BEWCASTLE: A FRONTINE IN THE WILDERNESS

Bewcastle Landscape. Photograph by Bill Birkett

The vast parish of Bewcastle on the northernmost margins of Cumbria, was once described as a succession of solitudes consisting of a few hundred people and a few thousand sheep. It extends from the White Lyne to Christianbury Crags, the landscape becoming increasingly remote and unsettling as it edges towards the border. There is nothing conventional about this place, it is stark and subtle, losing definition as the pale brown hills seep into the rushy pastures; an old landscape settling back into an even older one. In 1756 the Gentleman's Magazine reported that in Bewcastle ‘there is neither town nor village, but a few wretched huts, widely scattered in a desolate country’ and although it may still seem distant from the world, for many centuries it was a place of considerable significance, not so much a backwater as a frontline.

Two millennia ago it was one of the most populated sites in the British Isles with, at times, 2000 soldiers crammed onto the natural hexagonal plateau above the Kirk Beck. The present church, farm, and castle occupy the site of a Roman out-post fort directly linked with Hadrian's Wall at Birdoswald via the Maiden Way. A natural defensive position, it was also the site of a pre-existing shrine dedicated to the local war god Cocidius. It is clear that occupation here ebbed and flowed with the course of Roman ambition, however documentary evidence survives of Bewcastle’s significance in the eyes of administrators in Ravenna, the capital of the western empire in the fifth century.

This has not always been a frontier. With the departure of the Romans, parts of southern Scotland and the far north-west of England formed the Brittonic kingdom of Rheged. Here a fading half-life of Roman civilisation continued for a few generations until Latin was abandoned for their local tongue, the fort buildings fell into decay and the state-of-the-art plumbing was allowed to clog up. This was the twilit world described by the 6thcentury monk and historian Gildas, in his excoriating Ruin of Britain.

All was to change again when this area became part of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, a kingdom which for a brief moment emerged as the greatest Christian civilisation of its time. Bringing together craftsmen from Byzantium and Scandinavia, missionaries from Syria, Italy, and Ireland, it produced the finest sculpture in Europe. As Nikolaus Pevsner in the opening of his Cumberland and Westmoreland (1967) states, ‘Art in Cumberland started its course through history at its climax. The crosses of Bewcastle and of Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire are the greatest achievement of their date in the whole of Europe’.

Despite this the Bewcastle Cross, standing to 4.5m tall beside the centuries later church, still remains deeply mysterious. Carved from a single block of yellow sandstone, the style looks to Northumbria, and beyond to Rome and Syria. On the west side are three classically robed figures in deep niches. At the top is John the Baptist holding the Lamb of God, and at the centre, Christ with a pair of eager mole -like creatures worshipping at his feet. The figure at the base may be John the Evangelist with his eagle or, equally likely, a secular figure with a falcon. Elsewhere are panels of east Mediterranean vine scrolls and knotty interlace populated with birds and animals.

Perhaps dating from soon after 675 when masons were brought from the continent and beyond to work on the new monastery at Monkwearmouth, it may have been carved to commemorate King Alchfrith of Deira, who made an unsuccessful bid for control of all Northumbria c.664. Others however have suggested a slightly later date in the ‘golden’ reign of King Eadberht (737-758). The history remains as fugitive as the detail, eroded by fourteen centuries of northern weather, yet just decipherable on the west side is an inscription in runes, ‘Pray for them, their sins, their souls.’ It reads almost as a premonition of the future.

Four hundred years later the Normans appropriated Hadrian’s Wall as a convenient borderline and England and Scotland coalesced into something like their present form. At Bewcastle a motte and bailey castle constructed using the Roman earthworks was replaced by a stone castle on the same site in the 14th century. Regularly repaired for good reason, this castle guarded a well-trodden byway into the western marches of England, via the high ground of Bewcastle Waste. Northwards, beyond the border lay Liddesdale, Teviotdale and, almost certain danger. From the Anglo-Scottish Wars of the late 13th and early 14th centuries until the Union of the Crowns in 1603, this was a fortified landscape of pele towers and bastle houses, within a repeatedly brutalised wasteland known as the ‘Debatable Lands’. Here the Marcher lords and the local ‘reiving’ families they indulged, formed a unique criminal society specialising in cattle rustling, feuding and revenge. It was without parallel in Western Europe. With little allegiance to either nation, they held to their kin groups and the feral power of blood ties. Lord Burleigh, Chief Minister to Elizabeth I described, ‘These lawless people who will be Scottish when they will and English at their pleasure … are grown to seek blood … and they will kill any of the surname they are in feud with.’ Their names were what made them: Armstrong, Elliott, Nixon, Johnstone and Routledge amongst many others; names which struck a chord of fear across the western marches. In the dark winter months, when the ‘balefire’ was lit on Gillalless Beacon, giving warning of reivers from the north intent upon their livestock, their possessions and often enough their lives, the farmsteads of Bewcastle would ‘batten down the hatches’. This was a landscape under siege.

An uncharacteristic act of rapprochement occurred in 1599 when six Armstrongs came from across the border to Bewcastle to play football against six local lads. Almost inevitably the spirit of friendly engagement was not to last long. After the match there was ‘drynking hard at Bewcastle House’. William Ridley an Englishman ‘knowing the continual haunt and receipt the great thieves and arch murderers of Scotland had with the Captain of Bewcastle’ prepared to ambush the Armstrongs on English soil. However news of the plot was leaked and the Armstrongs set on the ambushers with more than 200 riders. Ridley and two others were killed, 30 taken prisoner and many ‘sore hurt especially John Whytfield whose bowells came out but are sewed up again’. Bewcastle was also the home of Hobbie Noble, who features in one of Walter Scott's border ballads: ‘his misdeeds they were sae great, they banished him to Liddesdale’.

Many of the gravestones in the churchyard bear witness to some of the more notable border reiver clans although it is said that in those days, a Borderer rarely died ‘like a cow’ in his bed. There is a story, possibly first recounted in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1852 of a stranger visiting Bewcastle and noticing that the gravestones in the churchyard predominantly commemorated females. His guide explained, ‘Oh Sir, they're a' buried at that weary Carlisle!’ the implication being that every man in the district was sooner or later hanged at the border city. The visitor wisely concluded that ‘if not altogether calumny, it refers to a very remote period.’

This is today a depopulated landscape, in places irreconcilable under the dreary conformity of Sitka spruce; the fate of so many ‘unprofitable’ landscapes in the north. Once there was diversity and detail, around the low built farm houses, small fields clustered with copses and thickets left standing to shelter animals and supply a source of windfall firewood. A network of trackways little more than a foot or two wide followed the grain of the land; and then there were the mosses and bogs, impenetrable mazes to the outsider, but places of impregnable refuge for those who knew them. Of the infamous Tarras Moss to the north west, Robert Carey in his 1601 memoir wrote ‘It is of that strength and so surrounded by bogs and marshy ground, with thick bushes and shrubs, that they fear no force, no power of England or Scotland.’ It could be the landscape of Beowulf, the ‘lonely fastness … by misty crags … windy headlands, fenways fearful’ in which the monster Grendel lived.Now it is difficult to imagine that only five centuries ago more than 2000 horsemen could be raised and ride out of Liddesdale.

For over fifteen hundred years, against a background of changing patterns of thought, allegiance and shifting boundaries, the Bewcastle Cross has stood firm, a stubborn reminder of a moment of extraordinary creativity. There have been others, although perhaps less exalted. The Border reivers for all their destructive zeal have left a legacy of beautiful, sad poetry and wove their violent history into a series of compelling, unforgettable stories. It is a cultural heritage rooted so profoundly in the intractable terrain that the clear lines drawn on the map seem curiously irrelevant. If all nations are imagined communities, it is perhaps not surprising that those other elements, less tangible than the cartographer’s pen, are the ones which more often survive. One foot in England the other in Scotland, one stands full square in the unique landscape and tradition of the Borders.

First published in ‘Cumbria and Lakeland Walker’ May 2024.