The Debatable Land

AUTHOR: Graham Robb PUBLISHER: Picador RRP: $36.99 hardcover REVIEWER: John Graham

THE Debatable Land – that small pocket of sometimes-English, sometimes-Scottish land running north-east from the Solway Firth. So named because its sovereignty, pre-union, was regularly in dispute.

Well, that’s what I thought too, before I read this book. But was I wrong? I’ll leave it to you readers to discover the meaning ascribed by author Graham Robb to the name.

I confess that, with ties to the most famous of the Reiver families who inhabited the Debatable Land – Grahams and Armstrongs – I began this book with the expectation of those families figuring prominently.

And they did – albeit briefly – but the depth of the history uncovered by Robb outside the Reiver period is astonishing.

This ranges from Ptolomy’s AD150 map of England (to which the author applied some modern corrective technology) to the 2017 Brexit vote (when residents on either side of the border voted in opposite directions – rebels to the last!)

Robb bases much of his local forays around the quite-small region on the 127 bus or his trusty bicycle, and does a good job of merging the present with the past.

While he draws some historical conclusions which will not find universal agreement (such as his linkage of the Twelve Battles of Arthur with the Debatable Land), there is plenty to give the historian pause.

However, the book remains one man’s quite wide-ranging view of the area in which he has lived since 2010. To the historian, it is no