Border Reivers

From: The Telegraph

Once, says Brian Jackman, Northumberland was England's Afghanistan. Now it is the quietest county under the sun.

Winter is coming to Northumberland. Down on the coast at Lindisfarne the brent geese have already arrived from Spitzbergen. Inland, the leaves have turned to gold, piling up in deepening drifts under the trees of Howick Hall. The bracken lies rusting on the Simonside Hills and everywhere, from Tyne to Tweed, the fires are lit, the scones are baking, ready to welcome any visitor canny enough to know what off-season pleasures await in this emptiest of English counties.

For anyone searching for fresh air and space, Northumberland has plenty of both to spare. A long haul from the south it may be, but how rewarding to recapture the long-lost joys of motoring on near-deserted roads, to go swooping for miles over switchback hills that still have the look of frontier country and to feel the past closing in around you.

That is what happens when you follow the B3618 on its way west from Newcastle beside Hadrian’s Wall. For nearly 2,000 years its forts and mile-castles have lain across the throat of Britain, marking the outermost limits of the Roman Empire.

The view from Steel Rigg sums up the best of it. Here, high above Crag Lough, the hills fall sheer in a frozen wave of Whin Sill rock with the Wall on its rim, snaking away towards Sycamore Gap where the opening scenes of Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves were filmed. Look north and, apart from the black smudges of conifer plantations, the rolling landscape of bentgrass moors and boggy turf would be still recognisable to the men who manned the mile-castles.

From: The Berwickshire News

HUNDREDS of cheering well wishers lined Coldstream's High Street on Thursday, as a 300-plus cavalcade began the annual ride out to Flodden Field to commemorate the notorious bloody battle of 1513.

After last year's ride was greeted by torrential rain, strong winds and flooding, the highlight of Coldstream's civic week was due some good weather, and with bright sunshine and temperatures soaring into the 20s, they certainly got it.

The ceremonial duties began when the 2009 Coldstreamer, Craig Telford, and his attendants - right-hand man Ricky Hope and left-hand man Gareth Watson, followed pipers into the town's Market Square. There the 15th Earl of Home, whose ancestors led the Borders into battle in 1513 at Flodden, charged Craig to carry the Home colours to Flodden and to return it "unsullied and untarnished".

The Earl, flanked by two Coldstream Guards and with the Countess by his side, also charged Craig to cut a sod of earth from the battlefield and return it safely to Coldstream, to commemorate the actions of those who brought back the bodies of the Scots noblemen to be buried in consecrated ground.

This year's Flodden Day marked a special occasion for two of the riders taking part - Peter Scott made this year's pilgrimage 50 years after winning the Smail Cup in 1959 for the youngest rider, and Hamish Brown also took part, making it his 50th annual Flodden Day ride-out.

From: BBC

The historic clock bells of a Borders town have been silenced at night after an investigation by environmental health officers.

It followed a complaint by a bed and breakfast owner about the sound coming from the Galashiels war memorial.

The head of the town's Royal British Legion branch said that stopping the bells was "frankly ridiculous".

However, Scottish Borders Council said it had decided the complaint about the chimes was "not unreasonable".

The local authority received a complaint from a local guest house about the noise.

It has now decided to take action and ordered the bells to be stopped between midnight and 0715 BST.

From: Southern Reporter

FEW businesses can boast of client relationships of more than 20 years. However, Sykes Global Services can go one better than this having served multinational software firm Adobe for 22 years of the company's 25-year existence – although it has to be conceded that this was in a number of guises.

To mark this occasion, Sykes' Douglas Watt commissioned a silver Border Reiver figure, below, which has now been presented to Dan Brown, Adobe Incorporated Worldwide operations director at its HQ in San Jose.

From News and Star

Tom, a Lancastrian, who now lives in Walton near Brampton, was also aided in his travels by Dougie Harkness of Langholm as they scoured the border countryside looking for Reiver sites.

Tom estimates he has visited more than 600 sites related to the period when the lawless clans on both sides of the border, particularly in the 16th century, stole, burned and murdered each other.

It took Tom, a textile technologist who works in Carlisle, two years to write the book and another two to get it published.

From BBC News

The novelist George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman adventure stories, has died aged 82, his publisher has said.

The popular books saw womanising anti-hero Sir Harry Flashman, fight his way around the British Empire.

MacDonald Fraser, who was appointed an OBE in 1999, also wrote the screenplay for James Bond film Octopussy.

The Carlisle-born journalist turned author, who lived on the Isle of Man, had fought cancer for several years.

He was married and had three children.

The Reavers by George MacDonald Fraser. Harper Collins. £18.99 (£15.99 in Bookends)

George MacDonald Fraser begins this book, which he says is "nonsense, with one monstrous, contorted, cantankerous sentence" 360 words altogether, in which he contrives to quote from Shakespeare, the Bible, Lord Lytton and the BBC. He talks of "the false forecasts of Master Michael Fishe, he o' the isobars, who had predicted only light airs, gentle as zephyrs" (will our poor prognosticator ever be forgiven?), describes an equally monstrous storm, which whirls away Steeple Bumpstead and causes haystacks and livestock to crash through thatches, and wonderfully evokes the years of Good Queen Bess while at the same admonishing all the ills and contrarieties of our modern world from global warming to intellectual arrogance.

The octogenarian master is at it again.

The Reavers, intentionally mis-spelled, of course "this book is spoof upon spoof" is rich with the relaxed comic invention of a man who delights in detesting the pretensions of today and loves the endless variety of humanity and especially the ruggedness of Border folk.

A 16TH-CENTURY border peel tower, named by English Heritage as a building at risk, is to be preserved and converted into a family home.

Kirkpatrick Fleming businessman Andrew Ritchie has plans to renovate Brackenhill Tower near Longtown.

The tower appears on English Heritage's current list of Buildings At Risk and campaigners have been battling for years to save it.

Mr Ritchie has submitted a planning application to Carlisle City Council to renovate the tower and alter its interior. It would create at least eight bedrooms.

The application comes after months of discussion between Mr Ritchie and English Heritage on how to best to preserve and carry out improvements on the tower.