Living a British Borderland

On August 26, 1850, Queen Victoria visited the town of Berwick to open Robert Stephenson’ Royal Border Bridge, a grand 2160-foot viaduct spanning the river Tweed. The Queen received a loyal address from the Lord Mayor before an honor guard and audience of several thousand people. To add dignity to the event, a triumphal arch had been erected over the railway line near where the presentation of the address took place. On the arch, picked out in gold lettering, were the words ‘The last act of the Union.’ 1 In so referencing the 1707 Act of Union—which had joined England and Scotland together in one state—the new bridge was represented as reinforcing and embodying the ties between the two countries. Strictly speaking, of course, Berwick was not in Scotland: the Royal Border Bridge did not bridge the formal border between the two nations. Yet for all that, it was not misnamed. In crossing the Tweed, it crossed what was widely believed to be the natural boundary line on the eastern seaboard, before giving way to the Cheviot Hills further west. Traveling north as a young man towards the end of the nineteenth century, the English writer A.G. Bradley thought he ‘was entering Scotland’ as his train rumbled over the Border Bridge into Berwick, the long-standing impression that the town was only uncertainly English proving ineradicable. 2 This was true of other parts of the nineteenth-century Anglo- Scottish Borderland. Writing about the bleak moorland around Kielder in north Northumberland in 1835, William Chatto found that ‘the precise boundaries of each kingdom [were] rather” ill to red ,’ a judgment with which Bradley would concur three-quarters of a century later when he visited the same district. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Bridge (graph theory) · Gentry · Geography · Honor · Queen (butterfly) · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Political Systems and Governance · Scottish History and National Identity

• A Persistent Borderland

  Andrew Wells•Zeitschrift für Anglistik und…•2022

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• Westward on the high-hilled plains’

  Gareth Roddy•Contemporary British History•2018

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• Race, Empire, and the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Nationhood

  Open Access•Colin Kidd•The Historical Journal•2003

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• Word and Deed

  Open Access•Adrian Jones•The Historical Journal•2000

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