Just Finished Reading: The Debatable Land – The Lost World Between Scotland and England by Graham Robb (FP: 2018) [239pp] 

I’ve never been to Carlisle but I’ve been through it four times – twice on a train during a school trip to Edinburgh and twice in a car travelling to and from a Queen concert in Newcastle when I was at university in Lancaster. So, it's not exactly an area I know much about despite visiting the near-by Lake District many times and being based in and around Lancaster (around 70 miles to the south) for 5 years or so. The other thing that prompted me to pick this book up is the ongoing mystery of the significant amount of Scottish DNA in each and every cell of my body. I was hoping that this book – about the borderlands – might give me some hints to help resolved that. 

Borders, especially ancient borders, are strange beasts. These days we think of borders as barriers with checkpoints and, sometimes, armed guards whose job it is to prevent people simply crossing back and forth as they please. OLD borders were often much more porous and all too often much less defined, much less agreed upon. The ‘debatable land’ investigated by the author after moving into the area from Oxford is one of those more liminal places where the border between England and Scotland was more of a suggestion rather than anything hard, fast or agreed upon by either country. Despite having a VERY long history neither country really concerned itself with this small patch of land that straddled the border as long as order was, more or less, maintained. Both countries periodically invaded the zone – often in pursuit of raiders or cattle thieves – but neither stayed nor built any commanding structures in the area to control it. It was wasn’t worth the effort. This meant, of course, that the area eventually became controlled by a small number of (often feuding) families who made their living out of raiding and protection rackets whilst keeping, as much as possible, off the radar of either nations high and mighty. 

Despite not really being the book I was expecting – I had assumed that it would be about the whole border rather than a small piece of it – this was a reasonably interesting if rather niche book. I certainly now know a lot more about this zone and it might even give me a few family names to work with if they show up in my ancestry searches. Despite being illegal (if at least technically) there was a lot of cross marriage between Scots and English in this zone which might (possibly) explain where at least some of my DNA came from although as far as I can tell that ‘drift’ happened further East of any debatable real-estate. A reasonable read but only really recommended for anyone interested in the Scottish/English border zone or the history of the Carlisle area itself.