The Bells were here: Scottish roots.
Last summer, Nancy and I walked the border between Wales and England, the birthplace of the relatives on my father’s side. My fascination with borders, identity, liminal space, and words found fertile ground during this walk. My search for understanding the meaning of Cynefin and Hireath became the quest of this pilgrimage as these two Welsh words, not easily translated into English, provided a daily contemplative focus.
This summer I wanted to continue to walk the borders or the frontier, of my mother’s side of my family, along the borderlands between England and Scotland. The walk was not a quest to search for the Bell family’s Scottish roots, yet this trip surprised as I found myself confronted with the obvious. The Bells were here.
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Travel days although all part of the experience of travel, demand levels of patience and forbearance that do not come naturally to me. Throw in jet lag, a long overnight flight, poor internet connections and well…. I am pretty much fried and at the end of my rope.
After arriving at Glasgow in the early morning after a sleepless night, my goal was to get to Carlisle which was near the start of my Hadrian’s Wall Walk. Carlisle is the major city in Cumbria, a district in the extreme corner of northwest England. It marked the border that the Romans established and protected with the building of Hadrian’s Wall, and it is also the only place on my walk where I would also be on the border between Scotland and England. It has been a fortified town from Roman times up to the early modern era. I also knew that across the border was Dumfriesshires and Galloway an area where the Bell family name was quite common.
As I stumbled off the train at Carlisle, I came face to face with a mural tracing their history. And wow, there it was. In the mural the Bell family name pictured just beyond the walls of Carlisle in Scotland with all the other (in)famous names of the Scottish border reivers who became central figures of the history of this region that was swept up in the dynastic history and religious wars of both Scotland and England from the 1300’s to the 1600’s.
Over the last two years as I have gradually untangled threads of my family roots, I have inevitably hit walls, where the trail runs cold. Records no longer exist, and all that remains is hints that the Bells were ever in Scotland and if they were, where did they live? I had given up any chance to be able to flesh this story out. And yet here it was, tangible evidence that the story of the Border Reivers was an important narrative for the people of Carlisle.
Finding out that this narrative related to me and my identity, I felt the same feeling that has become so common in my search: why didn’t I know this, now that I know this how does it change the sense of who I am and where I came from, and lastly how can I best introduce that narrative back into our family story so it is not lost again.” It is a difficult feeling to explain as it evokes a myriad of emotions ranging from the profound sense of loss to a feeling of wonder like unearthing your parent’s love letters or caches of undiscovered family photos. Hints of a story that now allows you to fill in and create a narrative of your family that up to then I was really a blank slate. This blog is an attempt to start to not only pull these stories together, provide a context for understanding the events that our family lived through but to make sense of this story affects me at a personal level.
My cab ride from Carlisle to Bowness on Solway
To start my hike, I hopped in a cab to take me the 25 km to the start of Hadrian’s Wall. My driver like so many of the ones I have encountered are local experts who seem to know more about the history of their community than one would expect. First, I learned the complete history of the Carr cookie company that makes Digestive cookies before our conversation than moved to our personal stories him moving to Carlisle for work decades ago and then the inevitable question is where did my family come from? In the end, I said: “well here actually,” as I pointed out across Solway estuary that divides Scotland from England. My general point in the end was pretty accurate as Bells did live just across the estuary. He then responded: “so that is why we built the wall.”
Besides the historical inaccuracy of who built the wall, apparently on this side of the estuary, we were the bad guys. As most things in history, events are always a bit more nuanced. Stay tuned.