To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat

track, rutted by wheeled vehicles, led up to the stone and gradually I saw that it was the same one that had seemed to swing away out to the west. It had turned towards the sitka spruce plantation and then aimed directly at the summit of the hill. The walking was easy and, as I climbed, the vistas on all sides began to reveal themselves. They were panoramic, long views to all points of the compass, some of them more than twenty miles. A breeze began to cool me, the flies fled and I walked the last few hundred yards in a good rhythm.

      As I neared the summit of the hill, the second stone revealed itself, having been hidden by a rocky outcrop. Both were very bulky, not like the slender slivers of the Stones of Stenness, or the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, or Calanais on the Isle of Lewis, and they no doubt weighed many tons. The taller Brother towered over me at well over two and a half metres and the other was shorter, more stumpy. As if ignoring these majestic, dramatic ancient monuments to a forgotten faith, the farm track ran precisely between them before dipping downhill towards the Cow Stone. It too was very bulky, standing about three hundred metres to the north-east, looking as though it had been carefully placed in some sort of alignment with the stones up on the summit. But the tracks of modern traffic could not diminish the magic of this place.

      Probably dragging them with ropes over log rollers, the people who erected the stones on Brotherstone Hill expended great labour to set them there. But while the details of their religious rites will almost certainly never be discovered, the reason why they raised the standing stones on the hill could not have been clearer to me. The panorama was so vast, so heart-piercingly beautiful in the midday sun, that to stand by the Brothers’ Stones and simply gaze at it was thrilling.

      Below us the valley of the Tweed, the great, life-giving river, widens as the Tweed winds its way east to the sea between the sheltering hills. To the south rise the foothills of the Cheviots, and I could see the rounded shape of Yeavering Bell, a place Cuthbert would come to know. Clouds clustered over the long hump of Cheviot itself and my eye was led to the watershed ridge running west, the line of the English border, where I could pick out the twin peaks of the Maiden Paps. Closer is the conical, volcanic shape of Ruberslaw and beyond it the hills of the Ettrick Forest. Much closer rise the Eildons, Roman Trimontium, the three hills that dominate the upper Tweed Valley: Eildon Hill North, Eildon Mid Hill and Eildon Wester Hill.

      To the north-west, also close, is Earlston Black Hill, Dun Airchille, the Meeting Fort – all places where the strangeness and romance of Thomas of Ercildoune, True Thomas, Thomas the Rhymer, still clings. A prophet who foresaw the death of Alexander III in 1286 and whose predictions were widely believed and repeated, Thomas was perhaps the most famous Scotsman of the Middle Ages. The low ridges of the Lammermuirs lie to the north, many studded with groups of elegant white wind turbines, their sails turning lazily in the breeze. And standing up proud above the horizon in the north-east, I could easily make out the summits of Great Dirrington Law and Little Dirrington Law.

      Forming a vast natural amphitheatre, the hills surround the courses of the great river and its tributaries on three sides. On the fourth, to the east, the horizon dips low as the patchwork of ripening fields edge down towards the seashore. With a hand on the cool mass of the taller of the two Brothers, its surface smoothed by the winds, rain and snows of 5,000 winters, I looked and looked out over a landscape I know intimately but one I had never gazed upon from this place. And somewhere in my memory, deep inside my sense of myself, the warmth of an old love began to glow once more.

      I was born and raised in the valley of the great river and I know that my ancestors have been on the banks of the Tweed for many, many centuries, ploughing the fields, coaxing food from the soil, perhaps seventy generations living and dying within sight of the sheltering hills. The rich red and black earth is grained in my hands. But as I grew older, sat and passed (mostly) exams, heeded the advice of my parents ‘to get on’ and ‘stick in at the school’ and ‘make something of yourself’, I knew I would have to leave, have to tear up deep roots and go and live somewhere else. And so I did. After university at St Andrews, Edinburgh and London, I was, to my amazement, appointed to run the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1975 and despite my youth (I was twenty-five) and inexperience, I made a success of it. My big break; it led to everything else and a twenty-year career in television that brought rewards and occasional satisfaction. But I always nursed a need to come home, to return to the Tweed Valley, and having bought our little farmhouse, I decided to resign my well-paid job and begin the precarious life of a freelance writer. At forty-nine, I still had energy and ambition. And so for almost twenty years I have lived and worked in the Scottish Borders – and gradually taken all of its beauties and glories for granted.

      When I climbed the hill to look at the stones, I had given little thought to the hill itself, the place the old peoples had chosen, but when I looked out from it, the elemental power of its beauty flooded back, an uncomplicated, unconditional love for the fields, forests, hills and intimate valleys of my native land, my home-place. That reminder was to be the first of Cuthbert’s gifts.

      And up on the hill, history was whispering. The Eildon Hills to the south-west rose abruptly from the floodplain of the Tweed, their flanks steep, their three-summit outline dramatic and distinctive. The name ‘Eildon’ derives from Old Welsh, the language spoken by native communities before Cuthbert and my Anglian ancestors brought early versions of English, and it means ‘the old fortress’. It was attached to one summit, to Eildon Hill North, and it is closest to Brotherstone Hill. The name described a long perimeter of double ditching dug some time at the outset of the first millennium BC. But it cannot have been defensive. Probably topped by a palisade of wooden posts, the ditching runs for a mile around the crown of the hill, and instead of one or two gateways it has five. A huge force of defenders would have been needed to man these ramparts, especially the weak points at the gates, and if they had, they would soon have been thirsty. There is no spring or source of water other than what fell from the sky.

      Eildon Hill North was not a fort but a temple, and a place of spiritual and temporal power. Inside the long perimeter, more than three hundred hut platforms have been found, enough to house a population of about three thousand. Lack of water and the need for all provisions to be lugged up the steep slopes probably meant a temporary occupation of these huts, almost certainly for significant points in the year; times of celebration, worship, perhaps sacrifice and perhaps propitiation of whatever gods were believed to govern the lives of mortals 3,000 years ago.

      The oldest calendar in Britain revolves around the half-forgotten turning points in the farming year of the native Celtic peoples. It begins at the end of October with Samhuinn – in Gaelic: ‘the end of summer’. It is now Christianised as Hallowe’en and seen as the beginning of winter and the moment when the clocks change. But the remnants of ancient, pagan practices still survive and versions of these would likely have been enacted by those who climbed Eildon Hill North on Samhuinn Eve.

      Originally, guising at Hallowe’en did not involve outlandish dressing-up but a simple daubing of ash from the great bonfires that blazed in the darkness to effect a symbolic disguise, the cue for all sorts of licence between men and women. It persisted for millennia and in the 1796 Statistical Account for Scotland, kirk ministers in several parishes were complaining about ‘A sort of secret society of Guisers made itself notorious in several of the neighbouring villages, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, dancing in a very unseemly way.’

      There is persuasive evidence that belief in late prehistoric society attached great significance to the human head, perhaps as the repository of essence, of what might have been seen as the soul. Roman historians reported that European Celts were fond of collecting the heads of their enemies as grisly trophies, sometimes attaching them by the hair to their saddles, even preserving them in cedar oil. In Scotland, skulls have been found at several sites and their arrangement suggests that they were displayed in some way. As late as AD 70, the priests of Venutius, the native king of the Brigantes, a federation of Celtic kindreds on either side of the Pennines, set up a row of skulls to defend a rampart against the assault of Roman legions. This has been described as a ghost fence.

      These ancient beliefs still sound a distant echo at Hallowe’en. When hollowed-out turnip or pumpkin lanterns have a candle placed inside and are set on a windowsill, it looks very much like a relic of paganism; a ghost fence still flickering in the early dark of winter.