Late on Sunday afternoon, I stood in a lay-by holding a cheap whiteboard. ‘Peebles’ was scrawled across it. Within three minutes of standing there, it had begun to rain. Within five I’d been given the middle finger. Within ten I was speeding along to Peebles in the backseat of a Mercedes. Edinburgh’s gothic towers shrank in the rear-view mirror.
It was the first time I’d hitched a lift in Britain and it was just about one of the shortest waits I’d had. Things were looking good for my British hitching prospects. Most drivers tell me they haven’t seen a hitcher for years but clearly the principle is still alive and well. My driver was called Mal and he told me he lived in Peebles.
“Oh nice! What do you do in Peebles?” I asked enthusiastically, enthralled by the excitement of my first lift.
“I live there,” he grunted.
An awkward silence followed as we both looked out the window. I checked my phone to see how far to Peebles: a whole hour…
Luckily, Lorna who was sat quietly in the passenger seat piped up with some small talk and in no time the three of us were chatting away amicably. Despite the unsteady start, we made light work of the winding road to Peebles.
I knew three things about Peebles. I’d leant two of them from a quick glance at the local newspaper. The first was that throwing relatively unusual projectiles at your spouse is very common. The paper was littered with headlines like, ‘Borders woman, 60, admits throwing a garden chair at long term partner,’ and ‘Forklift driver admits throwing cardboard box at wife’. The other day an unfortunate vase was apparently a victim of another dispute.
The other thing I’d learnt from the paper was that on a single day in 1629, 27 Peeblian women were burnt alive for witchcraft.
The third (which I didn’t learn from the paper) was that Peebles is apparently a very nice place.
It certainly conformed to the third as we drove in and it looked beautiful, nestled neatly in a sweeping valley. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the witches and asked Mal all about it. He pointed out the Venlaw, as the hill is known, shrouded in trees and looking a dark and foreboding place. It had been in the news because the local council and Nicola Sturgeon have recently been making a big deal of pardoning all the women condemned for witchcraft.
“Ay,” Mal knew of this, “It wasn’t a very nice way to go. But…” he paused before suddenly becoming quite animated, “there are holes in the road, the trains are a mess and the schools don’t work but no! Let’s forgive the bloody witches!” Taken aback by his sudden outburst I decided I’d stop asking about the witches for fear of further wrath.
One of the joys of hitchhiking is that if the driver is local they’ll give you some excellent local knowledge. One such thing is pub recommendations and Mal had an extensive knowledge of these, “The Crown’s good. They’ll entertain you there too, the Bridge has great beer, then there’s the..” such and such and so on. There was quite a list of pubs it turned out, “Whatever you do though, don’t go to the Central. Real spit and sawdust kind of place. Kinda place that has a queue at 11 in the morning. Real rough. All the pubs are good but stay away from the Central.”
I thanked them both for the advice and made my way around the corner to the Central.
True to Mal’s description, an old fella with a red nose sat guard in a wheelchair blocking the doorway, puffing away on a cigarette. I squeezed past into the tiny bar behind. Disappointingly, there wasn’t any sawdust although there was a fair bit of spitting or at least some noisy hawking. In truth, I found the place to be very pleasant and felt sure Mal hadn’t given it a proper crack. Admittedly, the only decoration on the walls was a TV showing the racing but the chat among the handful of red-nosed gents was lively. The place clearly had a lucky charm too as the man next to me won a scratchy. A minute later his winning cheer turned to a grunt as he realised he’d only won a pound.
Shortly after, someone called Danny came in with a box from the chippy and the ladies all chirped up, joking about his ‘big sausage’ which got a superb reception from all the punters. It doesn’t matter where in Britain you are, or how old you are, jokes about sausages always seem to go down well. In fact, the jokes usually go down better than the sausages themselves. It turned out he actually had nuggets anyway but he made sure everyone had some.
I stayed for a pint of Tennant’s which I nursed quietly in the corner before, inspired by my fellow punters, heading to the chippy for some haggis fritters. I made my way down to the river to eat it. Relaxing as my supper spot was, sat on the grassy playing fields beside the Tweed, it was evening and I had to find somewhere to stay for the night. I had two options: stay in town and risk having a vase launched at me, or head into the woods and camp among the burnt witches. After careful consideration, I chose the latter.
Luckily, Peebles is surrounded by absolutely beautiful country. Above the town, the hills give way to vast, curving valleys, drystone walls, hazy mountains and the serpentine drift of the Tweed. On my way out of town, I had a quick dip in the rust red waters, beneath the gaze of the crumbling Neidpath Castle and then I marched off to find a spot to pitch my tent.
In the woods, it was deadly silent but for the distant blowing of branches on the hill face and the evening birdsong. As dusk gathered I sat by the fire, turning pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, an eloquent elegy to the forest. I tried to bask in the magic of the woods, thinking of magical tales of fairies like that of the young man Tamlane, the Scottish legend in which Tamlane falls asleep in the woods not far from Peebles and is whisked away to become a fairy knight. Fortunately he’s saved only by the boundless love of the fair Janet.
In truth, I was absolutely terrified. Every leaf that rustled and wing that flapped had my chest doing somersaults. I nearly had a full-blown heart attack when a fox trotted up to me. Once I realised it was just a fox and not a crazy witch I calmed down a bit and we watched each other for a moment before he nonchalantly trotted off. His dirty coat looked like an old guardsman’s. Moments later, a hare hopped over to say a cautious hello which despite its kind intentions nearly sent me into cardiac arrest. When I’d regained my senses, I felt we had something in common as it looked about jumpily, nervously stirring at every noise.
I didn’t sleep very well. I was slightly cold and remained fearful that either an angry farmer with a shotgun or an axe-wielding madman would come and do me in at any moment. Not to mention the brigade of ghosts that presumably wander these gnarled woods. As luck would have it though I was still in one piece by the morning.
I made my way back into Peebles, where I discovered a museum entirely dedicated to the author John Buchan who famously wrote The 39 Steps. It was a small museum and as I stepped through the door an old Englishman in Tweed beckoned me in. “Welcome to the world of John Buchan,” he announced a little creepily before launching into Buchan's life story which was, I must admit, actually highly interesting. Although he died aged 64, he wrote over 100 books, was an MP, a Governor of Canada, director of Reuters, and chairman of a publishing company. He’d worked decommissioning the concentration camps the British had built during the Boer War and had been central to the government’s propaganda campaigns during the First World War. Amid all of that, he was also the foremost thriller writer of his day.
It was getting on so I decided to get on the road and lugged my bag to the edge of town.
After barely 20 minutes I was picked up by an artist called Emily. We wove our way along through the towering Borders country talking about her project to create a footpath along the entire banks of the Tweed. We stopped and picked up her colleague, Rachel, and together they explained how they hope to allow people to be able to walk source to sea alongside the historic river. They’d not met much resistance, fortunately, except for a few grumpy fishermen, but then again as Rachel pointed out “there’ll always be a few grumpy fishermen.”
They dropped me off by the Tweed and inspired by their effort I set off to walk the few miles into Selkirk along its thicketed banks. Set high on a hill Selkirk commands glorious views and I soon discovered it was an important week for the town what with it being the Common Riding on Friday. There were several men dressed in finery with numerous rosettes pinned to their chests. The lady in the tea shop told me what was going on. Riding is deeply engrained in Borders culture and once a year the young men of the town gallop round the town’s boundaries, led by that year’s Standard Bearer. The bearer has to be an unmarried man and is elected every year and much like the Lord Mayor is a ceremonial post. As luck would have it this year’s standard bearer was in the teashop so I spoke to him and he told me all about his week of duties and what a great honour it is. Most towns in the Scottish Borders have a similar tradition and according to one man who gave me a lift, they’re an excellent excuse to get pissed and have a fight as much as anything else.
As I waited on the outskirts, reading the Selkirk Common Riding 2022 booklet the lady at the teashop gave me, a man dressed in a Celtic tracksuit hobbled up and said out of the blue making me jump, “Ay that hill’s a fuckin’ bitch.”
He pointed out the hill in question, “I’ve been up it four times already and I tell ya, never again!” I was still a little startled so questioned him and for the next 20 minutes he explained the entire route he’d taken in great detail, emphasising several times the severity of the challenge and pointing out all the most trying parts.
After a while he changed the topic completely, “I’m dying for a smoke,” he said, “I was in town earlier and nobody was giving me one! The government’s not given me any money. They’ve got it all wrong, you know, not giving me any money. All I want is a smoke. That Boris Johnstone has got a ferret up his arse!”
With that he continued on his way, panting back into town. I never quite worked out why he climbed the hill four times.
I was picked up by a very friendly Scot called Brian and we drove together to Hawick. He had a warm, weathered face and had spent all day fencing in the hills. He’d whiled away his youth hitchhiking and missed it bitterly. “Ay, it’s great to see a hitcher, it really is,” he told me. “I miss those days… when you don’t know what day of the week it is and the weekend just rolls on forever.” He looked longingly at the road ahead. He told me how he’d love to buy the two donkeys in the village and head off on the road. He’d do it too if it wasn’t for his girlfriend. He took me right through Hawick to a good spot on the A7 out of town. As I thanked him and we shook hands he suddenly remembered something in his rucksack and pulled out a long, green finger of marijuana. “Here, have this lad. I grew it myself.”
Then he remembered something else and whipped out of a side pocket a small jar of mushrooms, “You better have these too!” tossing them over to me.
“Ah, It’s great to see a hitcher!” he called as he drove away.
I was hoping to get to Carlisle before nightfall and was still an hour away. Fortunately, someone pulled up before long and I piled into the passenger seat. His name was Stewart and he was a passionate, eloquent man, expressive in his conversation and completely open about his life, opinions and worries. He was driving to Stoke-on-Trent to consider selling the business he’d set up 15 years ago. “What’s the point,” he questioned vehemently, “of working your whole life to get a stress-induced illness that costs your life? What’s the point? Zero! Nothing! Zilch!” He hit the wheel as he said it.
The journey was clearly a big moment in his life, much as it was in mine. We talked through our predicaments, working them like potters at the wheel, moulding them into something recognisable. Though we were at very different stages of our lives we shared a commonality that bonded us. Perhaps it was heightened by the fact we both knew that when we reached Carlisle we’d never speak again.
Before long we were there, pulling up under the watchful gaze of the dark red cathedral. We shook hands and I climbed out into the evening sun and Carlisle’s quiet streets.