Table of Contents
I crossed the border on a little country lane, which was pretty much deserted. This was good because it gave me time to stop my car in the middle of the road and take some photos. I was a bit surprised that there was a sign up telling me where the border was, actually. I've been told you should never write a sentence that you can put "Ah!" in front of, so I'm going to. Ah Scotland! Here I am visiting your fine estate! Wilt thou welcome me with thine open arms and rejoicing of heart? Wilt thou weep that I comest here in my Figaro to learn as a student of thy culture? Wilt thou treatest me with the hospitality for which Scotland is world famous, and I art so poorly undeserving? Wilt thou be good to me, the humblest of travellers?
 |
My first night I planned to sleep at the hostel in Kirk Yetholm, which is at the top of the Pennine way, and is just a few miles into Scotland in a tiny village surrouned by fields and hills. When I arrived the woman looked at me like I was a phantom returned from the dead and so I just asked if I could sleep the night. Oh no, the dorms were closed because they were redecorating. I don't mean to sound condemnatory, but closing the hostel dorms in the middle of August for redecorating is a questionable idea.
"Can I put my tent up somewhere then?" I asked.
"Oh well you can't put it up here," she said, just as I was considering giving her an award for being helpful, "you're not allowed to put tents up in our garden."
Brilliant! I had driven 300 miles to discover Scottish hospitality, and if this was it I might as well go home. I had actually checked on the internet that the hostel was open, operational and had nearly booked a bed the previous day but didn't only because I don't trust people with my credit card details.
Anyway, I went outside and met a local called Richard who was roughly 75, and he was walking his two fat black labradors. He told me that his parents were Scottish, his father being a doctor in London during WWII. His mother was evacuated to Wiltshire, where he was born. He seems to have had a lucrative career with an oil company , and is one of the many rich retirees in the village. I asked him about the rest of the economy, and he said that there was the obvious tourism (although it seems to me that they are doing an excellent job killing this), and also that there were some small factories in Kelso up the road that manufactured printed circuit boards, which I found fascinating as I thought all that was done in China and S.E. Asia because it's cheaper. Richard was totally pro-British, and he told me that he always thought of himself as British, in spite of the fact that his wife has traced his family tree back to the thirteenth century, and they're Scottish, indeed Richard would have a claim to be aristocracy if his line had come from a first son instead of a second son. He told me that he thinks the Scottish parliament is a waste of space and money, and that the main divide between the culture of Scotland and Britain is that Scotland is more socialist.
It's amazing the insights you can gain from a simple chat with an old man walking his dogs. Richard has a nice house in the village, and has been there ten years. He says that when he first arrived there was a gypsy camp in the village by the river, and there I pitched my tent. These were real gypsies with horse-drawn wagons, and not like the "travellers" who drive around in £50,000 cars and claim benefits, he told me. The winters here aren't too bad. Once in his time was everyone snowed in, and the power was cut for five days. They dropped food off by helicopter at Kelso and the farmers brought it down on their tractors. That kind of inclemency is a rarity however, and they don't expect that to happen again for fifty years.
So I slept in my tent, and was was a bumpy piece of ground, a bit of a shock after my usual soft mattress. However one acclimatizes. It was colder than I expected as well. I have reached the conclusion that July is a slightly hotter month than August, and that you can feel the September chill creeping in on the August weather. My tent was dual skin, and these you can expect to be significantly warmer than single-skin tents. However I certainly didn't notice it this night. I am also starting to think that, what with global warming and everything, the London weather is too hot in the summer. But I digress. The main thing that I was pleased about is that I wasn't awoken in the night by a farmer with a pack of dogs and told that
"You're not allowed to camp there, I'm afraid. You'll have to GET ORFF MY LAND," which I'd certainly expect in England. I was once monitoring a canoe race for Reading Canoe Club, and I parked my canoe by the bank and sat on the bank of a huge, empty field making sure all the race contestants went around a buoy. Some nice gentlemen who seemed to originate from India or Pakistan appeared from nowhere and told me to get off his land. I know where I'd like to tell him to go.
I'd been in Scotland less than 24 hours, and two people had asked about my Fig. Firstly the man painting the hostel asked me about it. I know what information they want to hear: the make (Nissan), the age (1991) and the engine size (1l turbo). Then they say they thought it was older. I don't know why everyone is so preoccupied with engine size, is it something to do with sex? I have a theory to develop here: firstly it's usually men who ask about her, secondly the Fig has a delightfully curvey body. Hmmm.... are we seeing some facet of the male subconscious here?
In the morning (12/8/09) I was trying to zip up my tent bag when a local, passing with his dog, ventured
"Where are you going today, then?" - "Melrose" - "Is that your car?" - "yes" - "I bet that's an unusual make" - "No, actually it's a Nissan" - "Oh," he says, and walks off.
It was a short drive to Melrose, thankfully, as I was still a bit spaced from the previous day. I arrived in Melrose, and was driving around trying to find the hostel when someone waved at me and told me that I had just come 100m down a one-way street (Buccleuch St), in the wrong direction. Oh dear. This was one of those times when speaka-the-lingo was pretty useful. I told him to go and hold up the traffic at the junction in front of me so I could go onto another street. I was expecting him to say "Oh no, you're not allowed to do that, you'll have to reverse 100m instead," but something clicked, and he did as I suggested. The Fig is not a car that turns on a shilling, Scottish nor English.
Melrose is a small town geared for tourists. Apart from the usual supermarket, bank and pharmacy, the town has a plethora of tea-shops, fashion boutiques and an "arts-theatre" which, I expect, does well from the holiday makers. The hostel here is a huge regal affair with a lovely lawn you could use for croquet, and the only facility lacking is wi-fi. The main attraction in Melrose is the ruined abbey. The site seems to have carried a monastery in the seventh century. This offshoot from Lindisfarne was used as a base for converting the locals to Christianity. In the mid-ninth century the peace was shattered by the raiding parties of Vikings and the Scottish, and the monastery perished.
However that was not the end of the story, as in 1137 King David I of Scotland came up with the brilliant idea of giving the land here to the Cistercians, who were spreading in this direction. At this point it's time to get all historical, and consider what things were like in the Middle Ages. In those days, there was no formal borderline on a map you could use to delineate between the two kingdoms, and this area around Melrose, was a kind of no-man's-land between the kingdoms of Scotland and England. There is probably much truth in saying that it was unsafe for the English to live here because the Scots would become uneasy and attack them, and similarly it was unsafe for the Scottish to live here because this would freak the English out. Also, there were probably lots of bands of outlaws who could operate because they were beyond the reach of either Scottish or English law. So King David I gave the land over for Cistercian monks, and being men of God, they enjoyed a certain safety: the people of the Middle-Ages were religious and superstitious, and killing men of God was not considered a good idea. The establishment of monasteries in the area gave King David a moderate hope of peace on his Southern Border, and as their benefactor it gave him some standing. Furthermore, the Cistercians were excellent farmers and they brought a kind of prosperity to the area by turning it into a big sheep farm. They even tried cultivating some of the land. There was not much the king of England could do about it either, as the monks were generally tolerated and could not be called Scottish invaders.
The basic proscription for monastic life (i.e. dedicated Christian communities) was written by St Benedict in Italy in the early sixth century, and the main three pillars of the lifestyle were church services, study & meditation and manual labour. The original Cistercian group felt that monks were spending all their time on church services, and were living in places far too grand, gorgeous and ornate for the servants of Christ. So they started their own monastery in remote French marshland in in 1098 in eponymous Citeaux in Burgundy, France, led by an English monk called Stephen Harding. Reacting against mainstream monasteries, and they lived plain, simple and spartan lives in which they deprived themselves of temptations and distractions so as they could concentrate on Christ. They aimed to escape the "tumult" of the outside world and establish a serene, isolated existance on their own. The monks lived austere lives without contact with the secular world. They painted their churches plain white, and didn't have stained glass windows.
The medieval mind thought that ascetism was the route to holiness, and this is why the Cistercians spread rapidly. After a year's apprenticeship, you could become a Cistercian monk. They seemed to attract a lot of recruits, and when one monastery was full to overflowing they would open another one. By 1153 there were 339 monasteries, spread across Europe from Scotland to Poland. They were known as the "white monks" by the colour of their undyed habits.
In those days it was usual for rich people to pay monks to pray for their salvation, and to some extent a monastery can be seen as a prayer factory. I don't know if you have ever booked a flight and been asked to contribute to "Carbon Offsetting" via some UN fund or something. Well, I suspect giving money to the monks was something very similar, and if you lived in the secular world you would do things that, ahem, "you weren't proud of", and would just pay the monks to offset for your sin. The Cistercians were natural magnets for money, and it is debatable to what extent they lived their spartan creed for the next few centuries.
 |
 |
Little of Melrose abbey ruins are original, because in 1385 King Richard of England razed it to the ground. He then paid for it to be rebuilt. This little exercise established the English King as their benefactor instead of the Scottish King. The monastery had plenty of money and influence, expecially as it didn't have to pay its workers (cf Communism), and by the fifteenth century it was paying stonemasons to build impressive stone buildings in an elaborate French style, incompatible with Cistercian plainness. It is interesting that there is a Masonic lodge in Melrose, not far from the abbey, and it is the second-oldest in Scotland. It has moved from the original site, which is in Newstead.
A French master mason called John Morrow oversaw much of the work on the new Melrose abbey. There is a plaque over the entrance to the tower stairs which reads thus: "As the compass goes even lay about, so truth and loyalty shall do, without doubt. Look to the end quoth John Morrow". This can probably be translated thus: "as the compass evenly measures out, so shall truth and loyalty operate; instead of looking at the view, you could be thinking about how you will be judged when you die." The icon there is of a pair of compasses crossing one another, which is a masonic symbol similar to the famous one of a compass and set-square which is found in many places.
 |
 |
When the reformation came to Scotland in the sixteenth century, much of the abbey was destroyed. Oh dear.
Now when I was going around the abbey site I noticed a Spanish teenager who had absolutely no interest in the abbey whatsoever. He had a bow and arrow (I know this sounds unlikely, but he did) and he spent his time shooting it at the people he was with, or attacking them with a stick. He was running over the walls of the ruins and spitting on them. I doubt he had the slightest idea what a monk was, or that the abbey was a holy place. I firmly believe that there should be age restrictions on the site, so that only mature, sensible people may enter. This is my case: that idiot parents are dragging their kids to visit sites which the kids have absolutely no interest in, no understanding of, and spend their time annoying other people who are making proper use of the facility. Parents seem to think that they are performing their parental duties by dragging their kids out like this, but I rather think they are demonstrating their complete lack of understanding of their children's development and needs. I also have to wonder about banning women from the site as well, on the grounds that the Cistercian order was a male-only organisation. I am quite sure that the last thing they would want in their abbey would be some silly teenage girl who is there to scream and giggle and disturb the spiritual meditations of the holy men. My prayer is that the Lord protect our peace and solitude.
At the hostel one slightly more mature lady told me that "we love your car". "Yes, it's nice isn't it," I said, more of a statement than a question. One of her friends was being married in Kelso, so she was here with her French boyfriend touring around for a week. They usually live in France. So anyway that disses my theory that love of the Figaro is rooted in male sexual desire, since she was clearly heterosexual, yet found my car attractive in spite of the fact that it is somewhat feminine in its curves. What, then is the reason for its stunning good looks?
Anyway, after feeling lonely yesterday, I was now starting to enjoy my trip. It takes a while to "get into" the travelling mode. I liked Melrose, and I liked discovering about the monastery. It's so far different from modern life, which is essentially about indulging your passions and living consumerist opulent lifestyles with plenty of unnecessary possessions. I doubt I would last two days in a monastery, such is the pampering that I am accustomed to.
The abbey nestles in a valley by the Tweed under the three peaks of the Eildon hills. These hills were originally volcanic, although now extinct, and I decided to climb one of them in the morning. It was a pretty steep walk over moorland to the summit at ~400m. The views from the top are, predictably, great. These three little mountains bring me onto the next important thing about this town: the Romans were here.
 |
 |
Melrose was just a field on the Borders when the Cistercians arrived. However, a millenium earlier the Romans had made it their main base in Scotland. A couple of miles outside the town is the site of Trimontium, which was a stone fort for 1000 men. Trimontium comes from the latin for "three mountains", as you may already have guessed. The Romans conquered England in 43ad, and seemed to have every intention of bringing Scotland under the Roman yoke as well. Roman governor of England, Gnaeus Julius Agricola led a sequence of five campagins into Scotland with 20,000 legionaries (which is four legions). It seemed to be his summer activity in the years 79-83ad inclusive, and he covered most of the lowlands. I'm not quite sure what he did with his 20,000 soldiers: it seems he didn't go around to have a cup of tea and a nice chat. He was, in some sense, softening up the locals for Roman domination. If they didn't like Romans, they got killed. If they didn't mind too much, they were allowed to live under their new masters. After 83ad the legions were recalled to deal with problems on other borders, most notably the Danube, so Scotland was left to its own devices. Over the next few centuries they invaded and then left several times.
There isn't much to see on the site of Trimontium. There's no visitor centre, and there are no visible remains. You can just about discern the curve of the amphitheatre, near the river. There are a few artifacts to be seen in the Roman Heritage Centre in Melrose, but I don't recommend it. It's not a good museum. It claimed that Vespasian and Titus were involved in conquering Scotland, which they weren't. It seems other people have commented about this because the museum has posted a label saying "The museum is undertaking a project to improve its labels and asks for your patience", which has probably been there for several years. Further I noticed another label reading "Sorry, grey flagon removed temporarily for conservation". When is that going to reappear? never I expect. The audio guide played its tracks in reverse order, and only one headphone operated. There was a model of the fort, which demonstrates that it was a pretty standard Roman establishment.
 |
There was a walking tour in the afternoon which was taken out by a pensioner called William Watson. It was a long tour, lasting four hours, and after climbing the Eildon hill as well, I was pretty tired come evening. The tour involved looking at some of the architectural features of Melrose, and walking out through the village of Newstead to the site of Trimontium. The Trimontium Trust erected a pillar in the year 2000 near the site, in imitation of a Roman milestone. The milestone they are thinking of was made from buff sandstone, and is currently in the museum in Edinburgh. Their modern pillar is made from gaudy red granite, and has gold lettering carved in it, not even in a Roman typeface. It is set on a red patio with red gravel and looks like a mausoleum. I think it's horrible, and belongs in a cemetary or a shopping centre.
The walking tour finished in Newstead village hall, and the locals kindly gave us tea and biscuits. I liked that a lot. This is the famous Scottish welcome I was looking for. They are a band of local retirees (with grandchildren), and they are running these walking tours and giving people tea and biscuits in their village hall. How very British, and I think it's all very good. When I'm retired, I would like to do the same.
I was sad to leave Melrose. It was full of tourists, and I mean people touring around Scotland like me rather than day-trippers or coachloads of photographers. I saw people going around on bicycles, vintage motorbikes, hire-cars and walkers. It made me feel like it's okay for me to take a month or so out of my great "career" (haha) and have a bit of fun broadening my horizons. My plan for this day was to visit three things you can find in the Borders: an operating woollen mill, Sauron's Tower and a mountain-biking centre.