I'm a Reiver

One Brit has spent his life in the fantasy world of rock, and the other, the antithesis, rising to make an unsuccessful run for British Prime Minister. Both brighter than the average bear. 1949 was an exceptional year for being born. 1973 was as well, so it seems. And the distance between Newcastle upon Tyne, England and Crieff, Scotland by road is 190 miles and three plus hours driving. Knopfler is the son of an architect, poor lad, and Stewart is from a long line of Scots. One’s a former journalist turned musician, and the other is a writer turned politician turned academician.

What started this article was the confluence of finishing the last chapters of Rory Stewart’s The Marches, while listening to Border Reiver by Mark Knopfler. What follows is what the book, song and authors have in common.

Jazz for the Layman

Border Reiver is another story sung by Mark Knopfler. That’s all the boy knows how to do—tell offbeat stories, compose music and wail on a six string—Stratocaster, Les Paul, National, he uses them all. He does a job on all three that’s hard to compare to other singer-songwriters. On Border Reiver, he’s moving toward a more traditional musical styling to match the story.

Albion Reiver, 1963—photo by Pimlico Badger - 2009-04-12 13-40-14

The lyrics are obscure to any but Brits of a certain generation. Knopfler borrows the role of a lorry driver on his route. “She’s an Albion.” Took a bit to suss it out, but in the 50s and 60s Albion Motors produced a truck model named “Reiver”. Manufactured in Glasgow, Scotland, and named for that region’s infamous outlaw clans living on the border between England and Scotland.

Border Reivers were in the longstanding Anglo-American tradition of rebels, highway robbers and pirates that Knopfler returns to repeatedly.

Dire Straits’ breakout recording, Sultans of Swing arrived late to the show in 1979 in the States, after an avalanche of stellar rock had already poured forth from both sides of the pond. First hearing Dire Straits, my reaction was ‘holy shit, where’s this guy been?’ The 80s were around the corner, with pop music drowning any remaining musical soul in commercialization. Hendrix was gone, Cream broken up, Dylan gone into seclusion, the Beatles dissolved and John Lennon would be assassinated the following year. The rock and roll party looked to be winding down when Knopfler arrived on the scene, though I don’t think it fazed him.

At the time, the song’s lyrics were not what was expected on the radio, then the guitar solo began… Reminded me a bit of the flurry of notes recorded on Steely Dan’s Reelin’ in the Years, only consummately executed. They both had that furious urge for showing off what they had.

“With Sultans of Swing a breath of fresh air was exhaled into the airwaves in the late '70s. Sure, Donald Fagen and Tom Waits were writing great lyrics about characters you'd love to meet and Jeff Beck and Eddie Van Halen were great guitar players. But Knopfler, he could do both things as well or better than anybody out there in his own way, and didn't seem to have any obvious rock influences unless you try to include Dylan. Like his contemporary and future duet partner Sting, Knopfler's ideas were intellectually and musically stimulating, but were also accessible to the average listener. It was almost like jazz for the layman. Sultans of Swing was a lesson in prosody and tasty guitar playing that has seldom been equaled since. If you aren't familiar with Sultans of Swing or haven't listened to it in a while, you should definitely check it out.”

from Rick Moore in American Songwriter, 2013

Though it took until Brothers In Arms from the same CD. And Telegraph Road from the Love over Gold CD—for me to realize Knopfler was no one trick pony. At 9:30 minutes into the Telegraph Road recording, the last five minutes of the orchestral coda nailed it. We heard him playing Telegraph Road one summer evening on the lawn at Wolf Trap and it was rhapsodic. When he came back through town later with Emmylou, we saw that concert, too.

From the first, before Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel were mourning the loss of a workingman’s future, Knopfler wrote of the fading industrialized British midlands, of ships from the Clyde sailing their last. For Telegraph Road, the immediate scene he saw from outside a tour bus was the afore-mentioned road leading to Detroit, but the story in his head was that of his home country.

He’d had the licks from the start, but his writing has grown stronger CD over CD. Not all cute, not as sarcastic as Money for Nothing, which I have to believe is difficult for tthose among us lacking humor genes.

Listening to Border Reiver, I took what lyrics I could to mean being a smuggler’s song, although I never understood the reference. Who or what the hell is a border reiver? Dunno.

“Reive, a noun meaning raid, comes from the Middle English (Scots) reifen. The verb reave meaning "plunder, rob", a closely related word, comes from the Middle English reven. There also exists a Northumbrian and Scots verb reifen. All three derive from Old English rēafian which means ‘to rob, plunder, pillage’. Variants of these words were used in the Borders in the later Middle Ages… The earliest use of the combined term 'border reiver' appears to be by Sir Walter Scott.”  

from Wikipedia article, Border Reiver

Knopfler has written so many songs about water, the life of sailors, shipbuilding, and River Tyne, you’d think he was born on a raft.

For those of us unfamiliar with British geography—myself definitely included, the River Tyne lies not far from the Scottish border. Coal and shipbuilding were major industries in the area. Knopfler was born just outside Newcastle upon the Tyne, so I suppose seafaring images come naturally. But what lies at the heart of his writing is the immediacy of people and place in his stories. He sees his world through the eyes of a journalist. And following the progress of his lyrics, he has traveled from a hometown boy to a man of the world.

So we arrive at the ex-member of Parliament, Rory Stewart.

In his first book, The Places in Between, Rory Stewart’s story about his trek across Afghanistan, he wrote about the multitude of people he met along the way, and begged hospitality for the night, sharing whatever food they had, in a tradition among Afghani tribes to honor passersby, using his broken Farsi learned from Pakistan. Stewart’s story stays markedly focused on these individuals, most of whom are illiterate farmers. However, traveling in a land of ruins and lost kingdoms, he uses both stories of the recent upheavals, as well as those of the region’s long history of a multitude of preceding cultures and peoples going back to antiquity.

Rory Stewart’s Afghanistan only if you need to review…

In his later book, The Marches: A Borderland Journey between England and Scotland, Stewart writes of another walkabout, like the Aussies call them, this time in his own backyard. He doesn’t feel it’s necessary to explain reasons for his ventures. They aren’t explained any better than the European Australians’ grasp of why Aboriginal Australians checked out for self-imposed exiles coming into adulthood.

That he was following a British tradition going back to the days of the great explorers isn’t a theme he discusses—one suspects because he sees it as too obvious to bother noting.

Reading his first book, I had the impression he’d spent a great deal of time researching Afghanistan, before or after his trek. Reading The Marches, the depth of Stewart’s interest in history writ large becomes the dominant impression left by the book. His walkabouts become a method of grasping what it is humans through history do, an education he brings us along for.

The borderland he writes of is a messy tangle of cultures going back to before the Romans build Hadrian’s Wall across the narrows to keep the wild Gaels from descending out of the highlands. His family house lies in Crieff, Scotland. His then-Parliamentary constituency (Penrith and The Border) lay in Cumbria south of Hadrian’s Wall in England.

“Although Cumbria was previously believed to have formed the core of the Early Middle Ages Brittonic kingdom of Rheged, more recent discoveries near Galloway appear to contradict this.  For the rest of the first millennium, Cumbria was contested by several entities who warred over the area, including the Brythonic Celtic Kingdom of Strathclyde and the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria. Most of modern-day Cumbria was a principality in the Kingdom of Scotland at the time of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and thus was excluded from the Domesday Book survey of 1086. In 1092 the region was invaded by William II and incorporated into England. Nevertheless, the region was dominated by the many Anglo-Scottish Wars of the latter Middle Ages and early modern period and the associated Border Reivers who exploited the dynamic political situation of the region. There were at least three sieges of Carlisle fought between England and Scotland, and two further sieges during the Jacobite risings.”

From Wikipedia article, Cumbria

The Marches’ two-page preface is a vignette set when Stewart was six and striving to gain his father’s attention. He pulls a typical little boy stunt for attention. The preface ends when he realizes as he put it, “I saw from his face how frightened he was. I realized how easily I could hurt him. I never wanted to see him like that again.”

Reading that line on first opening the book, I knew I’d read it all the way through.

Chapter 1 begins:

“Thirty-three years later, in 2011, my father and I decided to march the length of Hadrian’s Wall together. I thought this walk would allow us to explore and answer questions about Scottish nationalism, Rome, frontiers and empires. He probably thought it would be a good opportunity to spend some time with his son. My father, who was eighty-nine, traveled down from our house in Scotland. I came across from my cottage in English Cumbria.”

from The Marches by Rory Stewart.

I didn’t know but one grandparent—the one who raised us—and none of my great grands, which could be just as well. I don’t know. One great grand—the Irish immigrant, Daniel Brown, I heard fought at Antietam, firing grapeshot at southern immigrants, then went wandering for a long while before coming home to die. His wife, another Irish immigrant, my great grandmother, Susan Barry, had her gangrenous leg sawed off without anesthesia with her own child holding her down. They both had to be hollowing ‘where is my god?’

“My research confirmed, however, that my father Brian was the son of Redvers son of George son of Alexander son of Alexander son of Charles son of David son of Davie son of David. And that all these men, my Stewart ancestors were in the same town doing the same things in the same square mile, right from their appearance on the first charred half-page of the earliest parish records.”

from The Marches by Rory Stewart.

I suppose it’s possible that where the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s engineers chose to separate Britain from the northern Gaelic tribes, who refused to stop invading became the later border lands, and because the border itself moved from time to time, there was this vague, in-between place that still exists today. Hadrian’s Wall—probably the best known place tourist can name for the Romans in Britain, and it’s well outside Italy.

It lies just north of the meandering River Irthing, you know. ‘Tis a runnel of a thing, wink, wink, say na more.

Crammel Linn waterfall on River Irthing—photo by Rnorv (en.wp) 2010

The effort to drain arable land from the border land marshes in earlier centuries was the backbreaking work of decades. Present efforts to restore the wetlands and rebalance the region’s ecology is reversing the process.  Was there a prehistoric forest where Kieder Forest Park and Northumberland National Forest now thrive? And south of Hadrian’s Wall, you’ll find the North Pennes AONB (translated as: ‘an area of outstanding natural beauty’).  And lest we forget, the Lake District National Park, and the Yorkshire Dales National Park. If it had all been cleared of trees, no one remains to tell of it.

Stewart describes hiking the Lake District as disturbingly barren of what Wordsworth and the other wandering Romantic poets had dreamed. In Northumberland, Stewart notes the missing farmers and keeps his peace about the political compromises made, though you know his heart’s with the farmers absent stories.

Is it a good thing these places have been brought back from human ‘settlement’—from even the lighter touch of farms or is it a note on our decline? Should the current wealthy among us buy what remains and turn it back to public land again? Visiting Acadia National Park, I forgave the Robber Barons.

I’m OK with we bipedal creatures becoming a smaller footprint. Humans have lots still to figure out, and the scientists are all about it, given time.

One day, I’d like to hike some that border land Stewart goes on so about, though if I can’t learn to fake a good accent, I mayn’t get so far.