Nice try! How England stole rugby from the Scots
One night in March 1286, the Scottish king, Alexander III, was in edinburgh Castle when he suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to be with his new young queen, Yolande de Dreux.
The kingdom needed an heir, he shouted, and he would make one that very night. Although the weather was wild and stormy, Alexander rode off to be with his wife, who was staying at another royal residence. Just a mile from his destination, his horse lost its footing and plunged over a cliff, killing the king.
With no direct heir, Alexander’s death left Scotland vulnerable and led to three centuries of intermittent warfare as the english tried to subjugate the Scots. Although the countries were united under James I (also James VI of Scotland) in 1603, the renewed clamour for Scottish independence has made the relationship almost as fractious as it was in medieval times.
Alistair Moffat, a prolific writer on the history and landscape of Scotland, grew up in the delightful town of Kelso, less than five miles from the english border. In the past few years, particularly since Brexit, he has felt that england has changed and ‘seems to be in the process of becoming elsewhere’, while at the same time Scotland has been ‘embracing much that is unquestionably un-english’. In an attempt to understand which way the winds of change are blowing, he sets out to walk the length of the 100-mile border.
Moffat is, for the most part, a genial guide, with a wealth of knowledge about the dramatic history of the border country, its ruined but still beautiful abbeys and the many traces of the Roman occupation. He also has a great appreciation of the wild beauty of the landscape; thrilling at the sight of a hare and glorying in the wild flowers that make the fields looks like ‘a giant sunlit Mondrian’.
He is very opinionated, and at times quite grumpy, though he has enough selfawareness to quote PG Wodehouse’s comment that ‘it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine’.
A talented rugby player in his youth, he is particularly incandescent when his thoughts turn to the ba’, an early form of rugby once played all over Britain and still played in the Scottish Borders and on Orkney. The idea that rugby was invented by a boy at Rugby School in the 19th century is, he fumes, ‘a big lie . . . england appropriated it’. even worse, he thunders, the game was taken over by former public
BETWEEN BRITAIN by Alistair Moffat (Canongate £20, 309pp) CONSTANCE CRAIG SMITH
schoolboys and ‘fuelled and fouled by undisguised snobbery’.
Moffat experiences another burst of anger when he walks through the village of Branxton in Northumberland, where, in 1513, the invading Scots army of James IV met the English army at the Battle of Flodden. The battle was a disaster for the Scots, who lost their king and almost 10,000 men.
In England, Flodden is largely forgotten but in Scotland, Moffat writes, it is still seen as a national tragedy, so he is appalled to find that the Flodden Visitor Centre is nothing more than a red phone box with a map of the battlefield fixed to the back, and some leaflets.
He is dismayed by the sea of tartan at Gretna Green; tartan, he says, is something that only belongs in the Highlands. He is equally scornful of the St George’s flags he sees in England. To him ‘they seem sinister, even aggressive’.
As he walks, he sees symbols of the perilous relationship between the two countries. Passing a damaged bridge on a crossing between England and Scotland, he wonders: ‘Was this a clumsy, lumbering metaphor for the state of the British union? Both still worked but needed repair.’
His morose conclusion is that the English now don’t care that much about whether Scotland gets its independence.
At the end of his nine- day trek along the border, Moffat is as anxious as ever about the relationship between England and Scotland. Yet even though it is fraught, he declares, it can surely be repaired with goodwill on all sides. ‘Let local identity flourish, but let us all unite,’ he says.