A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott

lovely dirge was sung about a young man murdered by the brothers of the girl he loved:

       They shot him dead at the Nine-Stane Rig, Beside the Headless Cross, And they left him lying in his blood, Upon the moor and moss.

       They made a bier of the broken bough, The sauch and the aspin gray, And they bore him to the Lady Chapel, And waked him there all day.

       A lady came to that lonely bower, And threw her robes aside, She tore her ling [long] yellow hair, And knelt at Barthram’s side.

       She bathed him in the Lady-Well, His wounds so deep and sair, And she plaited a garland for his breast, And a garland for his hair.

       They rowed him in a lily-sheet, And bare him to his earth, And the Gray Friars sung the dead man’s mass, As they pass’d the Chapel Garth.

       They buried him at the mirk, When dew fell cold and still, When the aspen gray forgot to play, And the mist clung to the hill.

       They dug his grave but a barefoot deep, By the edge of the Ninestone Burn, And they covered him o’er with the heather forever, The moss and the Lady fern.

       A Gray Friar staid upon his grave, And sang till the morning tide, And a friar shall sing for Barthram’s soul, While the headless Cross shall bide.

      Between the Lady’s Well and the ruins of St Mary’s Chapel are a jumble of mounds and earth banks assumed to be the remains of the motte-and-bailey castle built by Sir Nicholas de Soules, Lord of Liddesdale, in 1240. Further on, beside the Hermitage Water, on a bank above a deep pool is an oblong hump, reputedly the grave of Sir Richard Knout, Sheriff of Northumberland, who was killed by retainers of the de Soules family in 1290 when they rolled him, in his armour, ‘into the frothy linn’. Then there is the grim awesome ruin of the Hermitage Castle, the ‘Gatehouse to the bloodiest valley in Britain’, where, in 1566, Mary Queen of Scots had the infamous meeting with her lover, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Back in the body of the farm, a great wall of boulders, known as the White Dyke, runs across the middle of Hermitage Hill, said to be part of the deer ‘haye’ or funnel into which deer from the castle deer park were driven and slaughtered. There are more stone walls or ‘dykes’ built in the eighteenth century during the Acts of Inclosure, when gangs of Irish labourers built mile upon mile of walling across Scotland and Northern England. At much the same time, drainers dug open drains all over the hill to improve the quality of the grazing and built ‘cundies’ (conduits) to carry water from one of the hill burns to power the water mill at the steading. An old drove road runs down the side of the farm’s northern boundary through an area known as the Mount; at the bottom are the ruins of an old toll house and the earth banks of Mount Park, where cattle from all over south-west Scotland rested for the night on their long journeys to the trysts in the north of England. The ‘old’ steading, a handsome range of slate-roofed stone buildings (cattle byres, cart sheds, granary and stabling), was built in 1835; the ‘new’ steading, a hideous open-span erection of steel girders, asbestos and concrete, was put up in the 1970s when the government was offering subsidies for new farm buildings during a drive to increase agricultural output.

      I mention all this in detail because my farm only covers 600 hectares and, although having a castle on the doorstep adds a certain amount of added historical interest, the visible traces of preceding generations are similar to those of all other farms in the country.

      OUR LANDSCAPE’S HERITAGE

      Virtually every corner of the British Isles, from the tip of Cornwall to remotest Hebridean Island, has been owned and tilled, cropped and grazed for at least 7,000 years. For all its wonderful areas of remote, rugged and natural beauty – the Cumbrian Fells, the Cheviot Hills, the savage grandeur of the Highlands or the moorland of the West Country – Britain is the least wild of any country on the planet. It has been estimated the there is not a metre of land that has not been utilised by someone since the arrival of Neolithic man, and the landscape we love and admire is entirely man-made. The rolling heather-clad hills of Scotland are most certainly man-made – even the Broads, the stunning network of lakes and rivers covering 300 square kilometres of Norfolk and Suffolk. Until the 1960s, when the botanist and stratigrapher Dr Joyce Lambert proved otherwise, this vast wetland area was believed to be a natural formation. In fact they are the flooded excavations created by centuries of peat extraction. The Romans first exploited the rich peat beds of this flat, treeless region for fuel, and in the Middle Ages the local monasteries began to excavate the peat as a lucrative business, selling fuel to Norwich, Great Yarmouth and the surrounding area. Norwich Cathedral, one of the most stunning ecclesiastical buildings in Britain, was built with money from 320,000 tons of peat dug out of the Benedictine lands every year, until the sea levels began to rise and the pits flooded. Despite the construction of mills and dykes, the flooding continued, resulting in the unique Broads landscape of today, with its reed beds, grazing marshes and isolated clumps of wet woodland.

      VIRTUALLY EVERY CORNER OF THE BRITISH ISLES, FROM THE TIP OF CORNWALL TO REMOTEST HEBRIDEAN ISLAND, HAS BEEN OWNED AND TILLED, CROPPED AND GRAZED FOR AT LEAST 7,000 YEARS. FOR ALL ITS WONDERFUL AREAS OF REMOTE, RUGGED AND NATURAL BEAUTY … BRITAIN IS THE LEAST WILD OF ANY COUNTRY ON THE PLANET.

      During this incredible longevity of occupancy we have developed a passion for our countryside, a bond and an affinity with the land that is uniquely British. This love affair has been expressed throughout history by an almost obsessive desire to draw attention to the landscape by affectionately adding what was considered, at the time, to be an improvement to Nature’s already superlative offering. Britain is covered in decorated summits, follies, woodland plantings, individual trees, artificial lakes and monuments, all carefully sited to improve the vista and all constructed as a statement of gratitude.

      MAKING A MARK IN THE HILLS

      Our Bronze Age and Iron Age ancestors were among the most diligent of landscape enhancers, compulsively building henges, erecting megaliths and carving hill figures where the colour of the chalk or limestone substrata would show up in contrast with the green of the surrounding sward. Undoubtedly the most famous of these is the White Horse of Uffington, high on an escarpment of the Berkshire Downs below Whitehorse Hill, a mile and a half south of the village of Uffington, looking out over the Vale of the White Horse.

      For a piece of artwork which optically stimulated luminescence dating has proved to be 3,000 years old, the highly stylised curving design is extraordinarily contemporary. It was either the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age occupants of the adjacent Uffington Castle hill fort who devoted the immense amount of time, organisation and effort required to carve the no-metre creature into the hillside and, despite endless hypotheses, no one really knows why. From my perspective, you only have to look at it for an explanation: the horse is a thing of beauty, young, sleek and vibrant, lunging forward with neck arched and forefeet raised, a picture of health and vitality. The carving was deliberately constructed just below the summit where it would be visible to other hill-top settlements and the horse triumphantly shouts a message from his tribe across the wooded valleys: ‘Look at me!’ The horse rejoices, ‘Am I not magnificent? See how beautiful and fertile my hill is.’

      Unless the substrata was regularly kept exposed, a hill carving would disappear back into the ground within a decade and there will have been hundreds of them dotted around the uplands which are now lost to us. The two Plymouth Hoe Giants, visible until the early seventeenth century, are an example,