Walking in the Southern Uplands. Ronald Turnbull
lot of ground up among the cloudberry and under the open sky and the skylarks. The going is fast and grassy, across a couple, or six, or a dozen of the rounded hills.
Gaze down into hidden hollows such as Hen Hole or the Beef Tub, where cattle thieves and Covenanters lurked; walk steep-sided river valleys with grim castles; and come upon sudden views south into England or north to the Highlands along the horizon. And then descend by another old path, or by one of the stream-carved cleuchs or linns, to the Grey Mare’s Tail waterfalls, or a pretty village in red sandstone, or the banks of the wide, wandering River Tweed.
In winter, the snowfields stretch, hump beyond hump, to the misty blue of Edinburgh or of England. Just the tops of the fence posts stick out of the snow. Follow them along the ridge for an hour or two, and find yourself looking down into one of the Southern Upland glens. But even then, it’s just an icy river far below and a strip of empty roadway, with a silence as deep as when the Stewart kings cleared this ground for deer hunting, or the Armstrongs from over the hill drove away the cattle, burned the small thatched cottages and left a huddle of spear-slain corpses at the field corner.
The Southern Uplands under snow are as big and blank as the screen before an outdoor movie show. What sort of story is going to unfold across the empty whiteness? A romance of the lonesome explorer high in the cold blue air; a grim epic of thigh-deep struggles in the white-out; or perhaps some frivolous bit of fun involving snowballs and an evening mince pie at the Tibbie Shiels Inn.
Rolling – but also rocky
Basalt on the Girvan shoreline, looking over to the volcanic plug of Ailsa Craig (Walk 2)
Like Yosemite’s granite or Snowdonia’s volcanics, the main range of the Southern Uplands is made of one sort of stone. It’s the deep-ocean sludge called greywacke that gives the chunky dry-stone walls, the occasional blocky outcrops, the scaurs (slopes stripped to scree and bare rock) and the cleuchs (deep-cut little stream valleys).
These hills have their rocky moments, but moments only – small stream gullies, broken slopes of stone and scree. But in between the long, rambling days across the grassy tops, short but strenuous half days lead up the small rocky outliers with the big views – Eildon and North Berwick Law; pink Tinto, whose stones colour the roads of Lanarkshire; and seaside Screel, looking across the Solway to England’s Lake District.
And away in the west is something even better.
Here is where the uniform greywacke of the main Southern Uplands is suddenly broken. The grim granite country of the Merrick is unlike anywhere else in the UK. Slabs of bare rock give easy walking across the humps of the Dungeon Hills – easy walking until the granite ends at knee-deep tussocks or a swamp of black peat. A wild goat stands on the skyline, and all below you are silver lochans trapped in the hollows of the rock.
Lists of hills
The Scottish Highlands are dominated by their list of the 282 Munros, the mountains rising above the 3000ft (or 914.4m) mark.
Southern Scotland has none of these. The next category down are called Corbetts. These are hills of 2500ft (762m), with the added requirement of having a clear drop around them of 500ft (152m). The Southern Uplands can boast seven: Merrick, Corserine, Shalloch on Minnoch and Cairnsmore (Section 1 of this book); Hart Fell and White Coomb (Section 3); and Broad Law (Section 4). Add an eighth when we count in the Cheviot, just a few miles into England in this book’s Section 6.
However, the hill list specific to Southern Scotland is the one compiled by Percy Donald in 1935. The 140 Donalds are all over 2000ft (610m) high, but the drop around each can be as little as 50ft (15m) if the hill has ‘topographic merit’. Donald distinguished between ‘hills’ (current surveys give 89 of these) and less significant ‘tops’ (currently 51) – but anyone going after this lot generally ticks them all.
The final listing to consider is the so-called Marilyns. These are hills, however low or high, that have a clear drop of 150m around them. Thus all Corbetts are by definition Marilyns. But so are lowly Grey Hill at Girvan (Walk 1) and Arthur’s Seat (Walk 34). The Southern Uplands’ incised valleys create a grand number of Marilyns – at the foot of Ettrick glen one could get five of them in a day.
Magnificent Marilyns, which might otherwise be ignored because of being below the arbitrary 2000ft or 600m mark, include Ailsa Craig (Walk 2), Criffel above the Solway (Walk 11), Well Hill at Durisdeer (Walk 13) and the Broughton Heights (three of them on Walk 17). Ward Law (Walk 23) and the Wiss (Walk 24) both overlook St Mary’s Loch in the Yarrow Valley. Over in the east, the Marilyn listing takes in the Tweed with Rubers Law (Walk 32) and Eildon (Walk 31), celebrates the Pentlands (two of them on Walk 33), and lingers over little North Berwick Law (Walk 38). These range in height from 606m down to a mere 187m.
Such lists can act as a spur to further hill-going, and take walkers to places they wouldn’t otherwise think of. (Even if, in the event, some of those places turn out to be only moderately attractive.) This book concentrates on the most worthwhile summits, irrespective of altitudes and listings – so that even one of the Corbetts (Shalloch on Minnoch of Galloway) is ignored in favour of lowly (but lovely) Screel Hill above the Solway.
Border reivers
For 300 years, between the Battle of Bannockburn and the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1604, the Border was an enclave between the two countries where neither king really ruled. Anarchy and lawlessness were convenient for London and Edinburgh as a buffer between the two kingdoms. But for those who lived there, it meant starvation or death by the spear. Family and the local warlord were all that stood between you and the raiders from England – or the Scottish warlord in the next-door glen.
From Nithsdale in Dumfriesshire to Redesdale and the North Tyne, the Border had its own laws, its own ethics, and an economy based on theft, blackmail and kidnapping for ransom. Over moorland and bog, through the passes of Cheviot and the fords of the Tyne, reivers rode up to 60 miles in an autumn night. After a skirmish at dawn with lances and the long-shafted Jedburgh axe they would ride back again with stolen cows, leaving the smoke of burning thatch behind them.
The most feared clans on the Scottish side of the border were the Armstrongs, Elliots, Scotts and Kerrs; on the English, the Grahams, Fenwicks and Forsters. The author’s Turnbull ancestors were a small but effective gang inhabiting Teviotdale. (See whether your ancestors were involved by searching online for ‘reiver surnames’.)
A record of those times is found in the Border ballads collected by Sir Walter Scott 200 years after the event. But they live on also in the defensive pele towers still standing above empty fields. Smaller fortified farms called bastles are in England only; the Scots ones were all destroyed. ‘Thieves’ roads’ still run across the hilltops. Horseback ‘march ridings’ re-enact the battles around the stout, rugby-playing Border towns that stood through the anarchy. And the Border’s harsh history is shown in the emptiness, even today, of the green glens that run south to the Tyne and northwards to the Tweed.
The Covenanters
In the times up to and including the English Civil War, Scotland developed its own Presbyterian form of Protestant religion – one in which spiritual leaders were democratically elected by a Presbytery council of church members. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 Charles II re-imposed bishops, and with them the king’s authority over the church. Those who rejected king and bishops in Scotland were known as Covenanters. Often they held their illegal church services (‘conventicles’) in remote hollows of the hills.
Covenanters were at their strongest in Galloway, Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire. In 1667 their small army of rebellion marched on Edinburgh and was defeated at Rullion Green in the Pentlands. This marked the start of the Killing Times, when redcoats recruited from the Highlands broke up conventicles with muskets, and arrested, interrogated and tortured locals. Anyone too slow in renouncing their Protestant extremism went to Edinburgh for hanging in Greyfriars kirkyard or, in less serious cases, for transportation to the plantations of the West Indies. The victims responded with what today would