the lane and from there to the main road we have added more outbuildings, an arena and barns. One of these is my office, a large room overflowing with books and runs of periodicals that have helped me write mainly Scottish history over the last twenty-five years.
Perhaps one of my most eccentric possessions is a series of annual volumes published by the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club. Founded in 1831 by Dr George Johnston of Berwick-upon-Tweed, it is the oldest active natural history field club in Britain and its object (what would now be called a mission statement) is pleasingly limited. Members are interested in ‘investigating the natural history of Berwickshire and its vicinage’, while the club badge carries the figure of a wood sorrel, Johnston’s favourite flower, and the motto is Mare et Tellus et quod Omnia, Coelum – ‘The Sea and the Land and what covers all, the Heavens’. Wonderful. Especially the use of the obscure ‘vicinage’ instead of vicinity.
From the BNC, I discovered that in the summer of 1930 a group of members had visited what they reckoned to be the ancient village of Wrangham between Kelso and St Boswells. Their guide, Rev. W.L. Sime, pointed to a row of ancient ash trees at Brotherstone Farm, saying that it grew where the village once stood. Andrew Armstrong’s map of the Borders made in 1771 also plotted its remains at the farm. This immediately caught my interest because I had been reading the Anonymous Life of St Cuthbert in the excellent translation by Bertram Colgrave, a scholar at the University of Durham. There are three eighth-century versions of lives of Cuthbert, two written by that more venerable and very great scholar Bede of Jarrow, but the earliest is the anonymous text almost certainly written by a monk on Lindisfarne between 699 and 705, only twelve or at most eighteen years after Cuthbert died.
The first Life is also more richly detailed than the others and contains what sounds like testimony from monks who knew Cuthbert. The account of his miracles and deeds feels at once more personal, more authentic, less formulaic, less political. It seems that Cuthbert was of Anglian rather than native Celtic descent (his name itself suggests that); the son of a landed, perhaps noble family, for the young boy was sent to be fostered, a common practice in early medieval Britain and Ireland and a means of extending bonds of loyalty and obligation amongst ruling elites. The prime purpose of both Bede’s and the Anonymous Life was to establish Cuthbert’s cult of sainthood and recount the miracles he wrought with God’s help. Here is a passage from the earlier Life that also imparts a little biographical detail:
At the same time the holy man of God was invited by a certain woman called Kenswith, who is still alive, a nun and a widow who had brought him up from his eighth year until manhood, when he entered the service of God. For this reason he called her mother and often visited her. He came on a certain day to the village in which she lived, called Hruringaham; on that occasion a house was seen to be on fire on the eastern edge of the village and from the same direction a very strong wind was blowing, causing a conflagration.
Cuthbert fell to the ground and began to pray, and miraculously the wind began to blow from the west and the rest of the village was saved. Over time, the place-name of Hruringaham was rubbed smooth into Wrangham and, to add to the findings of the Berwickshire Naturalists, archaeologists have more recently detected the remains of an ancient village near the modern farm of Brotherstone on the slopes of the Brotherstone Hills above the road between Kelso and Melrose.
Here is another description of a miraculous event from the Anonymous Life:
On another occasion, also in his youth, while he was still leading a secular life, and was feeding the flocks of his master on the hills near the river which is called the Leader, in the company of other shepherds, he was spending the night in vigils according to his custom, offering abundant prayers with pure faith and a faithful heart, when he saw a vision which the Lord revealed to him. For through the opened heaven – not by a parting asunder of the natural elements but by the sight of his spiritual eyes – like blessed Jacob the patriarch in Luz which was called Bethel, he had seen angels ascending and descending and in their hands was borne to heaven a holy soul, as if in a globe of fire. Then immediately awakening the shepherds, he described the wonderful vision just as he had seen it, prophesying further to them that it was the soul of a most holy bishop or of some other great person. And so events proved; for a few days afterwards, they heard that the death of our holy bishop Aidan, at that same hour of the night as he had seen the vision, had been announced far and wide.
What Cuthbert saw, and whether or not it really was a miracle rather than a meteorological event, seemed much less important to me than where he saw it. From all that I had read and researched, it was clear that he had been raised at Brotherstone/Wrangham, not far from the junction of the River Leader with the Tweed, and that he had had a remarkable, transcendent experience, probably in the Brotherstone Hills.
In 2000, I first became interested in Cuthbert when I was writing what I hoped would be a definitive history of the Scottish Borders (it ignored the border for the early part of the story) and I knew that up on one of the Brotherstone Hills there were two impressive standing stones known, of course, as the Brothers’ Stones. A third had been raised some way down the eastern slope and called the Cow Stone. I wondered if that place of even older, prehistoric sanctity was where Cuthbert had been tending his flocks and where he had seen the angels and Aidan’s soul ascend.
I had never been up to the Brothers’ Stones and so, having fed, watered and walked the dogs that sunny morning in July, I pulled on my boots and drove over to Brotherstone. Or at least I thought I did.
Having crossed the magnificent new bridge over the Tweed and then the much older and narrower bridge over the Leader, I drove east towards Kelso before turning left up a short farm track. There was no sign, but the Ordnance Survey suggested this was Brotherstone and glowering above the steading I could see the south-facing cliff of a steep crag. Having rung the doorbell of the farmhouse and had no reply except the furious barking of a very angry guard-dog, mercifully behind the back door, I walked over to a courtyard of cottages. A lady assured me it was OK to park and she would let the farmer know I was planning to walk up to the stones.
Every fence seemed to be electrified and so I carefully ducked under the wire at all of the gates. It was a thick gauge intended to give straying cattle a real jolt. Below the crag I found what looked like a warren of fox holes, or maybe a badger sett. Whatever creatures had excavated the rich, red earth, they had not troubled to seek the cover of gorse thickets or even long grass, and by the dyke lay the eviscerated carcase of a lamb, recognisable only by the largely untouched head, its clouded eyes bulging. Odd.
I skirted the crag and climbed up to a wide ridge of rough grazing made into large parks by long runs of drystane dyking. In front of each was a low electric wire and when I looked for a gate leading me in the direction I wanted to go, there seemed to be none. Perhaps this was a farm boundary. By this time the sun had strengthened and I was regretting not wearing a hat. When I came upon a tumbled section of dyke, I crawled under one electric wire and scrambled up over the stones to see another on the far side. The ground beyond it was obscured by tall nettles and so I had no means of judging how much of a drop it was. But did I really want to climb back down and carry on looking for a gate? When I jumped down, my right foot glanced off a hidden stone and I was lucky not to twist my ankle or worse. This gentle walk up a low hill was turning into a business.
When I reached what I reckoned to be the summit, there were no standing stones to be seen anywhere, only another slightly higher summit about two hundred yards further east. When I reached it, more disappointment waited, more head-scratching, more bewildered consultation of my map. I tried to locate a strip of sitka spruce below me and relate it to the route I had taken. My map was from the old Pathfinder series, about thirty years old and sitkas grew quickly. Was it too old to show the strip? And then it dawned. The unnamed farm where I parked could not have been Brotherstone. Instead of telling her I was going up to see the stones (she must have thought I was taking the scenic route), I should have checked with the lady at the cottages that I was in the right place.
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