Men in armour, ladies on horseback, and ‘honest lads and lassies’ Medieval tradition clings on in rural Scotland’s weirdest summer festival It only happens once in a generation, but behind the strange goings-on, Musselburgh’s Riding Of The Marches tells t
WHEN, next Friday, former mounted policeman Iain Clark drives his spade down into the ground to dig up a clod of turf, then shouts “It’s a’ oor ain!” (It’s all our own), it will be 21 years since the last Musselburgh Riding Of The Marches. Twenty-one years since the last “turf cutter” performed this part of the town’s eccentric “common riding” ceremony. Twenty-one years since he toured Musselburgh’s boundaries protected by the town champion – a local dressed in armour with a lance.
That is just how long an interval there is between these Musselburgh “ridings”, a quirky tradition, based on what was once a more serious medieval practice of marking the boundaries of towns across the Borders, a ritual developed in a time of savagery and land disputes, of cattle-stealing and marauding by the notorious criminals that were the Border Reivers.
That such traditions still exist is remarkable. But what’s even more remarkable is not so much what they tell us about distant history but what they tell us about how life in small Scottish towns has changed in recent times, and how life is today.
In essence, common riding ceremonies – of which there are a number across Scotland – are mass cavalcades along the boundaries of a town. But Musselburgh’s tradition is among the more complex and involves a lot of people riding round on horses, some in fancy dress, some throwing bits of turf and shouting commands that sound strange to the modern ear.
Immediate questions have to be: why keep it going, at a time when there are no Reivers or landed gentry out to steal land – when building developers and supermarkets are more likely to have designs on the plot next door? And why every 21 years?
To the latter question, the organisers have various different answers.
“Tradition,” says Alaric Bonthron, a former turf-cutter who also offers: “I don’t think you could afford to run it more often.” “Once in a generation,” suggests Gaynor Allen. “It’s ae been,” says Alistair Knowles.
In towns across the Scottish Borders, where the common ridings are the heartbeat of rural social life, the events are often accompanied by partying, balls, high emotion, male-bonding and alcohol, and they ride the boundaries of their land once a year – not once in a generation. For them, each summer brings a new enactment
of the tradition. But Musselburgh’s ridings, because they occur so infrequently, are almost like a generational time capsule. Its archive of photographs and anecdotes is like history speeded up, with jump cuts. They tell us not just about how the town has changed, but how we’ve all changed.
With an event every year, notes Alistair Knowles, a former town champion, what ties it together is “short stitches”. The widely-spaced Musselburgh ridings are linked, he says, by a “golden thread of human endurance”.
As Neil Wilson, this year’s town champion, puts it: “Alistair and I are the only two champions alive. And there have only been 15 or 16 that we know of. That’s a special bond.”
That it continues also seems to testify to an ideal of community. Even though some of the old connections and institutions have been lost from the town, even as some industries have disappeared, everyone keeps reiterating how strong Musselburgh’s community sense is. They also seem to genuinely have a desire to connect with the past, to the generations that came before, many of whom were antecedents – since most of those involved are “Musselburgh born and bred”.
The earliest Musselburgh Riding Of The Marches on record occurred in 1682. However, it’s thought that the tradition was carried out for many centuries before that. It’s just that council records prior to 1682 were burned.
Given the gap between them, each riding of the marches is performed by a new generation – so each in some way takes place in a different Musselburgh. The 1914 Marches were delayed by the First World War, held instead in 1919 in a spirit of “thanksgiving for the end of the war” and remembrance. Nearly a century later, 2016 takes place against the backdrop of Brexit and Scottish independence, a time of uncertainty with regard to borders and boundaries, though currently Musselburgh’s own boundaries are not under threat – no-one seems to be worrying, as they sometimes have done, about the dreaded “incorporation into Edinburgh”.
One example of change is the fact that Fiona Grant-Macdonald, this year’s turf-cutter’s assistant, is a woman. At the last riding in 1995, the team of principal roles was entirely male.
In the interim between those two ridings there was, famously, a bitter dispute in Hawick, home of the biggest common riding, when in 1996 two women riders decided to take part, only to be spat at and blocked by a huge phalanx of women singing traditional Hawick songs. The riders, Ashley Simpson and Mandy Graham, launched a sexual discrimination case, and in 2011 won the right to take part in two of the event’s 16 rides.
But there is no spitting in Musselburgh, where Grant-Macdonald talks of frequently being clapped for being the “first woman principal”. “It’s very weird,” she says. “It’s hard to know how to react – ‘thanks for clapping me just for being a woman’?”
Change is revealed, too, in the photographs of past processions, with their floats and banners. Go back to 1956 or even 1974, and it is possible to find a very different Musselburgh of friendly societies, paper mill workers, net makers, vegetable growers.
“Industry is one of the things that has gone from Musselburgh,” says town champion Wilson. “Where Tesco is at the side of the Esk we had a wire mill, still producing 21 years ago. In 1974, we also had the net mills. We produced rope, wire, paper, netting. Go back to 1974 and a big company producing vegetables was Lowe’s.”
At 74, Alaric Bonthron recalls the first riding he attended in 1956 at the age of 12. “My father had a dairy business just at the top of the road. My brother and I drove ponies with traps. And mine had pigs in it, live small pigs, and my brother had a calf in his.”
The past few decades have been a time of astonishing change, as Grant-Macdonald observes.
“It seems to me the biggest changes in the world have happened in the last 21 years, particularly with technology. So now you have all these things that didn’t exist when the last one took place in 1995.”
The world has changed so much in the last 20 years. It’s not a maledominated world any more. Hopefully, we’ll have more women principals and women on the board in 21 years