ABSTRACT
The remote upland valleys such as Tynedale, Redesdale and Liddesdale showed distinct similarities to the world of the Highland Scottish clans further north and were removed from any kind of state control, dominated by clan chiefs and family ties. Part of the Borders was officially known as 'The Debatable Lands' in reference to this independence and lawlessness. This was the land of the raiding Border Reiver and Mosstrooper. The contemporary line on the map is almost incidental, because the Borders between Scotland and England are a distinct and continuous, though heterogeneous, region, ranging between uplands and lowlands. Neither the north of England nor the lowlands of Scotland geographically stop at the current political border. It is a landscape with few large towns between Edinburgh, Carlisle in the west and Newcastle in the east. Political authority in Scotland passed from Edinburgh to Parliament in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
