“The Debatable Land” by Graham Robb [Book Review]

“The Debatable Land” by Graham Robb brings the historical drama! The author, almost by chance, uncovered one of Britain’s most enduring, and ironically, forgotten mysteries. The question is: should he have left it alone? I can’t say enough about this book in terms of its contribution to understanding the British Isles as a whole as well as its utility as a magnifying glass of sorts bearing light on some of the deepest and darkest peculiarities of the English-Scottish hinterlands. Wow! What an eye-opener!

STAR RATINGS:

DEBATABLE LAND BOOK STATS:

• Published 2018
• 334 total pages
• 239 pages of text
• 30 chapters
• List of 25 illustrations
• List of figures
• A Guide to Pronunciation
• Two 4-page color picture insets
• 1 Appendix section with 15 exquisitely detailed maps!
• 1 Chronology section
• 1 Notes section
• 1 Works Cited section
• 1 Index section
• Hardcover available

DEBATABLE LAND BOOK REVIEW:

“The Debatable Land” will leave you on the ropes feeling a bit battered after reading each chapter, and I mean that in a good way. Basically, it packs a historical and linguistic wallop. Graham Robb’s writing can best be summed up by the words fun, witty, and circumspect; what a truly enjoyable read this book is.

The story put forth by the author really captivated me from the off. Think about it: there’s apparently some sort of mystical hinterland locked in perpetual struggle between the borders of England and Scotland that, despite being settled by treaties over the last 2,000 years, still remains lost in time and oblivious to modern-day political realities. Left alone to their own devices, the few hundred people of this so-called The Debatable Land carry on a pre-medieval system of law-making and law-breaking that is anachronistic and out of step with all modern laws and geographic definitions. I would call The Debatable Land a fossil, but this animal (entity) is still very much alive!

The whole idea of a 3,000 year old society continuing to practice their traditional culture unchanged and undaunted in the face of modernity is something that should be applauded. That’s what Graham Robb’s book amounts too: he’s documented an ethnography of a uniquely “British” people.

“It is one of the joys of studying history that first impressions are always wrong. Truth is proverbially stranger than fiction, but only because no guiding mind has contrived to make it credible. The truth is that the lawless borderlands of the Middle Ages had a fully developed, indigenous legal system.”

Page 67

Even before medieval times, the people of the Debatable Land have been reiving (raiding, stealing, pillaging, self-regulating) each other’s lands, and continue to do so undisturbed and uncaring of modern conventions. It sounds fallacious, but it’s entirely factual.

The brilliance of Graham Robb himself is that he is an actual resident of this area. Having moved his family up from London a few years before writing this book, he himself was entirely oblivious to its existence. It was only after arriving in Liddlesdale to his newly purchased home did he discover that there was WAY more to living on this western border between England and Scotland than he had ever conceived possible, and he’s a Scotsman with roots from this area!

At times this book reads more like a travel bloggers guide than an actual historiography; however, the most intriguing part of this narrative is that we are reliving his discoveries as he made them, taking us play-by-play into each and every nook and cranny of the Debatable Land. Robb is a virtual road scholar.

“It is easy to think of the tribes of ancient Britain as either pro-English or pro-Scottish, but the territory of the Selgovae belongs to a different era…” p.201 “The Solway Firth, where one country seems to pull away from the other, was not an ancient border after all. It had been no more a boundary to the people of the Iron Age than it was to the oystercatchers and the barnacle geese.”

Page 203

The Debatable Land is very well researched, from front to back the author has done his digging into the history of the area including locations that appear in Arthurian legends. It’s quite impressive to say the least. Chief among his support material are a whole host of maps that are included in his Appendix section and referred to throughout the book.

It’s the people of this land that really make this book special. Interspersed amongst the historical facts are numerous, often humorous, vignettes of life along this ineluctable borderland. From stories of missing bicycles, to rubbish bins, to bus passengers and their chatter, many of Robb’s insights into the culture of the area can be seen through the eyes of its own people as the author captures their stories as any intrepid journalist might do. Unfiltered quotations in the dialect of the Debatable Land offer the best and most authentic version of its own history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• Robb, Graham. 2018. The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
• ISBN-13: 978-0393285321
• Amazon Link.

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