corner of the path, shot some general views, packed up our kit and walked, quite quickly, back to the cars. More than strangeness, this little enclave in the landscape had a powerful atmosphere, something malign, and even though it was a bright day, good for filming, we all felt uncomfortable and were relieved to park at St David’s and set up our next sequence of shots amongst the crowds.
Dryburgh’s strangeness is not malign, it seems to me, but it is not a place of settled peace either. For some who visit, God may be close, but I had a powerful sense of other presences, perhaps the spirits of the pagan past were flitting in the shadows of the old trees. The early history of the abbey and its site is scant but it might cast a dim light on these competing impressions.
All of the original locations of the great twelfth-century
