The place is the Scottish borderlands and the time is the late 1950's and early 1960's when the Cold War paranoia was at its height.
Here in the dark brooding hills the military were developing the missiles to deliver Britain's own nuclear arsenal. In deep man-made caves they tested and developed the rockets that would carry the war-heads. The ground shook and the muted screams of the engines traveled on the winds for miles.
It was one of Britain's worst kept secrets.
These hills had seen the last ragged lines of the Roman Empire drawn along their rough escarpments and wind blown moors. The Romans went no further and deemed the land beyond as wilderness.
Ancient Neolithic settlements and forts are dotted along the exposed hilltops.
There are hundreds of ancient rock carvings on huge stones and rock faces all along the borders that speak of age old rituals and beliefs.
It is an area that has seen conflict and war for centuries, yet it remains untamed and largely uninhabited. The ruins of crofts and settlements litter the length and breadth of the wild borderlands.
For more than 3 centuries it was home to the lawless Border Reivers who gathered in clans and looted and pillaged on both sides of the England/Scotland divide. They changed allegiance as easily as the weather turned but many family feuds and mistrusts last into the present and the old quarrels lie close to the surface and remain.
It is an area of deep superstition and old ways.
I was born and grew up in this land and the old ways and the land itself are part of my being.
In my childhood the rockets blasted on the test-beds in the remote hills and strange planes and aircraft circled in the skies above the old aerodromes left over from the Second World War that dotted the lands around the flat coastland and wide mudflats and marshes of the Solway Firth. The old lands buzzed with the new technologies that had invaded like strangers into the landscape.
Russian submarines came up the tidal estuary and became stranded. The Cold War was a part of daily life in this isolated backwater.
The old lived uncomfortably with the new and the landscape bided its time until the new invaders left, like all the ones before.
Sightings of UFO's and unexplained phenomenon grew and added to the already burdensome tales of supernatural occurrences that littered the length and breadth of the landscape.
The missile testing ended and the military moved away, burying the evidence of their existence behind them, leaving the land to brood and settle back to the cold isolation it had endured for millennium.
The old ways returned to the hills.
The place names reflect the superstitions and old beliefs with names like black fell and black beck referring to the lay-lines that run under the ground and link places with a mysterious energy. The dark rivers of the album title."
- Robin Storey (2009)
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