Raiders of the lost lands

Graham Robb, apart from being a distinguished historian, biographer and literary critic, is one of our most accomplished travel writers. His The Discovery of France remains a classic, made both engaging and accessible by his very francophile obsession with cycling. Indeed, his new book, The Debatable Land, opens with a declaration that ‘writing and cycling are inseparable pursuits’.

The debatable land in question is the thin wedge of territory between England and Scotland on the west coast which, for a period in the late Middle Ages, was officially declared as lawless by the parliaments of each country. The resulting piece of English legislation contains a quite magnificent disclaimer:

All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock… without any redress to be made for same.

As Robb comments dryly, ‘by all accounts they availed themselves of the privilege’.

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Cattle raiders, or ‘reivers’ as they were known locally, roamed the land, and for obvious reasons the few human habitations were strongly defended. Today it remains relatively empty — a place where ‘it is quite possible to spend a long day walking across it without seeing another human being’. Not even Rory Stewart.

It is to this desolate landscape that Robb and his wife relocate from a comfortable college life in Oxford. Naturally they arrive at their isolated farmhouse by cycle.

Robb claims a trifle disingenuously (‘this book, which I had never expected to write’) that the idea of describing his new adopted home only came to him slowly, although for a historian such a hinterland was clearly a gift. The process was accelerated when he discovered a second-century Atlas of Roman Britain, showing that even then, this same area was a buffer zone between competing tribes.