Walking the Border

In the lower Tweed, around halfway between Coldstream and Norham, lies an island with a border running through it. This low finger of gravel and silt, barely a mile long and only 500 feet at its widest, is hardly thought of by anyone but the trees binding the tentative soil together and the few nesting swans. The greater part, to the southwest, rising to the majestic height of five feet, is named Dreeper; the smaller part, to the northeast, thinning into the water, is named Kippie. The 1899 Ordnance Survey shows them as separate, but the slow build-up of silt has brought them together even as the border keeps them apart.

I’m walking the path between these two towns, one Scottish and one English, both with their bridges across the border, alongside Kirsty Law, a Scots folk singer of songs new and old, whose words likewise slip between languages. As we walk, our conversation meanders with the river, across art and life and what holds the two together. Anything that straddles a border is irresistible to us both and, I suspect, to most people who enjoy breaking rules – which is to say, most people.

Walking on the English side of the river, where the public footpath lies, we’re struck by the thought that swimming to one end of the island would be rather more fraught, vis-a-vis the rules, than swimming to the other. On Kippie, the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 gives us the right of responsible access to the great majority of land and inland water in the country: roughly speaking, we can go there as long as we look after the place and its life. On Dreeper, things are murkier: the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 allows the right to roam over open land, mountain and moor and heath, and wherever there are established long-trodden paths. This scraggly island, mostly wood, may well not count. Inland water is even more contested in England, with only 3% of rivers carrying clear and settled access rights. Legally, we’re on surer ground and in safer water swimming across the broader part of the Tweed, south from Ladykirk lands, and sticking to Kippie.

"Borders are made where they’re contested: you only know what side you’re on once there’s a struggle."

But practice rarely follows law: law only matters where it’s enforced, as anyone who compares tax evasion and so-called benefit fraud could tell you. Law is only its enforcement. No-one except the swans is likely to protest should we wander carelessly across the border to Dreeper. But why would we? The island is quiet and the swans should not be bothered. The only thing that pulls us into the river and across to the island is the fact of the invisible border and the desire to cross it.

Borders are made where they’re contested: you only know what side you’re on once there’s a struggle. A couple of miles downstream, in the bright spring of 1291, on an island lying below the English Norham Castle, an island which before comprehensive military mapping was on neither side of the river-border, King Edward I of England met thirteen claimants to the Scottish throne. He decided in favour of John Balliol, who swore fealty to the English throne the next year. This resolved the succession crisis triggered five years earlier by the death of Alexander III, and intensified by the death of his only surviving descendant, Margaret (in Orkney, my home, a border archipelago, then Norwegian and now Scottish) – but the arguing has never stopped since.

A couple of miles upstream, meanwhile, the Scottish town of Coldstream was for a century or so a popular destination for runaway marriages: England’s Clandestine Marriage Act 1753 mandated parental consent, but did not apply in Scotland, allowing boys of 14 and girls of 12 to marry there without parental consent – and sometimes without consent of the bride, especially when she stood to inherit a fortune. The border crossing bore both war and peace, both love and crime.

Such legal borders are fictions made real by power, but nature’s borders, no less invisible, cross the landscape with greater authority. I joined for only a day where the Tweed’s river-nature is indubitable, but Kirsty began her walk much further west, in the claggy, ambiguous ground from which it first rises. Just a little higher, on the hills between Tweedsmuir and Abington, two raindrops fall between the white blades of the 152 turbines in the 522-megawatt windfarm. They fall on the gravel path that is the watershed. One raindrop lands an inch to the west, joining its sisters to roll into the marshes that become the streams that become the Clyde, destined for the Atlantic. One lands an inch to the east, making fellows with the bogs and rills that become the Tweed, heading for the North Sea. Any waste and pollution on one side of the watershed belongs to the lives depending on that water; any mineral wealth and frogspawn on the other side depends on the care of the lives around that water. But then, if the water molecules are very lucky, they’ll meet again far to the north, where the North Sea meets the Atlantic at Noup Head, a bracing walk from my childhood home, where once the kittiwakes were plentiful and now, with the seas warming and the fish dying, the gannets rule the roost.

"We try to put national borders around these languages, but words cross between catchment areas more easily than rivers do."

But this is another story. Nature’s chaotic, which means, mathematically, that it’s impossible to perfectly predict, and nature’s flexible, which means its borders can move much quicker than the law’s. There’s no atomic line that is the watershed: there’s only a place where water falls and chaotically, flexibly decides. Those places belong to both rivers. You could walk that gravel path in the rain (should the negotiation between wind farm management and the right of responsible access allow it) and see the water flow either side of you, and then you’d really know how a border might and might not be.

Let’s flow back to the Tweed, and us sitting, soaked in the river, on the invisible line between Kippie and Dreeper, listening to the sounds of the slow-moving water and wondering what language they’re in. Kirsty and I both use Scots in our work, a fraught minority language which, despite its newly statutory status, flows in a fractious ongoing negotiation with English. We both love old dictionaries and the illusion of authority they provide in their word-hoard, and we both, in our poetry and music, seek ways to keep the language fresh and alive to contemporary ears. The language flows from an imaginary source to our mouths in the present.

A ‘dreeper’, in many forms of Scots, is a drainer or strainer, from the Germanic ‘drip’, which could come to us via the Old English ‘dryppan’ or the Old Norse ‘dreypa’ or one of many other tributaries. For this silty strand, catching the mud and debris of the slowing, widening Tweed, it’s a tempting etymology. There’s also ‘dreip’, to dawdle, idly and pleasantly, like our walk, like this essay, perhaps from the same source. Or a ditch, a drizzle, a disappointment. A ‘kippie’, meanwhile, is a left-handed person, or by analogy someone with the leftie’s suspect status, though that seems an unlikely origin for an unassuming gathering of low trees. A ‘kip’ is anything projecting, like a hill or a horn or a tuft of hair, but this island is flat. In tempting contrast to the dreip, ‘kippie’ can also mean hasty or ill-tempered, a rush, a snit, but then in contemporary English a ‘kip’ is just a wee snooze: it’s a border word, then. The names are too old to be sure of their meaning, and dictionaries must bow to local knowledge. Perhaps someone who lives by the islands can enlighten me.

We try to put national borders around these languages, but words cross between catchment areas more easily than rivers do. These names, with their light, smiling vowels and their definitive stops, could just as easily belong to Northumbrian, of which I’m fairly ignorant, as to Border Scots, the two dialects holding more in common than apart. Richard Oliver Heslop’s 1892 Northumbrian Words has ‘dreep’ for ‘drip’, but there ‘kip’ means either to thrash or an overgrown calf. Either way, the meanings on the border are far more likely to be relevant to this little island than my Orkney ‘kip’, where it’s to snatch. On the other hand, national infrastructure, which is to say borders, guarded, is precisely what makes a national language. The imperial process which created the modern nation also created the idea of a standardised language, more often than not by suppression of minority dialects. That is, for a language to have national status it must protect its borders, and cast out those words of suspect origin. A shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot, as the linguist Max Weinreich had it in Yiddish, another cross-border language which had and has neither army nor navy to define and police it. Thus, I can tell you those Scots meanings because of the work of Dictionaries of the Scots Language, funded by the Scottish Government and its national cultural infrastructure. The Northumbrian Language Society lacks such national-level support for its important work, but the Internet Archive – a library of disputed legality whose unauthorised book digitisation brought the wrath of major publishers, as copyright, like all law, exists only in its enforcement – gives me access to the historical research so I can follow the words back to their imagined source. The river of language flows both with and across such legal borders.

Then, after a kip, we swim back across the Tweed – an Old Brittonic word which may well mean ‘border’ – to resume, dreepin, our kippit dreip. We’ve a conversation to meander through, a friend to catch and keep up with, and a border to follow. Some miles later, the sun drying the Tweed from our skin, we part until next meeting. Kirsty has the latest in a series of community concerts to play, stitching a path along the Tweed with border ballads. I find a border bridge to cross, to make my way home to the catchment of the Forth (from the Proto-Celtic, slow-running, or dreepin, perhaps), where my daily life is governed by laws, mostly unseen and forgotten, until precisely the moment where they meet their enforcement. Every border can be ignored, until it can’t. We’ll walk the border anyway.

Kirsty Law's Meander project took place over three weeks in May and June 2024, during which she walked the length of the River Tweed, meeting with musicians and writers, sharing songs and stories and developing a new Tweed-inspired song cycle.

Harry Josephine Giles is from Orkney and lives in Leith. Her verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia was published by Picador in October 2021 and won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Stirling. Her show Drone debuted in the Made in Scotland Showcase at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe and toured internationally. www.harryjosephine.com

Image: Roy Military Survey of Scotland, 1747-55 via National Library of Scotland