It was – still is – a magic land. A green, rolling landscape, westwards from the east coast off Holy Island, with the English border dipping southward along the Cheviot hills, past Flodden Field where King James IV and 9000 of his Scottish subjects were slaughtered by Henry VIII's shock troops, to Kelso with its twelfth-century abbey and on into ‘Walter Scott country’ – Melrose, Abbotsford and Selkirk, where for 33 years Scott, ‘the Great Unknown’ for most of them, sat as Sheriff in his courtroom, and to Ettrick Forest.

In Lanarkshire and west towards Glasgow and Clydesdale surroundings change. The people of Berwick, Roxburgh and Selkirkshire look north and south, to Edinburgh and beyond, and to the lands of the Five Abbeys, St Cuthbert's Way, which leads to Jedburgh, and the smugglers' route over the Cheviots.

The land was fertile –marsh and lochs in ancient times – but the English border was close and enough blood was shed there to give those north of it a very strong sense of their Scottishness. It was the land of the reivers, making cattle theft endemic so that Thomas Pringle, born on the farm Blaiklaw, also known by its earlier name of Easterstead, four miles south-east of Kelso, on 5 January 1789, was less surprised than he might have been in his later years at endemic cattle theft from both sides of an African border.

It was a land of dissenters – ‘Secessionists’ like Pringle's own family, gypsies, whose Scottish ‘capital’ was almost on the border, at Town Yetholm (yett = gate) and poets.