The Marches by Rory Stewart
| The Marches by Rory Stewart | |
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| Category: Travel | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: From Hadrian's Wall to modern day farming, via Flodden and Afghanistan, Stewart's personal reflections on life in that part of the country his father named The Middleland straddling the England/Scotland border are endlessly fascinating. Thoughtful and thought-provoking. All wrapped up in some very fine writing. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 368 | Date: September 2017 |
| Publisher: Vintage | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-0099581895 | |
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The Observer quote on the front of the paperback edition of Stewart's latest book observes This is travel writing at its finest. Perhaps, but to call it travel writing is to totally under-sell it. This is erudition at its finest. Stewart has the background to do this: he had an international upbringing and followed his father in both the Army and the Foreign Office, and then (to his father's, bemusement, shall we say) became an MP. Oh, and he walked 6,000 miles across Afghanistan in 2002. A walk along the Scottish borders should be a doddle by comparison.
He gives the impression that the walking itself is easy, as he talks about fording rivers, climbing fences, escaping stampeding cattle almost in passing. He doesn't even hint at the organisation or fortuitousness that went into the logistics as he stays with a succession of local people, many of whom are strangers to him. He has the charm – it comes across on the page – and openness with people – perhaps natural, perhaps learned – that makes you believe that he may well have simply turned up, started chatting, hinted that he was looking for somewhere to bunk down and offers were made. He carried a tent, which implies not everything was pre-planned. Some hosts were old friends clearly warned of his coming…for the others who knows. Perhaps there had been adverts, perhaps it was all done through the six-degrees-of-separation which with his background produces contacts more likely to be forthcoming. None of this matters, except for those of us who might envy him the experience – and wish we had the nerve to emulate it.
What matters for most people is that the book isn't about the walk as such. It is about the history of the borders, of the people of the borders. It is about how our perception of history and of national identity gets attached to place, rather than being fully rooted in it, in the way we might think.
It's also partly a memoir – his own, and his father's. The subtitle of the book is Border Walks With My Father. Walking with his father was always an ambitious plan given that the gentleman concerned was in his nineties at the start of the project. Managing a mile or so was an ordeal. Plans were adapted, so that Rory walks alone, but meets up at various points en route during the first of the walks (a coast to coast along the Wall) and exchanges emails through-out the others.
It is a boy's attempt to understand his father, a relic from the days of the Raj who refuses to be an apologist for Empire, but simply holds to his own belief in all that was achieved, the good that was done, irrespective of all the rest. The feeling comes across that Rory is the more thoughtful of the two, with Daddy opting out of many a controversial topic with close-down Not my subject, but a kinder reading might be that the elder Stewart was being a father to the last, encouraging ways of thinking, ways of enquiring, not stipulating what conclusions to come to as a result.
As I've remarked before, the best books are those which are not re-sellable by the time I've finished reading them because of the numbers of turned down corners. This is one of those…more than that it got carried around and back-flipped, and re-read in parts before getting to the end, to the extent that the cover is already wrecked and needed sellotape surgery to reattach it. (Not a criticism of the published quality, purely an indicator of rough handling.) Part of me wants to say I love this book... but that wouldn't be it. Many books, even travel books, produce a connection, an emotional reaction be it fellow-feeling for the author, humour and delight, sadness at the state of the nation. This didn't do any of those. I struggle with a man of Stewart's ruggedness calling his father Daddy and the reciprocal term of endearment Darling is one that makes me cringe in whatever context. So maybe that is sufficient to create the disconnect for me personally. Others will undoubtedly respond differently.
What I found instead was intrigue, a call to think and maybe think differently. I found arguments that I could agree with and others I would challenge. What I found was something that I could only describe – to use an oft neglected and much maligned word – interesting. Many of those turned down pages are not inspirations to be quoted, but ideas to be pondered, arguments to be considered, conversations to be had in my own circle.
On occasions he points out the unseen obvious – that Hadrian's Wall had taken more stone and more labour than the pyramids, the numbers of men that would have been garrisoned along it. Almost child-like, but with serious purpose, he spends an hour attacking the wall, trying to run back and forth across it with its ditches and mounds on both sides. He comes to the conclusion that this monstrous military cam, half a mile wide and eighty miles long could not…have conceivably been intended simply as the Scottish examiners claimed, as a base for patrols and to stop smuggling. Given the limits of exports from the Scottish side (dogs, furs, slaves and the occasional Caledonian bear) and the local sport practiced in both directions of cattle rustling, he doesn't feel the economic investment would be warranted. Would not a deep ditch have sufficed?
As he goes on to explore the question wider, we learn that even the Romans themselves were never convinced about it – whether there should be a fixed boundary, and if so, whether it was in the right place. Cue reflections on insurgency and comparisons of the Romans in Britain, with the British in Afghanistan many centuries later. Stewart has an uncanny habit of making you think the human race isn't very good at learning.
With his military background, we would anticipate certain aspects of Stewart's story telling, particularly given the setting, but he really comes into his own when thinking about the people, the culture and heritage of people living on both sides of the wall and in The Middleland, the Borders that stretch some way on either side of it. He talks of the wall in terms of partition or the division of Berlin: families separated, places of worship suddenly inaccessible, and of its ugliness: a brutal industrial scar on the landscape.
Plus ça change!
This is explored via a second walk which takes him from his own home in Cumbria to his father's house beyond the Antonine Wall, north of Stirling – taking in a detour over to Berwick on Tweed via the battleground of Flodden. He sets out to prove a theory that there are really three parts to this island. The southern English, the northern highland Scots and in between the Middlelanders who have more in common with each other than with either their northern or southern neighbours. He finds something very different. He finds passionate Scots in favour of independence signing up to the Walter Scott fiction, adopting the tartan and the Scots Gaelic in places where they'd never been traditionally worn and spoken. Above all he finds people who know so very little about the land and landscape in which they live. He laments a dying of the oral histories and a lack of interest in the written ones. He finds similarities in the language, and recreations, both of which date back to much earlier times – but the significance of them is often lost to those using them, or they are passed on as party tricks, no longer working language at all.
I could go on…to talk about the changing anatomy of landscape, the impact management practices north and south of a political border centuries ago, and the modern attempts to turn the clock back. These are littered with unspoken value judgements – or invitations, perhaps, to make our own – as he tells of what is lost as well as what is gained in the rewilding of areas once sustainably farmed.
And there is more – on language, on his father's memories of Malaya, of Scottish dances in unlikely places, of the receipt for an Afghan king, of the French heritage of the Scottish heroes, back and forward through history.
The book is well researched and coherently pulled together in a very personal picture of northern England and southern Scotland and if I am not 'moved' by it – I am absorbed and fascinated and I know that my already battle-worn copy will become much tattier by the time I've finished revisiting its pages.
For other long walks exploring British history we can also highly recommend Long Road From Jarrow by Stuart Maconie
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Marches by Rory Stewart at Amazon.com.
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