I am a qualified textile technologist and have worked in the textile trade since college days.

From cashmere spinning to the dyeing and finishing of some very superior fabrics to specialist weaving, I have spent my time with yarn and cloth. My career has been both worthwhile and enjoyable thus it seems a strange bedfellow indeed to also have a passion for history; but that I certainly do.

As a boy I would spend hours reading about those people who have left their mark on the island nation of Britain. In my mind’s eye I was with them in their battles, their confrontations, their successes and failures.

I have never lost that initial love though now a more mature mind is tempered with a more critical outlook.

We are often told that ‘history repeats itself’ and that there is a lesson to be learned from previous policy, encounter and war. That this is so may be true.

I am no academic but, in what I now class as my specialist subject in the history of Britain, I am more than aware that the written word is too often taken as ‘gospel’, that the opinions and writings of former times are honoured and perpetuated. Certainly, in this way, history does repeat itself.

I would welcome the chance to discuss some of the vagaries that exist in the history of the English Scottish Border, and especially in the accounts of those people who dwelled in the Border Country from the 11th century to the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603. I am passionately interested in this part of the history of the Border people and their struggle to survive against a backdrop of almost interminable warfare between England and Scotland.

Why the lands of the Border became the haunt of men well versed in murder, blackmail and feud and how they reigned supreme for centuries has become of special interest. These men were known as the Border Reivers.

The Border Lands are littered with their passing and I spend as much time ‘in the field’ as I do in reading about their lives and times.
I have visited over 600 reiver sites from ruined fortified towers to those that are still lived in today as well as bastle houses and battle sites and places associated with the Border Law which endeavoured to bring them to heel.

It is my earnest desire that I can convey some of this interest to a British public, who are, for the most-part, I think, unaware that the Reivers ever rode the Border Country.