The far hills are still etched in snow as we walk up from Peebles on the wide grassy path of the John Buchan Way. It’s a steady climb through sheep fields, the wind strengthening as we gain height; through the drizzle comes the clear trilling of a skylark.
Rising ahead is the lumpy outline of Cademuir Hill, a high vantage point above the meeting of three valleys. All along the River Tweed, the peppering of Gothic script on the map shows extensive iron age settlement, and there are several hill forts and cultivation terraces on the Cademuir ridge.
The first and largest of the forts was protected by a stone wall, its tumbled remains now a grey, lichen‑spattered scree. To one side, a steep escarpment drops 100 metres to the valley below. The wind is hitting its sheer face, speeding up and carrying hail that stings my skin and rattles on my jacket hood.
The second fort was built lower down the hill, with the same precipitous drop protecting it to the south. It’s this that we are drawn to, intrigued by descriptions of its chevaux de frise. Named after the skilled Frisian cavalry of northern Europe, the term is used for any defensive obstacles – of wood, barbed wire or the jagged glass set on top of walls. Here it describes stones set upright to slow an attack.
It’s only as we top a rise and look down into a shallow gully that we see them. About a hundred stones, sticking up, jagged and angular, pointing in different directions, earthfast still after more than 2,000 years. Within the walls there are traces of two roundhouses. Without, the view is of hill folded on hill, with the Manor Water meandering into the distance in scribbled arcs and loops.
The Scottish novelist John Buchan walked these hills. In one of his supernatural stories, he describes the river wrinkling across the valley “like the scrawl from the pen of a bad writer”. As we drop down off the hill, wheatears bounce restlessly ahead of us from rock to rock. Peewits swoop and cry in the sheep pastures. We look back at Cademuir’s long ridge, a bumpy outline sculpted by its prehistoric sites.
• Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
