The Savage Spirits of the Cheviots – The Duergar of Coquetdale, and the Brown Man of the Moors

I hopped on a train heading south from Edinburgh, after work on a Friday. It’s a nice journey; the railway line traces a coastline that alternates between clifftops and beaches, punctuated here and there by wooded valleys and views of offshore islands. At Morpeth, most of the way down to Newcastle, I disembark and catch a bus heading west. Just under three hours after my departure, I am finally deposited in the little town of Rothbury, on the fringes of Northumberland National Park.

The journey time is roughly equivalent to that between Edinburgh and Aviemore in the Cairngorms. Far, far fewer make it though. On a Friday evening, the roads and railways heading north from Scotland’s Central Belt are full of hikers heading for the Highlands; by contrast, on my way south I saw almost none. This, in my view, is an oversight. There is some utterly stunning country to be found down here, and some particular kinds of landscape that are not available north of the Highland line. There are plenty of people who do visit the Rothbury area – but they tend to come up from the urban centres around the Tyne and Wear to the south, rather than crossing the border as I have. From Newcastle it’s only an hour and a half on the train, or a 45 minute drive.

Rothbury is, today, a pretty little market town. The passing of the years has touched it but little; there’s not much industry to be found here, and a regional economy built on farming and tourism has preserved the traditional character of the area. The buildings are of sandstone rather than concrete; the shopfronts simply signs, rather than glossy frontages of plastic and shining metal.

I make my way to the Newcastle House hotel, where I spend the night in their walkers’ ‘bunkhouse’ room. It’s convenient and inexpensive, though the music from the bar is uncomfortably loud – nevertheless, it allows for an early start combined with a good fry-up, and I’d happily use it again. The view out of the window is also glorious – and as I pull the curtains aside, I find that it encapsulates a great deal of what I have come here to seek.

The town’s old marketplace lies before the hotel, now given over to grass. From its centre rises a carved cross, strikingly tall and slender in its form. Even from the window my eyes can pick out the shapes of the intricate carvings that coil and swirl across its surface; shapes that, to northern eyes, scream “Celtic”.

This cross was raised in 1902, to commemorate an inventor and industrialist named William Armstrong. The name Armstrong is a famous one in the Borderland, borne – appropriately – by one of the most fearsome of the region’s Reiver clans. The Armstrongs held territories on either side of the frontier, in Cumberland and Liddesdale, and for many years refused to recognise the laws of either kingdom. William kept up the warlike interests of his ancestors, but married to them a tremendous technical ingenuity – and made a fortune in the manufacture of artillery, warships and hydraulic devices for the expanding British Empire. The resultant spoils he heaped up in the impressive stately home of Cragside, in the woods just north of Rothbury; a place now in the hands of the National Trust, and one of the town’s main tourist draws.

The cross that commemorates him, and that dominates the heart of Rothbury, was created in a style characteristic of the lands of northern England; lands that once bore the name of Northumbria, from which the modern county name of Northumberland derives. Although this region is proudly English, nonetheless its nonetheless contains a marked Celtic influence; in shape and in decoration, the high crosses found scattered across the region recall the crosses of Dark Age Ireland and Scotland. This is no accident; it was the Gaelic church that introduced Christianity to Northumbria during the Dark Ages, and their missionaries brought with them the characteristic art style of the western Celts.

This particular Celtic connection in the region has long been recognised. It has, however, perhaps served to obscure other Celtic links – deeper links, with a more formative impact on the people and the culture of this land. It has in the past almost always been the case that the people of Northumberland have been seen as Englishmen with a Celtic influence; that the influence of Irish missionaries, and proximity to Scotland, saw some Celtic traditions pass on to a people who remained, at their root, fundamentally Anglo-Saxon.

Recent scientific advances have, however, thrown this longstanding perception into question. Developments in genetic analysis have taken place in recent years that have opened up a new window into the past – one that permits us to gaze into our own blood, and to perceive in it clearly the tale of from whence we came. The story told by that blood, the story bound both in our bones and in those of our ancestors recovered from the earth, is one very different from that held in the conventional histories of England – or of Scotland. There are some inconvenient truths that have been hushed up, over the centuries – and it is these truths that allow us to begin to decode the lost mythology of the Borderland. There is a secret history here, and some wonderful things await to be found within it…

In 2015, a team from the University of Oxford published a detailed analysis of the genetic inheritance of the British population in the journal Nature, based on samples from 2039 individuals whose families had long been resident in their home regions. In 2019, a team from the Wellcome Institute followed this up with a similar analysis of 2544 individuals. Both studies showed that the proportion of old Celtic DNA found in the people of England is far, far higher than that introduced from across the North Sea by the Anglo-Saxons. In the case of the inhabitants of the Borderland, including Cumbria, Northumberland and County Durham, this Celtic inheritance is even greater – so great, in fact, that the majority of samples from the region were genetically closer to those taken in Scotland than they were to those from southern England.

On the Scottish side of the border too, these studies held surprises. They revealed that the Scots of the Borderland have far more in common, genetically speaking, with their neighbours to the immediate south than they do with their fellow-countrymen to the north. This was so much so the case that the peoples of the Borderland, English and Scots together, formed a single genetic ‘cluster’; a distinct grouping with a shared genetic make-up rooted in common ancestry. In other words, though a border has long divided them, the native peoples of the Border counties of England and Scotland are, in terms of their blood, one people. And a predominantly Celtic one.

It is this new insight that allows us to uncover secrets in the history of the Border region. In the past, when the folklore and traditions of Northumberland were analysed, connections were always sought to the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon traditions of their supposed kinsmen to the south and east. Likewise, when Scottish Antiquarians and researchers attempted to trace the Celtic roots of the legends and traditions of their own Border counties, it was to the Highlands, Ireland and, less regularly, Wales that they looked. The idea of seeking for traces of the deep Celtic past across the border in England would have seemed absurd – for it was assumed that the Celtic influence on that side of the Border had travelled there from Scotland in the first place.

In the new light shone through the blood, however, those old certainties dissolve into nothing – and instead, new patterns emerge to take their place. Fascinating patterns. If we accept that the peoples of the Borderland were anciently one, then it is first to other parts of the Borderland that we must look when we attempt to trace the development of its traditions. If we accept that the underlying ancestry of the peoples of Northumberland is Celtic, then when we look to interpret the folklore and legends of the region we may legitimately look to Celtic history and legend for parallels, ahead of Scandinavia. If we perceive the Border region not as a land divided, a frontier world, but rather as a single original cultural unit, then we may begin to perceive an entirely new geography – one in which the Cheviot Hills are no longer the boundary or periphery, but rather the inner core of that land. They are its wild heart; an upland wilderness at its core that, like other such places in other such lands, might be expected to function as a natural fortress. A place in which all that is most ancient in that land might find refuge…

Standing at the window in Rothbury, I raised my eyes from the market square, over the old sandstone houses, to look at the shapes that rise beyond them. Above the slate rooftops, green fields can be seen, rising upwards with the slope of the land. Beyond them in turn, to the southwest the green tones of the fields turn to the yellow-brown of moorland, and the land swells upwards into the broad bulk of a hillside. Its summit is invisible, dissolving into the mist of the cloud-layer. These hills are the easternmost extrusion of the Cheviot range into Northumberland’s lowlands. Behind them, a great expanse of rolling hill country stretches off into the distance; an ocean of emptiness, a vast stretch of moor and forestry here and there broken by rocky outcrops and steep-sided, hidden valleys. It is an area of wild country as large as either Snowdonia, or the Lake District National Park – but one which receives a tiny fraction of their visitor numbers.

The hills above Rothbury are called the Simonside Hills. They are not high – 440 metres above sea level at their highest point – but they nonetheless represent a challenging physical environment. Their rolling, heathery tops are broken regularly by crags and stretches of bog; by unexpected chasms, and the occasional sinkhole where a cave has collapsed and opened up a pit. These hazards could easily trap a walker, snap a leg – and the featureless, barren nature of the summits make them a disorienting place, easy to become lost in.

In modern times, the presence of an established path network, combined with detailed maps and such conveniences as GPS, have reduced the impact of these hazards substantially. The hills are in modern times a popular place for a day-hike, and they have become one of Rothbury’s main tourist draws. In the past this was very much not the case, however; lacking modern navigation technology, the hills were a dangerous place to cross, and claimed plenty of lives. They gained a sinister reputation.

A folktale arose, apparently connected to the hazards of navigating these moors. Tradition placed in the Simonside Hills a tribe of malicious dwarves, bearing the unusual name of Duergar. These creatures were nocturnal, and delighted in leading travellers to their doom; in the folklore of the region, there are few creatures more clearly hostile to the presence of humans. The following brief tale describes their nature very well indeed;

“Not very far from the town of Rothbury in Northumberland lies a range of dangerous hills called the Simonside Hills.  The shepherds who live on these hills do not care to be away from home after night has fallen, or when the fog is thick, for there are many ravines and steep places where one false step in the dark or in the mist may mean death.  Much less do strangers, who do not know these hills as well as the shepherds, care to be lost in them. Indeed, few strangers ever attempt to cross the moors in the dark.  But once a young man, who was trying to reach the town of Rothbury, found himself benighted there.  He had meant to reach the town before sunset, but he had lost his way, and now found himself many miles from his destination, without a single light to guide him.  He tried to keep to his path in the dark, but soon lost it.  A shepherd, by recognising this hill and that stream, might have picked his way home; but it was the first time that this traveller had been among these hills, so very wisely he decided to look for some little cave or sheltered place where he could spend the night.  He was just about to settle down with his back against a big overhanging rock that he thought would screen him from the wind, when he saw not very far away, a glimmering light.  “Perhaps it is some shepherd’s house,” he thought, “and I can shelter there.”  So he began to pick his way very carefully through the bracken and over the stones towards the light.

“When he reached it, he found that the light came from a little hut built of wood and roofed with thick sods.  It was just such a hut as the shepherds sometimes use during the lambing time, and the light came from a little fire that was burning on the floor between two rough grey stones.  On the right-hand side were two great logs as thick as gate-posts.  How relieved the traveller was when he saw this snug little place, for he knew that the greatest enemy of the benighted wanderer was the cold night air.  He piled some of the smaller sticks on the fire, pulled his coat round him, and sat down on one of the grey stones.

“He had scarce sat down when into the hut walked a most surprising little figure.  It was a dwarf, who stood no higher than the traveller’s knee.  His coat was made out of a lamb’s skin, his trousers and shoes of moleskins, and his hat of green moss, decorated with a tall feather from a cock-pheasant.  He came in without a greeting, and sat down on the other grey stone, and scowled at the traveller as if to ask what he was doing there.  The young man was surprised and too startled to ask who the fairy was, and by-and-by, when he recovered himself, he was glad he had not spoken, for the little man kept on scowling at him as if seeking for some reason to pick a quarrel.  “This is a duergar,” said the traveller to himself.  “I must do nothing to offend him, for I know that these dwarfs mean harm to mortals, and fly into a rage very quickly.”  So he kept still and stared back at the dwarf.

“Presently the fire began to die down, and the traveller could feel the cold air creeping into the room.  It began to nip his fingers and his toes.  Nevertheless, he did not stir, until the cold began to creep up his arms and legs and make him shiver.  The dwarf did not seem to feel the cold at all, but at last the man felt that he could stand it no longer.  Reaching forward he took a handful of the small sticks that lay on the right-hand side of the fire, and threw them on the dying embers.  No sooner had he done that than the duergar gave him a worse scowl than ever.  Leaning over to the gate-post – and though it was twice his size and twice as thick as his own body – he smashed it across his knee as if it were matchwood.  Then he threw the pieces on the fire, as if to say, “Any child can break pieces of kindling sticks.  Take the other post, and see if you can break that.”  But the traveller, seeing that this was a kind of trap for him, never stirred, but kept on staring at the dwarf as motionless as a statue.

“By-and-by the fire died down again, but the man kept on staring at the dwarf and never moving a finger, and the dwarf scowled back at him. The room grew darker and darker and colder and colder, till suddenly, away down in a valley, a cock crew.  And as soon as the cock had crowed, the dwarf disappeared, and with him the hut and the fire.  The traveller looked up.  The sky in the east was turning grey, and by its dim light he saw that he was still sitting on the big grey stone.  But it was the topmost stone of a dark, rugged precipice.  Had he leaned over to the left to reach the other gate-post, as the dwarf had challenged him to do, he would have fallen down the cliff and killed himself.”

It is an intimidating tale, and one which is entirely consistent with the depiction of the Duergar in other local tales. They played a large part in the folklore of Coquetdale, and stories regarding them are still told to visitors today.

It might be assumed that the stories of the Duergar arose to discourage the residents of Coquetdale from straying onto the dangerous moors; that such stories were a natural response to the hazards of the environment, to the chill of the winter gales on the hills and the hazards of their chasms. The truth, however, is not so simple. The stories of the Duergar connect to some fascinating legends recorded centuries ago by the early Antiquarians – and, I have come to believe, go back far further still, to the very deepest layers of the region’s mythology. The sinister creatures that haunt the hills of Rothbury are, in my view, one of the most extraordinary remnants of Celtic mythology to be found anywhere in these isles.

To see how this may be so, it is necessary to go further; further into the legends, and further into the landscapes that housed and shaped them. The connection between the legends and these hills can only properly be understood by understanding the nature of this northern wilderness. There is more to be found on these barren moors than has ever been credited – and it takes a strikingly physical form.

After my morning fry-up, I hop on a local bus heading up Coquetdale. It drops me off at Alwinton; a tiny hamlet where the old cross-border drove road called Clennell Street reaches the lowlands. I choose not to follow this old path, however, and instead head south and west.

I cross the river Coquet at Angryhaugh, and depart from the road onto a track rising westwards. It is here that I encounter the first markers that declare this place something distinct from the average northern hillside; a flagpole, and a sign. The sign delivers two brief, clear messages. The first explains the function of the pole;

“Military Firing Range. Keep out when red flags or lights are displayed or barriers closed.”

The second makes clear the impact of such land use on the visitor experience;

“Danger. Do not touch any military debris. It may explode and kill you.”

It’s not the most inviting sentence you’ll see at the start of a footpath – and it is the presence of such signs that accounts, in large part, for the forgotten nature of the Cheviots. The signs mark the outer edge of the Otterburn Range; the largest military training area in the British Isles, and one which sees a great deal of use. The red flags often fly, and the staccato rattle of gunfire breaks the hillside stillness. Further in, deep in the interior artillery practice is conducted – and as a consequence, the moors are scattered with the broken, jagged corpses of military vehicles used for target practice. The Range occupies most of the central Cheviots, rendering them off-limits for much of the time; and at the western end of the hills, the Royal Air Force complex at Spadeadam does much the same. Between these two military zones lies a landscape of dense forestry plantation, intermingled with trackless moor – moorland so wild it makes the summits of the Simonside Hills seem like a city play-park by comparison.

None of this is inviting – and, in the absence of an invitation, few come. There are patches of popularity – around Kielder Water in upper Tynedale, and along the line of the Pennine Way long-distance path – but these are the exception rather than the rule. Over most of the Cheviot Range the moors are utterly empty. Few human feet tread here; few eyes gaze over the crags. This is one of the least-visited parts of the whole of mainland Britain.

It is, of course, in a place where no-one is looking that we would expect to find traces of the unknown. Secrets may easily go undisturbed, if there is no-one to seek them. This is precisely the case in the Cheviots; beneath a blanket of pinewood and covering gunfire, lost relics of the past have remained hidden. Legends have gone unexplored, and physical remains have gone undiscovered. Hidden things lie within the moss and the heather, and concealed amongst the pinetrees – more than we have yet realised.

From Angryhaugh I follow the track up the moorland of the Barrow Knocks, to the top of the hill called the Swire. Here, I trace the edge of a forestry plantation southwards, along the edge of the Range. Although I am beyond the limits of the firing zone, evidence of military activity lies all around. Little piles of spent cartridges litter the ground, small patches of shining metal scattered here and there amidst the rocks and the heather. I watch where I tread a little more carefully than would normally be the case…

A kilometre further, and I reach a bowl of open ground in the moors. Here, a small stretch of open water named Harbottle Lake lies nestled between two lines of crags. Though currently bearing the name ‘Lake’ on the OS map, it was traditionally called Harbottle Lough – the latter word being the usual term for such bodies of water in the Northumberland dialect. It’s a word pronounced in the same way as the Scottish ‘loch’, and is in fact a direct borrowing from the old Celtic language of the region. In this old tongue, called Cumbric, the word was rendered ‘luch’. The presence of the term here is a clear trace of the Celtic origins of Northumberland – and it is especially intriguing to find it used in this spot.

The ancient Celts held bodies of water to be holy, and would deposit therein valuable treasures and weapons as an offering to the spirits (usually female) who inhabited them. The legend of the sword Excalibur being received by King Arthur from the ‘Lady of the Lake’ is but one recollection of this tradition; the king was presented with his sword by a spirit of the waters of the very kind his forefathers worshipped as a goddess. It is also the case that the Celts worshipped natural features as embodiments of their gods; distinctive rock outcrops, groves, ravines, and other elements of the natural landscape that seemed to partake a little of the supernatural.

Looking at this place today, it is very, very easy to see how it might come to house such a conception of the supernatural. Within the little valley of the lough, the normal world seems a long way away. All that is visible from its edge are the crags and enormous boulders that ring the valley’s edge; all sorts of things might hide amongst them, invisible to the watcher. Squaddies on training runs, perhaps, malign Duergar about their cruel business, or else things more ancient yet…

Beyond the ring of boulders lie only pine trees, distant hilltops, and the empty moors of the Range. The still waters reflect nothing but the sky; a sky that was that day dark and brooding, as is so often the case. There is something savage here, a sense of an ancient wildness that does not welcome human intrusion. Perhaps this sense was merely one that I projected onto it – but with a certainty I was not the first to do so. The historian D.D. Dixon described it in the following terms;

“…a lonely eerie tarn in the hollow of the hills — a stretch of long heather and sphagnum marks an old extension of the lake… The water is always pure and very cold — so cold that it was said to be certain death to attempt to swim across.”

Murray’s “A Handbook for Travellers in Durham and Northumberland” (1873) states that a “druidical rock basin” was to be found by the side of the tarn. No trace of such a basin is visible today, nor any trace of why it was considered “druidical” – but it is not impossible that it may yet lie within the grip of the heather somewhere around the limits of the lough, and that an examination of its form might reveal something of its antiquity…

That a belief in the supernatural potency of the place endured into the 19th century is confirmed by Dixon, who records the following tale of the waters (Northumberland dialect updated into modern English for ease of reading);

“Tradition says there was once a scheme on foot to drain the lough, but on the workmen proceeding to the hill top beyond the Drake Stone, they were much alarmed, and forthwith fled on hearing the following warning, uttered in sepulchral tones, issuing from the depths of the dark mountain tarn : —

“Let Alone; Let Alone!

Or I’ll drown Harbottle,

And the Peels,

And the bonny Holystone.”

The three places named are villages in Coquetdale. The spirit of the waters threatens the workmen that, should they disturb its dwelling place, it will return the favour in kind – by destroying their own homes.

It is not impossible that all these associations are simply later inventions, notions of a mysterious past projected back onto a particularly dramatic spot. It is, however, also possible that they are as old as the very word used to describe the place, ‘lough’; that this lake was perceived as possessing supernatural power because it always had been, right back to the time of the ancient Britons. Imagination may be strong, but so too is memory – and it is far from inconceivable that old pagan tales of the lake might pass from parent to child, from generation to generation, over immense stretches of time. Such things are known from other parts of the earth, and so they might be true also of this one. Especially if there were some particular feature of the place that might encourage the survival of such a tradition…

I departed the water’s edge, and ascended towards the western rim of the basin. Here, on the brink of the little valley there is visible one particularly immense boulder, looming on the skyline. I made a beeline for it; it was the presence of this natural monolith that had brought me here, on account of the traditions attached to it.

I followed a well-worn path through the heather, past a scattering of subsidiary boulders and small, storm-battered trees. After a few minutes of ascent, I reached the edge of the stone, and gazed up at its surface.

Its scale is impressive, but so too its appearance, close-up. Its whole surface is covered in fine, intricate lines; the traces no doubt of some ancient geological processes that my knowledge is too limited to securely ascertain.

What was true for me that day must have been doubly so for the ancient observer; in times before science could explain such things, who knows what magic our forefathers dreamt up to explain the strange forms of rocks such as this. There must inevitably have been something of the supernatural that attached itself to such places – and in this particular case, we have confirmation that this was so. This great boulder was and is known as the Drake Stone – the dragon stone, in modern parlance.

There was an anecdote relating to the stone recorded in brief on page 324 of Murray’s handbook, stating;

“Half a mile from Harbottle is the Drake Stone, a very interesting relic, being the Draag stone of the druids… The custom which still prevails in Harbottle, of passing sick children over the Drake Stone may be a relic of druidical times, when they were probably passed through the fire on the same spot.”

The connection of the stone to a sacred fire is guesswork, and the use of the west Germanic ‘Draag’ rather than ‘dragon’ is surely an Antiquarian attempt at establishing a linguistic connection, rather than the commemoration of an old name for the place. There seems, however, little reason to doubt the story that sick children were passed over the stone; such things are known elsewhere and, although such superstitions may have been frowned on by the church, any parent faced with an unwell child will do whatever they feel to be necessary in order to make their little one healthy again.

If this custom did prevail here, it is hard to see how it might become established during the Christian era – but easy to see how it might be inherited from an older one. And if such a power was indeed ascribed to the stone, then it naturally raises the question of how it was that power came to reside there. We return to the notion of a supernatural denizen of the lough, and the presence there of things associated with the druids; such associations may long predate the arrival of the Antiquarians in these valleys. None of these things are beyond the bounds of possibility – in fact, in my view they are more likely than not.

There are plenty who doubt such connections. It is the present fashion to attribute all traces of ancient religion to the wishful thinking and fabulation of 19th century writers. Scepticism is assumed to be more rational than belief; fraud inherently more likely than truth. And, in the case of the Harbottle Lough and the Drake Stone, it is admittedly true that it could all be a 19th century invention. There is no definitive way to confirm the time-depth of this place’s sanctity – at least, not at the present moment. A solution is available, though.

As mentioned before, it was the custom of the ancient Celts to deposit valuable items into sacred bodies of water. If indeed the tradition of the sanctity of this place dates back to those times, we would expect to find such items deposited within its waters, too – and for those depositions to occur down to a comparatively late date. If some scrambling through the heather by the loughside could recover that lost “druidical basin” mentioned in the texts, we would have a prime candidate for a spot on the shore where such depositions might have been made. A little underwater archaeology might recover their remains from the sediments of the lake-floor; and analysis of those same sediments would reveal the likely date ranges within which those deposits were made. If we could do so, we would be able to confirm which version of the tale was truth and which fiction – and potentially, prove the survival of the ideas of an ancient religion into the folklore of recent years.

If…

It is unlikely that funding will become available any time soon for such a logistically demanding form of archaeological excavation, in such a remote corner of Britain. In its absence, we must accept that this particular riddle cannot immediately be solved. It has, however, given us a sense of the kind of riddle to be found in these hills, and of the prize we might win in solving them.

Although, in this place by this cold lough, it is not possible to state conclusively that traces remain of an ancient civilisation, this is not the case for every part of these hills, or for every tale. There are hidden corners of this landscape in which legends have been preserved that do already have evidence to support them – evidence drawn from archaeology, etymology, and history. Not every chase ends in uncertainty; not all the quarry we hunt can ultimately disappear into a fog of uncertainty. Hunt in the right place, and we can indeed capture the prize.

We return to the hunt for the Duergar…

From the Drake Stone, I drop over the crags and descend towards Harbottle. I pass swiftly through the little village, before leaving the road and heading off southwards, into Harbottle Woods. These are the northern portion of a sizeable complex of forestry occupying the northeastern fringes of the Otterburn Range, operated by the Forestry Commission. Not all is commercial woodland, though. Intermingled with the pines there are a patchwork of nature reserves, and stretches of natural woodland. Some of these latter little forests are very special places indeed…

I follow the track through the pines for just under three kilometres, before I am disgorged onto a well-tarmacked road running east-west. Today, this little highway is called the Burma Road, and connects the western parts of the Range with the little village of Holystone in Coquetdale. Underlying the modern road is another one, far older. This too was a military construction, but the soldiers who built it were not squaddies on any Majesty’s service; rather, they were legionaries serving the emperor of Rome.

The Romans chose this spot to drive a road across the moors, to connect their highway of Dere Street to the west with that of the Devil’s Causeway running through the Northumberland lowlands. They did so for a reason; a substantial cluster of ancient remains is to be found around Holystone, suggesting that this place once held some importance in the region. At that time, this was a key junction in the highway network; now however, it has been reduced to a sleepy backwater. The only vehicles that cross the moors here are those of the Ministry of Defence and the Forestry Commission; the public road up Coquetdale, by contrast, terminates at the head of the valley. It is a road that leads to nowhere but heather and hillside; anyone wishing to cross to the other side of the Cheviots by vehicle must make a detour to Redesdale in the west, or else circumvent the range entirely through the lowlands to the east.

Just because it receives less traffic, however, does not mean this place has become any the less special – it is just a different kind of importance it holds, these days. The kind that accrues to ancient places where the remains of the past have long gone undisturbed…

To the west, from the Range, I can hear the crackle of gunfire breaking the stillness of the moors. The red flags are flying now, and I have no wish to skirt too close to the edge of the MOD estate. Instead, I follow the inviting form of a trail, winding southwards through fallen red bracken – heading for a different kind of forest.

As I descend to the south, the pines fade out around me. Other trees rise in their place. First there are the slender, silver forms of birch – common trees on Borderland hillsides, hardy and able to establish themselves in all sorts of remote places.

Behind them, however, rise other forms, very distinct. They are larger, thicker, far more twisted. In the cold air, stripped of leaves, they look more than a little sinister.

These are oaks; a particular kind of oak called ‘sessile’, adapted to survive in the cold, damp conditions of northern Britain. This particular oakwood is unusually high, and unusually large; even for trees as tough as these, it is rare to find them forming a forest in a place as bleak and barren as this.

The trees are not the only things that make this place special, though. Far more important is their age. Once, a great forest covered much of the hill country of the Cheviots. It was one that held an important place in the earliest legends of the place – but one which has over the years but cut down almost entirely. Here in the woods above Holystone, this oakwood called the Yardhope Oaks is one of the last surviving portions of that ancient wildwood. It is here, almost alone, that it is possible to revisit something of the old reality of these moors; here that we can recapture the spirit of the place.

It is a very particular kind of a spirit.

We are fortunate enough to know what deities the original Celtic inhabitants of this land connected to the various elements of the world they inhabited. This is slightly unusual – the Celtic peoples largely eschewed writing, and there are relatively few native texts and inscriptions available to us that record the details of their religion. The area near Hadrian’s Wall is an exception, however, since the soldiers garrisoning the frontier dedicated many inscribed altars to the native spirits of the land. This was not unusual in Roman times; the pagan Romans saw in native deities versions of their own, rather than alien entities, and would regularly worship composite gods who combined the native and Roman forms.

In the case of the forests and moors of the Cheviots, these inscriptions have left us a clear picture of the god that presided over them. The Roman soldiery named him either “Silvanus Cocidius”, or “Mars Cocidius”. Silvanus was the Roman god of the wilds, and particularly of forests; Mars was the god of war. The name Cocidius is a native British-Celtic one. It is typically translated as meaning “the Red One”, but this is slightly inaccurate; the Celts understood colours a little differently to our modern palette and so, in Welsh, the word “coch” actually applies to red, rust-red and reddish shades of brown. It is the colour of blood, of autumn leaves, of alder-sap (a tree connected by one inscription to Cocidius), and of the dead bracken in winter. Looking around the woodland of the Yardhope Oaks as I stood there, it was in the fact the colour of most of the forest floor…

Inscriptions to Cocidius are found all along the line of the Wall, though concentrated more on the western side. An outlier has also been found to the south, in Lancaster. To the north of the Wall, they are found at the outpost fort of Netherby on the northern edge of Cumbria, at the fort of Bewcastle, and in the fort at Risingham – this last, but one valley over from Coquetdale, just on the other side of the Otterburn moors.

We know of at least one major temple complex dedicated to Cocidius; in Cumberland, the fort at Bewcastle by the western foot of the Cheviots was named ‘Fanocodi’ or ‘Fanum Coccidi’, which translated as ‘shrine to Cocidius’. Multiple dedications to him have been recovered there, including some impressive silver plaques bearing his image.

Further east, there is another location whose name may derive from his. The geographical text “The Ravenna Cosmography” lists a series of locations in northern Britain, one of which is ‘Coccimeda’ or ‘Coccuveda’. Various interpretations have been offered for these names, including ‘red river’, ‘red slope’ and ‘red mead’; whatever the real truth, it is clear enough that the same tone of red connected to Cocidius is a part of the name. Given the locations of the places that appear before and after Coccimeda on the list, we can be reasonably sure that it refers to Holystone, at the lower end of the Yardhope woods – and it is here that the old Roman road across the moors bridged the river Coquet. The name of the river itself must also surely to be linked to the old Celtic name.

This linguistic evidence is circumstantial, and might connect to red stones found in the river, rather than a red god who ruled its banks. There are, however, additional pieces of physical evidence that can be interpreted as supporting the religious interpretation. There are a large number of ancient ruins around Holystone, some at least of which certainly had a sacred character – and if there was worship conducted at a place, then it follows that certain spirits must have been worshipped there. It is also the case that there is an unusually low level of evidence for agriculture in the upper Coquet valley; although there was plenty of ritual activity, and hillforts were erected on its summits, the bulk of the land itself seems to have been left wild. This has been interpreted as meaning it was a frontier zone – but it could equally mean that this area was left as a sacred forest, to be visited and defended, but never cut down. This would account for the presence of major roads, holy sites and forts in the area, but little active farming – and were this the case, then it is obvious enough that the regional god of the wilderness and the woods would certainly have been associated with the place.

One final connection exists. On a boulder-strewn ridge to the southwest of the woods, within the perimeter of the Range, there was discovered in 1980 a small Romano-British shrine. The god to whom it was dedicated was depicted there in a relief carving, on the face of one of the boulders. On the occasion of this particular visit to the woods, I was unable to visit the spot – the red flags were up, and live firing in progress on the Range meant visitors were not welcome. I returned again, however, at a later date, and was able to explore the site in full (this trip is documented in detail in my book, “The Ghosts of the Forest“). The carving appears as follows;

The image is clearly that of a warrior god – and the Romans connected Cocidius, in their inscriptions, both to Silvanus and the god of war, Mars. The archaeologists who published the follow-up paper reporting on the discovery felt that it might well represent Cocidius, and entitled the paper “Yardhope; a Shrine to Cocidius?”; the iconographic depiction is not dissimilar to some other images of him, the location in the wilds is suggestive, and the location in a valley with linguistic connections to his name points in the same direction too. All is circumstantial – but the volume of circumstantial evidence is unusually high.

We are left with a web of tentative associations between the valley of Coquetdale and an ancient Celtic wilderness god. If these connections are indeed real, then it would inevitably be in the wild places of this landscape that his cult would be housed; in the forests, moors and hillsides of the region that his spirit would have been believed to dwell.

It is, of course, in just these wild corners of the Coquetdale landscape that, in later times, the Duergar were believed to dwell. It is my belief that this is not a coincidence. I have come to believe, after many years of research, that the folktales of the Duergar represent the last remnant of the ancient belief in Cocidius; that the people of Coquetdale preserved the memory of the ancient spirit worshipped by their ancestors for a millenium and more, and that even today those tales remain a vital part of the land’s traditions.

For such a scenario to represent the truth, it would be necessary for legends of Cocidius to have survived throughout the intervening years. Between the era of the Roman inscriptions to Cocidius and the recording of the tales of the Duergar at the end of the 19th century, there would of necessity be strands of tradition that maintained the memory of the ancient spirit. There is of course in Britain a fairly substantial body of medieval and post-medieval legend available; and if we can trace within those legends evidence of entities intermediate between Cocidius and the Duergar, then it increases substantially the possibility that the two sets of legends are indeed connected.

We do not have to look far for such a connection. In 1813, Walter Scott published a letter sent to him by the historian Robert Surtees, containing a story that more than fits the bill;

“In the year before the great Rebellion, two young men from Newcastle were sporting on the High Moors above Elsdon, and, after pursuing their game several hours, sat down to dine in a green glen, near one of the mountain streams. After their repast, the younger lad ran to the brook for water; and after stooping to drink, was surprised, on lifting his head again, by the appearance of a brown dwarf, who stood on a crag covered with brackens across the burn.

“This extraordinary personage did not appear to be above half the stature of a common man; but was uncommonly stout and broad-built, having the appearance of vast strength; his dress was entirely brown, the colour of the brackens, and his head covered with frizzled red hair; his countenance was expressive of the most savage ferocity, and his eyes glared like a bull.

“It seems he addressed the young man: first threatening him with his vengeance for having trespassed on his demesnes, and asking him if he knew in whose presence he stood? The youth replied that he supposed him to be the Lord of the Moors; that he had offended through ignorance, and offered to bring him the game he had killed. The dwarf was a little mollified by this submission; but remarked that nothing could be more offensive to him than such an offer; as he considered the wild animals as his subjects, and never failed to avenge their destruction. He condescended further to inform him, that he was, like himself, mortal, though of years far exceeding the lot of common humanity, and (what I should not have an idea of) that he hoped for salvation. He never, he added, fed on any thing that had life, but lived in the summer on whortle-berries, and in winter on nuts and applies, of which he had great store in the woods.

“Finally, he invited his new acquaintance to accompany him home, and partake his hospitality: an offer which the young man was on the point of accepting, and was just going to spring across the brook (which if he had done, says Elizabeth, the dwarf would certainly have torn him in pieces) when his foot was arrested by the voice of his companion, who thought he tarried long, and on looking around again, ‘the wee Brown Man was fled’. The story adds, that he was imprudent enough to slight the admonition, and to sport over the moors on his way homewards; but soon after his return, he fell into a lingering disorder, and died within the year.”

The location of the tales is “the high moors above Elsdon”. Standing at the western edge of the Holystone Woods, looking out over the heather of the Range, I was standing precisely 8 kilometres north of the little village of Elsdon – a place that was once the principal settlement of Redesdale, but has since yielded its status to Otterburn. The high moors to which the story refers are the selfsame moors over which I now gaze; the same landscape in which the tales of the Duergar are set, and in which there is to be found an ancient stone carving of a fierce, diminutive creature staring down from his rock.

This is but one connection. Scott wrote to Surtees because his curiosity regarding the Duergar had already been piqued. He had been introduced to their folklore by his longstanding collaborator Dr John Leyden; Leyden, in his turn, had gathered the traditions during an expedition to the remote country where Cumberland and Northumberland join. John Leyden travelled here in 1800 with his father, for the purpose of visiting the spa at Gilsland. The waters here were reputed to have medicinal properties, and Leyden’s father had been suffering from stomach problems; while residing at the spa, Leyden took the opportunity to explore the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall, and travelled all around the vicinity, collecting every fragment of tradition that he could gather. He was eventually to distill the stories he picked up on the wild spirits of the hills into a tale published in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; a ballad called the “Colt of Kielder” (“Cout o’ Keeldar” in the original dialect).

The being depicted in the Colt of Kielder no longer bears the name ‘Duergar’; rather, he is now called the “Brown Man of the Moors”. He is, however, recognisably the same entity;

“…And a Wee Man, of swarthy hue,

Upstarted by a cairn.

His russet weeds (clothes) were brown as heath,

That clothes the upland fell;

And the hair of his head was frizzly red,

As the purple heather-bell.

An urchin (hedgehog), clad in pickles red,

Clung cowering to his arm;

The hounds they howl’d, and backward fled,

As struck by Fairy charm.

“Why rises high the stag-hound’s cry,

Where stag-hound never should be?

Why wakes that horn the silent morn,

Without the leave of me?””

The Brown Man depicted in the tale of the Colt is, once again, a fearsome dwarf, hostile to the presence of humans within his domain. He is a guardian of the moorland wilderness, and watches over the wild creatures that dwell within it; any who hunt there must ask permission from him, or suffer ill for the omission. The tale’s central character – a Border Reiver from Kielder, called the ‘Colt’ – goes raiding across the moors without seeking such permission; and, worse, rides around a great stone within which the Brown Man was believed to dwell, challenging him to try and follow him. The foolish hero is punished severely for his arrogance; the Brown Man does indeed follow him across the moors, and imparts to his waiting enemies the means by which he may be slain. The whole narrative of the tale is constructed to drive home the point that the spirit of the moors is not one to be trifled with.

If we look for connections between this figure and the ancient Cocidius, they are even clearer than those we have identified for the Rothbury Duergar. The hill country around Gilsland forms the southern portion of the Bewcastle Fells; and it was at the little village of Bewcastle, a mere 10 km northwest of Gilsland, that the temple to Cocidius at Fanocodi was anciently sited. This place was one at the heart of his worship; to find a comparable being in the folklore of exactly this region is surely no coincidence. We may add to this the coincidence of their names; Cocidius, as we have seen, meant ‘red/brown one’ – a name that is virtually identical to ‘Brown Man’.

It was the Antiquaries of the 18th and 19th century who popularised the recording of folklore; before their time, the written record of such things is far poorer, and we must gaze further back to find evidence. Such evidence does exist, however. In my book “The Ghosts of the Forest” I trace these connections much, much further, identifying similar characters appearing in legends connected to the region originating in both the medieval and Dark Age eras. These more ancient tales are longer, more fantastic, and more eerily beautiful than any of the narratives yet presented here – and to present them appropriately would take far more than a blog post. If you would like to venture deeper into the ancient Celtic legends of the Cheviots, please do have a look at my book, “The Ghosts of the Forest: the Lost Mythology of the North“. You can read more, and if you wish order a copy, by clicking here.

Take together, I believe that all these connections, drawn from linguistics, archaeology, legendary literature and regional folklore, all combine to support one apparently incredible idea; that the ancient Celtic god of the Northumbrian wilds was still believed to watch over this landscape 1000 years after Christianity claimed these hills for its own. That the ancient religion of the druids did not in fact die, but in persisted alongside the mainstream civilisation of the flatlands. That a Celtic world long considered lost, did in truth survive – and is accessible to us still.

From the fringes of the Holystone Woods, I press on through the Yardhope oaks. Twisted, ancient forms line the path; the sinister sentinels of a long-forgotten forest, that here on the edge of the wild moors yet clings to life. Gazing on such forms, it is easy to imagine some ghost of ancient times lurking among their shadows. There is something about this place that demands that something magical should inhabit it; something about the place that feels distinct, special.

I head on, eastwards, following the line of the Holystone Burn as it flows towards the Coquet. I pass through a landscape of red-brown bracken, purple-silver birchbark, and the dark green of pine. Everything seems to be sleeping; the land dozing, with one eye half open, quietly watching me pass from within its winter torpor.

Beyond, I rejoin the road, and trace it toward Holystone village. I pass the mounds of ancient remains; earthworks of fortifications, settlements and burials, all scattered among the fields, heather and trees. Somewhere within these mounds, there doubtless lies the evidence to confirm or deny the conclusions offered in this blogpost; somewhere within the earth of Holystone lie inscriptions from the Roman era, that name the gods worshipped in this place. I would wager that the name of the Red One is among them.

The traces of ancient times here culminate in a most striking form, at the very northern edge of the village. Here, just by the point where the Roman road reaches the river Coquet, a little copse of trees hides a beautiful secret. I step within, and am rewarded with a unique sight; a stone-fringed pool, the original construction of which dates back to Roman times.

Today, a cross rises from the centre; the years when the pool was first shaped, however, lay long before the introduction of Christianity to this land. A stone sits by the side of the pool, currently supporting an image of Saint Paulinus; in older times, this stone sat within the pool, and a very different kind of image likely stood upon it. The lost history of this stone contains within it all manner of extraordinary possibilities, which are currently hidden within the surrounding earth – but that this past was indeed extraordinary is all too clear. The name of ‘Holystone’, that applies to the village and to the woods behind it, derives from this little rock; a sacred thing of extraordinary antiquity, the holy stone after which all was named. Holy to what, is a secret I hope we will one day uncover.

I walk on, through the village, passing pretty little houses, and a church fringed with the daffodils of early spring.

Beyond, I head southeastwards for a few kilometres, down the valley, before ascending again towards the moors. I climb up onto the western fringes of the Simonside Hills, and amidst a landscape of heather, crags and empty moor pass the night. I am thankful to say that no Duergar disturbed my slumber; the wilderness was happy to welcome this particular traveller, and I spent a peaceful night upon the heights.

When the morning broke, I rose, and head on for the final portion of my journey. A forestry track carries me over the interior of Simonside, through dense, rich-scented pinewoods…

Then through a landscape of eerie, piled up rocks…

And out onto the northern ridge.

Here, I am met by vast, expansive views. The whole of Coquetdale is visible, as is the Northumberland plain to the east. It is to the north and west, though, that the view is most striking. Here, the rolling summits and vast moors of the Cheviots are laid out, dominating the skyline. A great, wide world of wilderness, waiting to be explored.

In years past, this would have been an entirely forbidding place. The cold, dark hills were once inhabited by no-one but bandits and raiders; the moors once held little but the promise of death. Those were the years when the tales of the Duergar would have made most sense; a time when the wilderness was a hungry, hostile place whose appetite must be sated by offerings.

In more distant years still, it is not hard to imagine how much more frightening that wilderness might have been. Then too, this land was a wild, conflict-ridden frontier – but between Roman and Celt, rather than Englishman and Scot. In those earlier years, the wilderness would have been yet wilder; a dense, primordial forest, home to wolves, boar and bears. Wild tribes and wild beasts would both have awaited the unwary; the threats in those times came not simply from weather or landscape, but from animal and human inhabitants too. Just as the Duergar of later years might have seemed a suitable supernatural representation of the hazards of the place, so too an ancient, red god might have seemed the natural embodiment of the landscape; a fearsome, warlike ghost, stalking the shadows at the edge of the trees.

Those years are now done. Peace has come upon the North, and the moors over which the Brown Man watches are now accessible as never before. Hiking routes have been marked out here; maps are available that plot the landscape in detail, and satellite images may be accessed to supplement them. There are guidebooks, and internet guides such as this one – a host of resources enabling the human inhabitants of the land to venture into places once closed off to them.

Yet still, for all the passing of time, traces of that ancient savagery remain. As the winter breezes rake past the tors, and the ice crackles underfoot, it is not hard to imagine this a hostile place. In the darkness between the boulders, in the shadows that lengthen in the chasms it is not hard to imagine the hostile eyes of some invisible spirit gazing out, wishing only ill on those who trespass in its domain.

In the stories of the landscape, these spirits endure – and we may encounter them, if we have the desire to do so. There is a whole world of ancient spirits, the ghosts of lost religions, waiting for us; both in the pages of old texts, and also in the landscapes they were believed to inhabit. To journey in search of them is a fascinating pursuit, and I commend it to anyone.

If you would like to know more, to follow my path into the wilds, or to look for ways to find one of your own, do see my book “The Ghosts of the Forest: the Lost Mythology of the North“. It is full of tales such as this – and many far more extraordinary than this one has ever been. It may change your perception of the Borderland entirely, and reveal the possibility of all sorts of adventures. I hope you have enjoyed this journey, and wish you the best of luck in finding your own…

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