Summer’s End: Manor Valley & the Thief’s Road

Last updated on September 20, 2022

An early start; a bus from Edinburgh to the old, genteel town of Peebles. Out into the bright morning air. Sunlight and Saturday morning shopping; hills rise behind clad in heather and deep-green pinewood.

We crossed the town and ascended to the southwest. Up Cademuir Hill – the “hill of the great battle”, or perhaps “battle moor”. Two kilometres up, along the John Buchan Way and past the Red Well, and a world of ruins opens up.

Walls of tumbled stone ring the knolls of Cademuir Hill. Two settlements and two forts; the forts massive, and heavily defended. A great many of the hilltop complexes in the Borderland will originally have been temples rather than fortresses – this is not the case here, though. Fields of irregular rocks have been places around the walls, an obstacle for incoming cavalry and chariots – a clear sign that these walls expected assault, and were intended to repel it.

These walls were erected in the Iron Age. When they fell is anyone’s guess. The people who raised them were Britons, and it is surely they who fought the great battle after which the hill is named – though who they fought against, or when, is lost to us. The answer may lie in the earth, though, with the fallen weapons, blood and bone that battle left behind.

To the south of Cademuir stretches away the Manor Valley – one of the Borderland’s most beautiful, but little visited locations. Alistair Moffat made it’s name too a legacy of the Celtic Britons, seeing in it the territorial unit called in Welsh ‘maenor’. From here it cuts into the inner hills, touching the feet of the very highest in the region. One road leads in, and no other roads out; a road that leads nowhere by car, but to all sorts of places by foot.

In August this land shines green, vibrant, vital. The heights too are bright, with the blossoms of heather – but the green overpowers them, the leaves outshining the flowers.

A brief look back, at the rocks and screes of Cademuir – then on…

We followed the road to Kirkhope; the ‘valley of the church’. Here, in the 500s, a Christian inscribed stone was erected commemorating a martyr bearing the Brythonic name ‘Coninie’. Later, a church was constructed dedicated to a St Gordian; a little-known saint, to whom only three churches in Britain are consecrated. Gordian was of 4th century date, and killed in the time of the emperor Julian – the Roman emperor who abandoned Christianity, and attempted to turn the tide of history back towards paganism. In the context of the religious struggles that took place in these hills during the Dark Ages, the dedication is suggestive. This site may be one of the few that recalls an era when Christianity became once again a minority religion, the faith of a sub-culture that clung to the memory of Rome, while the mainstream of society resurrected the tribal cults that underpinned resurgent native kingdoms.

From the ruins, on and up, into the heather. We ascend an endless slope, clad in the purple of heather blossom. All around, the whole world is the same colour – an unbroken carpet of violet all the way to the azure horizon.

Insects buzz between the blossoms, and creatures crawl between the stalks. Beetles, spiders, caterpillars, harvestmen; tiny worlds of wilderness playing out miniature dramas beneath every footstep.

We ascend to the summit – over the curving rim onto a vast, undulating plateau. Here runs the Thief’s Road; an old reiver’s track, carrying cattle-raiders across the heights. Strange fractured stones rise from the peat of the earth; we find clear ground among them, and on Pykestone Hill raise our tents.

As the sun sets, a vivid glow rings the horizon. In the distance, to the north, the skyline is transformed into a vast ring of shark’s teeth; the mountains of the distant Highlands, marked out against the horizon line by the setting sun. Their outlines are crisp and clear in the cool northern air; a thousand miniature peaks are visible, a range of jagged forms that spans almost half the skyline. After a few minutes, they evaporate into the night – we stay up and toast their departure with a good few drams of whisky, before heading off to sleep.

The next morning, further along the Thief’s Road – a visit to the summit of Dollar Law, then back and out, to the northwest. We descend the Scrape Burn, towards Drumelzier where valley tradition places Merlin’s Grave – and beyond it the bus stop at Broughton, from where we’ll return to Edinburgh.

Down through the purple heather, along an empty, pathless cleugh, tracking the tinkling of a fast-running stream.

The remains of settlements are to be found here, scattered among sheepfolds and enclosures. The nature and purpose of many of the ruins is entirely unclear – all sorts of ghosts will haunt these stones, and all sorts of stories have marked their falling.

Rowans rise above the water, clad in red berries. From the flesh of these berries, a jelly can be made, and from their juice a bitter alcohol distilled. Rowans were a sacred tree, once, their branches believed to ward off witchcraft; they are hardy too, growing well even on rockfaces. It is this property that has allowed them to retain a toehold in the high cleughs, when the other trees of the forest fell long ago; they rise from tiny fortresses beyond the reach of hungry mouths, on boulders that have fallen from the hillsides, and crags overlooking streams.

At Drumelzier, we join the road, and finish it at a cafe in Broughton, eating cakes and drinking beers in the last of the summer sun. Then, it’s home – onto the bus and back north, towards the city. Barely an hour later, we’re back on its streets. A world away, yet so very, very close…

For more on the folklore and history of the Tweeddale hill country, take a look at my book, “The Ghosts of the Forest“.

© William Young and Inter-Celtic, 2022. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to William Young and Inter-Celtic with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.