Reiver Country

Strangers beware
Throughout the Reiving years, travel was a dangerous business. Strangers met with suspicion, fear and hostility. The traveler had to move cautiously by day, always sought shelter before night fall and rarely found welcome.The Border lands straddle the once disputed boundary and Debatable Land (see panel on right) between two of the most energetic, aggressive, talented and altogether formidable nations in history: England and Scotland.

"They stretch in one broad sweep from the Solway Firth in the West to the Northumbrian and Berwickshire coast in the East"

They stretch in one broad sweep from the Solway Firth in the West to the Northumbrian and Berwickshire coast in the East and comprise the Cheviot Hills and parts of the Southern Uplands and the Pennines. To the West they are the Solway Coast and the Eden Valley, to the East the Merse. They are riven by the waters of the Nith, the Annan, the Esk, the Teviot, the Tweed and by Redesdale, Coquetdale, Tyndale and of course Liddesdale: scenery of so many of the bloodiest events of the reiving years.

An ungovernable area
The Border country was divided for administrative purposes into three Marches:East, Middle and West - with a boundary for the English and Scottish side of each March.

With reckless thieving and violence, keeping the peace seemed a hopeless task and corruption and adversity was rife. Only the English warden's complaints have survived in the records. They describe the place as 'ungovernable'.

The award-winning Shepherds Walks website provides a superb range of maps and other resources to help you explore the Reiver country on foot.

The debatable land was an area 20 miles long by 8 miles wide between the realms of Scotland and England that belonged to neither Crown.

In practice it was a no mans' land, with its own 'laws', which in practice, were virtually impossible to impose.

The clans who lived there were notoriously mercurial in their political allegiances and the debatable land was known to be "English at its pleasure and Scottish at its will".