‘WHAT we have discovered here upends what Anglo-Romano centric theorists presume about ‘Roman’ Scotland and when we started to become a nation,” smiles Dr John Reid, director of Melrose’s impressively revamped Trimontium Museum. It’s just one Borders revelation in a land I find teeming with synapse-popping, heart-tugging history; a land where Bruce’s heart lies and the ghost of Sir Walter Scott still strolls by the Tweed.
The Scotrail train tugs me back in time through rolling hills away from Edinburgh in search of the Borders, a wildscape contested for centuries by everyone from the Romans and English, through to the legendary Borders Reivers. The latter are still celebrated today in the Common Ridings of the Borders towns.
I arrive at Tweedbank on the Borders Railway less than an hour after leaving Waverley, intent on walking through the region’s rich history. I’m diverted immediately by the site of conflict I’d never even heard about before – the Battle of Darnick. After a scan of the information board detailing the skirmish in 1526, I forge along the Tweed into Melrose, doffing my metaphorical hat to Melrose Abbey where Robert the Bruce’s heart – at his insistence – is interred. I’m bound for the recently revamped £1.4 million Trimontium Museum, where I meet Reid.
“Scotland was Rome’s Afghanistan. They had a fort here three times larger than anything on Hadrian’s Wall,” he tells me, as we travel back through time amongst helmets and weapons unearthed at Trimontium. “We’re uncovering evidence Scotland existed as a unified threat to the Romans centuries before many scholars acknowledge. Why else would they have manned Hadrian’s Wall for almost three centuries and stationed one in every eight of all legionnaires here?”
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History runs deep in the Borders, and even, I find, at my plush B&B, Bowden House, through one of the owners Uta Varty: “I’m from Austria and I love the landscape and history in the Borders. We’re just in the shadow of the Eildon Hills, which housed the biggest Roman hill fort in Scotland.”
I follow her advice and hike deep up into the Eildons, where I trace out the groundworks of the old fort and admire the sweeping hill and Tweed views that so entranced Sir Walter Scott as he fashioned his grand retreat, Abbotsford, on the banks of the river. You find Roman history at Abbotsford too. And Burns. And our Bonnie Prince.
Common Ridings in Selkirk
Reluctantly leaving the Romans behind for now, I push west up the Tweed in search of Scotland’s story; literally. The Great Tapestry of Scotland is now starring in a swish new museum at the heart of Galashiels. “This piece of Scotland’s living history has finally found it’s home,” beams John Baxter, operations manager.
Susie Finlayson, a visitor officer, soars me back over four million years. I feel her pride too, almost brimming over. No wonder – she was one of the self-taught weavers involved. And she roped in her mum too. “Originally it was just meant to be 80 panels. But then it became 120 and then 160 with more than 1000 weavers involved,” Finlayson tells me as she points to the intricately woven wonders. Scotland’s Bayeux Tapestry now bursts from the light-dappled panels in a suitably spectacular purpose-built museum. If you’ve not been, go.
I continue up the Tweed, walking on the old railway line between Innerleithen and Peebles, now reborn as the Tweed Valley Railway Path. I’m cheered by the swathe of community-owned rewilding woodland I find on the banks of the river and also by a hulking castle where I picnic. No one even suggested I visit, I didn’t read about it anywhere and I still don’t know the name of this craggy ruin, nor its stories and undoubted intrigues. That is the Borders in a nutshell: a corner of Scotland where history is very much of the living variety and everywhere you look, whether signposted or not.
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Over breakfast at the plush Kingsmuir House B&B in Peebles – think stand-alone baths and luxurious toiletries – the owner Malcolm Mullarkey tells me about a Roman marching camp you can see from the hills above the town. I yomp up past the Victorians at Crieff Hydro, through the thick forests towards Glentress, and find a clearing once alive with Iron Age homes. The villagers must have stood right here on the same spot, peering down on the Tweed towards the site of the camp wondering about the new arrivals.
What happened next after the Roman arrival has intrigued me since school. Back then I remember thinking Hadrian’s Wall couldn’t just have been one big vanity project as some scholars suggest in England. I cannot resist the temptation to head back to Trimontium.
IN archaeological terms we’ve only just scratched the surface of this vast Roman fort, the largest ever built in Scotland and the staging post for the construction of the Antonine Wall. Information boards and viewpoints help build a picture of life here, life you can feel pulsing at the still visible outline of the old Roman amphitheatre.
I think of what Reid told me back at the Trimontium Museum: “We’ve got big plans, training the local community to help us in digs, digs that will shed new light on the Romans. And on the way we view our own nation – the idea of Scotland as a collaborative entity capable of pushing back the Romans opens many avenues for stories of who we are and how Scotland came to be.”
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