Biking in the Scottish Borders
Judy and Duncan have fun discovering family roots by bike in the Scottish Borders…
Judy finds herself in the woods searching for her ancestors
Afew years ago, my father, John Armstrong, and stepmother, Sandy, came over from New Zealand to Britain on a mission. Dad had been digging about in genealogy archives and, in common with many Kiwis, was keen to trace the family roots. He’d got as far as the Scottish Borders, including Liddesdale and the Debatable Lands, regarded as home to the Armstrong clan.
The whole concept of the Debatable Lands stirs the blood; I’ll come back to that in a minute. For now, the point is that John and Sandy were here, armed with maps, ready to unravel the family secrets. Of particular interest was James Armstrong, who had emigrated from Britain in the mid-1800s with his parents and eight siblings, to end up in New Zealand, via Australia. As a very young man and pioneer settler, he established a farm, which is still in the family today. It was a massive leap from the Borders to the wild coastline of New Zealand and we were curious to know where he’d come from.
That year, the three of us set off from Yorkshire on a misty, unpromising morning. Research implied that the circle Dad had drawn around a river, farmstead and parish church south of Jedburgh was where Frances and Mary Armstrong and their 10 children lived 200 years ago. We navigated down narrow lanes, found the location and took photos plus etchings from gravestones... it took all day. Finally, we departed for our hotel, happy we’d found the family seat. But as we drove away, Sandy spoke up. “Bad news,“she said. “I’ve been looking at the map again, and I'm sure we’re in the wrong place.“
She was right. Somehow, we’d confused a grid reference and had been in totally the wrong valley. Even worse: the correct spot was in the middle of a large forest,
inaccessible on any practical level for walkers and with no accommodation for miles. The Ordnance Survey map showed a clearing where the records said the house would be, deep – and I mean deep – in Craik Forest. So that was that. We had a few beers and said, “Oh well, we were close enough...“But we weren’t. And I heard myself saying, “Dad, I promise that one day I will find the place and make a record for the family in New Zealand.“
Yeah, right...
In Deep Slack
A year later, – you knew I’d get to the point eventually – Duncan and I built Frank, the campervan, and bought electric mountain bikes. Finally, we could try to access the Armstrong homestead that, by now, I was calling the Family Bog because, let’s be honest, that spot was way more likely to be a damp hovel than a stately home. The actual place is marked Deep Slack, although historical records name it as a farm called Henwoodie.
Duncan and I like to multitask. If we were taking Frank on an adventure, he’d be carting kit for more than one sport: in this case, sea kayaks and bikes.
I admit, we looked a bit weird heading down a skinny lane into a forest with two boats on the roof, but there was noone around to comment.
Craik Forest is slightly southwest of Hawick. We had pored over the maps to find the most likely place to camp in Frank, with forest tracks we hoped would link together to reach the Deep Slack clearing. By luck, we found a forestry car park in just the right place and, despite summer holidays, it was deserted.
With Frank on his levelling blocks, we went for a wander and were thrilled to see a baby red squirrel, small and fluffy at the base of a tree. Also near our pitch was a memorial plaque: a Halifax bomber crashed here on 1 April, 1944 with the loss of all eight crew. It was a sobering moment, especially as several of my family served in the Air Force during the war.
Hitting the spot
In the morning, we set off into the unknown. It wasn’t on the same scale as Frances and Mary with their nine surviving children, but we took a sandwich just in case. Following the jigsaw of tracks through the forest, using the paper map for context and a phone GPS for detail, we pedalled until the tracks ran out and we were faced with a wall of trees.
Spotting a small run of green, Duncan surged on and, a few bogs later, we emerged in the clearing we’d seen on the map. Deep Slack was a large, sloping area of grass descending to tussock, with crumbling stone walls, bordered by a stream. We dropped the bikes and tried to identify where a house might have stood. I aimed for a rectangular paddock hemmed by stone walls and announced this was The Spot. Duncan disagreed, focusing on a much larger space with mature trees. Soon he unearthed large, flat slabs in the ground, placed where corners of a small house might be. In the main field boundary, he found worked stone and a lintel; further along was stone smeared with soot and bricks from a chimney and hearth. We recorded it all for my father,
with Duncan doing Tony Robinson-esque commentary, knowing John would never make it here.
I felt quite emotional. More research had shown that these Armstrongs were tenant farmers, so the chance to make a better life on the far side of the planet would have been a serious, if terrifying, draw. But even so, to uproot a large, young, impoverished family and sail off the edge of the world took bottle.
We cycled away in silence. Thanks to our campervan, I’d finally kept my promise to find the Family Bog... and it was Duncan’s turn to choose the next move. He started with the return leg to Frank. This entailed soggy stream crossings, mud to the knees, a charge across a windswept moor and a trail alongside a river; I was certainly glad to see the ’van by the end.
The Hermitage
Frank was not to be left out of the rough stuff: our route away from Craik involved a decaying gated lane, frisky bullocks and cattle grids that nearly rattled the stove off its moorings. Then, after brief luxury on the A7, we turned onto an unfenced road that crawled up and up and over, to descend eventually to Hermitage Castle. Had we met any vehicles, we would have been in dire straits; Frank consumed the full width of Tarmac and there was nowhere to pull over.
The semi-ruined Hermitage looms, square and austere, on the edge of Liddesdale. Dating from around 1360, it is just inside the southern boundary of the Debatable Lands and was known as the ’guardhouse of the bloodiest valley in Britain’.
Once an independent territory between Scotland and England, the Debatable Lands was controlled for three centuries by local clans, including Armstrongs (the most notorious), Elliots and Nixons, with Hermitage Castle at the heart of the action.
In the 1500s, bearing in mind the new threat posed by gunpowder artillery, gun holes were punched in the castle's thick walls and a massive gun defence was built to protect the western approach.
But strategic importance was lost in 1603 when Mary Queen of Scot’s son became James I of England and Hermitage Castle was left to decay. The exterior walls were restored in the 1830s, due partly to its links with Sir Walter Scott, who loved Hermitage Castle and had his portrait painted with the castle in the background.
I imagine that, on a blue-sky day, it may look romantic, but on a darkening grey afternoon, with rain approaching over the wild moors, Hermitage Castle seemed impregnable. We wandered through the ruins, climbing staircases to corner towers, feeling the history in every stone. The Armstrongs were here in anger and, although it was in a different century to my man, James, the link felt tangible to me.
The Border Stane
We moved on, down Liddesdale to Newcastleton, a market town founded in 1793 on the west bank of Liddel Water. My father would have approved; the Armstrong clan seat, the now-ruined Mangerton Tower, is just a mile away. Known locally as Copshaw Holm, Newcastleton is host to one of the 7stanes, a group of mountain bike centres developed since 2001 to boost tourism in undervisited parts of the Borders.
There’s an attractive campsite (Lidalia Caravan Park) near a welcoming pub, but campervans are also free to camp on a wide grass riverbank. We chose an idyllic spot beside the girder bridge opened in 2014, offering direct access across Liddel Water to the hiking and biking tracks.
7stanes is a wonderful initiative, supported by Scottish Enterprise, 7stanes, Scottish Borders Council and the Forestry Commission, plus bodies local to each site. Newcastleton welcomes more than 10,000 visitors a year as a direct result, and facilities like this freedom camping area help to attract ’vanners keen on exercise.
In the morning, we rode over the bridge to Whithaugh Park and the trails. The choice is diverse, from family walks via ponds and Iron Age earthworks to the all-day Cross Border route linking Newcastleton Forest to Kielder Forest in England. We took the middle option, a 15-mile route via the Border Stane.
’Stane’ is the Scots word for stone, and each of the 7stanes locations hosts a unique stone sculpture reflecting a local myth or legend. They’re all accessible on foot or by horse as well as by bike, and range in size from one to three metres high. The Newcastleton Border Stane stands close, and parallel, to the Scottish/english border. On the north side, Auld Lang Syne is inscribed to represent Scotland. On the south side, for England, are the words of Jerusalem. The hole in the middle allows people to stand on either side of the ’border’ and shake hands through the sculpture. I love this. To me, sculpture in and of nature is the best form of art, and to stumble across it in a forest is nothing short of a marvel. The whole ride was a treat, to be honest, with panoramic picnic benches, big views and a fantastic café at the end.
So that’s one stane down, six more to find. It looks like Frank will be busy for a while yet; having ’discovered’ the Borders via the Bog and the bikes, we’re now planning more campervanbased adventures around the 7stanes. Dumfries and Galloway, here we come...