In the Border Country — Text and Context

A Landscape of Layers: Roman, Medieval, and Romantic

Crockett’s method is to overlay historical periods on a single location. At Gilsland, for instance, he notes the Roman fort of Amboglanna, the medieval Lanercost Priory, and the “Kissing Bush” where Scott proposed to Charlotte Carpenter. The Roman Wall is not merely a ruin but a spine along which later stories cluster: the “Nine Nicks of Thirlwall” are seen from the Shaws, and the Irthing river “crosses the Roman Wall at Gilsland” before winding through “some of the richest scenery in Cumberland.”

This stacking of eras is reinforced by the book’s structure. Each site is introduced with its physical features—a “Runic Cross nearly fifteen feet high, of the Caedmon order”—then immediately linked to a literary or historical figure. The effect is cumulative: the reader is never allowed to see the landscape as simply natural; it is always already inscribed with human meaning.

The Texture of Place: Water, Stone, and the Named Feature

Crockett’s prose is dense with specific, often tactile details. Rivers are not just named but given character: the Irthing “courses amongst some of the richest scenery,” while the Eden receives Meg Merrilies’s body. Stones are described by size and function—a “huge boulder” where Scott proposed, a “Runic Cross” of a certain height. The naming of features is obsessive: “Spade-Adam, or the Waste,” “the Nine Nicks of Thirlwall,” “Crag Loch.”

This habit of double-naming (the Waste is also Spade-Adam; Burdoswald is also Amboglanna) suggests a landscape that resists single identity. Crockett often supplies the older, Roman, or local name alongside the modern one, as if to remind the reader that every place has a palimpsest of histories. The effect is not pedantic but evocative: the land itself seems to speak in multiple tongues.

Scott as a Lens, Not a Destination

Though the book is dedicated to Scott, Crockett uses him as a tool for reading the landscape rather than as a subject. At Gilsland, Scott’s proposal is a local anecdote, but the real interest is in how the place becomes “Guy Mannering Land”—a phrase that turns fiction into a geographical category. Crockett corrects guidebooks: Meg Merrilies was not buried at Upper Denton; the “treacherous landlady, Meg Mumps” lies there instead. The real heroine “was drowned in the Eden at Carlisle.”

This willingness to correct received lore is characteristic. Crockett treats Scott’s novels as sources of local knowledge, but he also treats local knowledge as something that can be wrong. The result is a travel book that is also a quiet argument about how we remember: not through monuments alone, but through the stories that cling to them, whether accurate or not.

In the Border Country rewards a reader who is willing to move slowly, letting each paragraph accumulate its layers of Roman stone, medieval priory, and Romantic anecdote. Crockett’s voice is that of a knowledgeable companion who occasionally corrects a guidebook or quotes a ballad, but never loses sight of the physical ground beneath the stories. The illustrations by James Orrock are not reproduced in this digital edition, but the text itself paints with a similar attention to colour and contour.

Those summer evenings spent with Crockett’s Border Country taught me how a place holds its stories in stones and quiet lanes. There was a similar hush in A Wanderer in Venice — A Closer Reading, though the water reflects a different sort of light. Both ask only for patience, and give back a deeper seeing. A gentle companionship, that.