The Marches

Hadrian's Wall, from my 2010 hike

Hadrian's Wall, constructed by the Romans from A.D. 122 to about 128, crosses northern England from Newcastle, through Carlisle, to Bowness on the Solway Firth.  In 2010, I followed the wall its entire length on foot. 

In 2011, Rory Stewart walked the same route, together with his 89-year-old father (the father driving far more than walking).  The following year, he walked a more rambling, and much longer, route from the Lake District to his father's home at the foot of the Highland Line in Scotland, exploring the puzzling region between the Wall and the Scottish border, the region called "the marches" in medieval times, and which Stewart likes to call "the Middleland."

Mr. Stewart is best known in America as the author of a best-selling book about his 32-day walk across Afghanistan in 2002, The Places in Between.  A graduate of Eton and Oxford, he has also served as a member of Britain's foreign service, working on issues in Iraq, Montenegro, and East Timor.  At the time of his Hadrian's Wall walk, he had just been elected as a Conservative party Member of Parliament, an office he continues to hold.

He has now published his account of his 2011 and 2012 ramblings, The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland.  But The Marches is far more than a travel document.  Stewart is a keen observer of flora, fauna, geology, archeology, history and pre-history.  Simply reading his account of the Hadrian's Wall walk made me realize how much I had missed, how unobservant I had been, how superficial my understanding of the history of the area had been.

Moreover, Stewart combines his trekking observations with a tribute to his father -- a man who was an amazing example of a certain vigorous type of polymath and adventurer spawned by the British Empire -- and a deeply moving, bittersweet testimonial to the unusually close relationship between father and son.  The book begins with Stewart's memories of his father as a child, and ends with his father's death at 93 in 2015.

The book has a number of themes, including the tribute to his father's remarkable life, and they perhaps do not all mesh easily together in a single volume.  But they mesh as well in writing, probably, as they do in Stewart's own mind.

One predominant theme, intended or not, is Stewart's love of Britain's "lived in" rural landscape.  The small village, the stone fence enclosures, the sheep and cattle, the neighboring farms and farm houses, where everyone knows everyone.   A certain coziness.  After the Norman conquest, the Middleland area was cleared of habitation and reserved as royal forest for the king's hunting.  Stewart looks on forest as a form of desert.

Modern agriculture, tourism, environmentalism, and reforestation are causing a rapid re-desertification, in Stewart's eyes.  Small farms held by families for centuries are being combined into large mechanized agricultural businesses.  The government is reforesting other areas, and environmentalists are undoing the farmers' work of centuries, returning the land to "non-invasive" species.  Among the many undesirable effects, as Stewart sees it, is a significant depopulation: fewer people now live in the "Middleland" than at any time since the middle ages, and deserted farm houses abound.

Another theme is the unique nature of the Middleland.  Stewart had set out on his Hadrian's Wall hike with some thought that the wall marked a separation between Scots and English peoples.  His findings confused him, and he now feels that the people of the "Middleland" -- now defined as stretching from the Humber river to the Highland Line -- make up a distinct third culture, one containing a number of sub-cultures. 

Stewart loves seeking out the etymology of place names, and notes frequently which areas of the Middleland have names deriving from Northumbrian (Germanic) roots, which from Norse roots, and which from Cumbric-Welsh roots.  He points out that what he now calls the Middleland was, before and for some time after the Conquest, shared by a number of kings representing different language and cultural regions.  Some of these distinctions still exist in local language and customs.

The book has an underlying mood of melancholy.  Just as his father -- a fascinating, accomplished, and eccentric gentleman, who still liked to dress up in Black Watch tartans until his death -- gradually weakens and fades throughout the book, so the Middleland is losing its cultural distinctiveness.  Stewart repeatedly finds that residents today -- even in small, isolated communities -- have little real organic connection to their history and traditions.  Local festivals tend to be promoted by community leaders for the enticement of tourists. Matching the cultural loss, the scenic values of the area are dying, as land use changes force a return to a dreary, pre-agricultural uniformity. 

Two states now predominated -- suburban and abandoned -- increasingly at the expense of the alternative, a living countryside.

Stewart frequently contrasts this dying of customary Britain with the vibrant survival of local village customs he encountered during his walk through Afghanistan.  I easily understand how Stewart has chosen the Conservative party.  And yet, his observations and conclusions are never doctrinaire, never set in stone.  He continually observes facts that mitigate against his conclusions.  He continually modifies his conclusions.  The Marches is a travel book and an academic study, never a political tract.

Stewart sums up his father's life, shortly after the old man's death:

It was an attitude to his life, then, and a resilience.  I was only half-conscious of the many ways in which he had modestly concealed how he was better than me -- in singing, in his languages, in his sense of engineering or art, and in his promptitude and energy in work.  In the end, I felt, his legacy was not some grand philosophical or political vision, but playfulness, and a delight in action.

Playful, indeed.

"I prefer," commented my father when I shared this [a Scot's verse, written contemporaneously, about Robert Bruce's battles with Edward I] with him, "Edward's comment on toppling Balliol -- 'bon bosoigne fai qy de merde se deliver' -- isn't it great to push out a turd."

Stewart's evaluation of his father feels entirely justified, but his self-deprecation not so much.  I suspect his father -- who continued to call his son "darling" right up to the end -- was immensely proud of his son's accomplishments, and felt he was leaving his world in good hands.

I doubt if any American Congressman, of either party, displays the same sensitivity, the same curiosity, the same scholarship, the same sense of history.  The same love of lengthy, solitary walking. Or indeed, the same playfulness.