The Position of Midculter and its Direction from Boghall.
A little while back a reader who was planning on coming to Scotland asked me about some of the places in the books that she might visit and mentioned the positioning of Midculter and how it seemed difficult to work out. This reminded me of something that had occurred to me on one of my earliest reads of Game of Kings.
As we all know, Midculter was fictitious, and must have been one of the earliest things that Dorothy considered when she started writing. Like much of the early LC backstory I suspect that she didn’t work it out as precisely to begin with as she did later – when she realised that the books would continue to be published and that her readers were such an analytical bunch! The amazing precision and detailed research seemed to develop as she wrote and were already in place for Queens’ Play, but there are some anomalies in GK. This makes the connections that she made to the House of Niccolo all the more amazing and though some readers are disconcerted with those backstory problems, given that it was her first book and such a milestone in the genre it’s surprising that there aren’t more.
Anyway back to Midculter. When, years ago, I first read the description, I was confused. It didn’t quite feel right but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why, and being swept along with the narrative I forgot about it. Much later I took a bit more time to analyse it.
Take a look at the later part of the first chapter (page 25 in the Vintage edition).
We are with Richard and Wat on the roof of Boghall Castle, and Christian has just smelled smoke.
“To the east lay the roofs of the barony town of Biggar, smoking in the socket of Bizzyberry Hill, and the Edinburgh Road. On the south, the horizon was jumbled with hills, footstools before the greater furniture of the English Border. To the north and northwest the roads for Ayrshire and for Stirling girdled the crag of Tinto.
To the west, springing from the base of the castle, the bog rolled, jellied green and shimmering between an avenue of hills, to dip three miles distantly into the bed of the Culter burn, where stood the village and castle of Midculter.”
Yet a look at the map (Ordnance Survey Landranger 1:50,000 Sheet 72 – Upper Clyde Valley) shows that Biggar lies to the north, not east, of the few remaining stones of Boghall castle. Likewise the lovely Tinto Hill lies to the west (in fact slightly south of west) and definitely not to the north. It is almost as if the compass has been turned through about 75-90 degrees. The final description in that piece tells us where Midculter is. Given the skewed compass heading it makes sense to put Midculter in the SSW direction – and indeed that is where both Culter Water and the village of Coulter lie.
What are we to make of this? Dorothy loved maps and must surely have poured over them in addition to visiting the area. Yet we see a passage with a consistent shift of bearing.
Oddly, there is another one 6 books later – when at the end of Checkmate, Lymond, having been released from the clutches of Margaret Lennox is riding home. Now we don’t know for certain which castle he was being held in – it isn’t Settrington which is far to the south in Yorkshire, Margaret is sent back there and she mentions that she wanted him dealt with well away from her husband Matthew. If he’s traveling west then it seems likely that it is on or near the coast. Nor can it be too far south as Wharton has to go back to Berwick and meets Austin there, who has further to travel than Lymond and whose path intersects his before reaching Flaw Valleys – again suggesting the east coast of Northern England. Lymond himself guesses that they are “not too far south of Berwick” during his final confrontation with Margaret.
On a very superficial reading of the map my first bets were Bamburgh or Alnwick or one of the other castles around there – a purely circumstantial idea hit me once when looking at a map of the area – Bamburgh has a place called The Master’s Tower, and if Dorothy knew about it then it’s just the sort of hidden link that would appeal to her, echoing the name by which he was known in the first book. However a quick check of the histories of those two castles suggest no links to Lennox or Douglas familes and so far I haven’t come across any Lennox histories which mention their English possessions. I wonder if it’s possible to find out which castles were associated with the Lennoxes at that time. . .
A further hint about the direction of travel in the narrative is that the escort won’t cross into Scottish territory – the border, which runs north-east to south-west, does turn sharply south for part of its length. But the description says that Lymond rode north and west which is surely wrong – it should be south and west for him to be heading for Flaw Valleys near Hexham. (Austin’s course is actually pretty much due south from Berwick on Tweed.)
Do we put this down to Dorothy’s habit of writing in a white heat of activity and hating revising? Should an editor have picked it up? I’m not sure who the UK editor was for Checkmate, and it may be that there wasn’t one for Game of Kings which was edited by Lois Cole and then sold to Cassell from the USA. Maybe it will just have to remain a mystery unless there is anything in the archive.
.
Map Images produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.
For online maps try the following options:
Bing maps around Biggar
Edit 2018 – When editing this link which had changed I recently noticed that the current version of Bing maps only show the Ordnance Survey options if your settings are set to use UK English, so visitors from elsewhere may need to temporarily adjust their settings to see those high quality maps. They only appear at resolutions that show them to good advantage so if you don’t see them immediately zoom in or out until the option appears.
Hi Bill
I found a site that purports to list some possesions of the Lennoxes in England in the 1540s:
\”The English government rewarded Lennoxs fidelity by grants of land; some of the property of the disgraced Percys was awarded to him, and he was made keeper of Wressil Castle. He also received a grant of the Percy mansion at Hackney, and this house Lady Margaret retained until her death. At the period at which we now write, however, Margaret resided almost entirely at Temple Newsham, devoting herself to the education of her son Darnley.\” link
Cross checking does say that Castle Wressil was in the possession of the Percys from the 1400s to the 1700s with some periods of alienation when they stood in opposition to the Crown. I haven\’t quite managed to verify when the (no doubt short) period of the Lennox\’s occupation would have been.
My knowledge of the required geography is abysmal but would Wressil, or indeed Temple Newsham, fit the bill for Lymond\’s prison at the end of CM?
FRED
Nice find Fred, Thanks, and welcome.
(Incidentally your post highlighted a small problem that this version of WordPress seems to have with not clearing escape characters (\) on quotation marks and is messing up the link – after some digging it seems I need to upgrade to the latest version which I’ll do shortly)
I’ve done some research and found that Wressil has had various spellings over the years and is now known as Wressle it’s about half way between Leeds and Kingston upon Hull.
http://homepage.mac.com/philipdavis/English%20sites/1079.html
http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?lat=53.7754&lon=-0.929&scale=200000&icon=x
So it’s a bit too far south for our purposes in this case but intersting none the less.
Temple Newsham is also near Leeds and was the birthplace of Darnley.
http://www.leeds.gov.uk/templenewsam/
Sounds like an interesting place to visit – Capability Brown gardens for instance.
Take the postcode from that site and put it into MultiMap and you’ll see the location in detail.
I am thrilled to see that I am not the only one who goes straight to maps to track various journeys. Bill, I am so pleased that you raised these discrepancies. I also tried to work out where Lymond was imprisoned but couldn’t make sense of DD’s directions and the actual map. I think that we have been spoilt by her meticulousness and expect it in all things. I could also not make sense of the route Martha should have taken if she was riding to Midculter….what caused the change of direction to Flaw Valleys. She was coming from Dover or somewhere in the south of England. I decided that she must have caught a ship up the east coast!
Hi Carmel, welcome to the site. It’s nice to find another map enthusiast among us!
I always rather wondered if the first of these was an editor’s error – I’ve heard of editors changing things simply because they sound better, and if they didn’t know that the placenames were real rather than fictional they might think it didn’t matter. I just find it so hard to see Dorothy making that error herself when she was an avid studier of maps. The second one is harder to explain, although the sheer drama of the scene that was being approached may have made anything else seem of little consequence. But you’re quite right; we’re so used to her being note-perfect in all things that a minor mistake that would never be noticed in most authors’ work seems suddenly enormous in hers.
Your mention of Marthe’s route caught me somewhat by surprise because I realised that I had not considered it before and that I certainly should have done. I don’t recall any clues offhand, but if she was coming from the same quarter that Lymond is then is would seem to make sense that she might have reached Newcastle first. Sea travel would certainly be easier than horse for that part, though it depends where she was after landing in the south east as to whether that was likely or not.
Then there is the question of whether she *was* heading to Midculter or if Flaw Valleys was a more important destination, even if only initially. She may have heard word of Lymond’s capture by Margaret or of his release. Or she may have intended to seek out Philippa’s advice first. Much depends on the topic I addressed at the end of my talk on her – was she still intending to reveal the papers to Richard or had she had the change of heart that I suggested and was going to give them to Lymond?
Of course if we could work out exactly where Flaw Valleys was we might get some clues there. Before the COVID pandemic I had often scoured through maps tryng to decide where was the most likely site, and had intended driving down there and spending a couple of days looking around, photographing, and researching to see if I could come to a firm conclusion before writing a post about it, but sadly that was forstalled and I am now over in Slovenia and not likely to be back for some time. Something for when I do get a chance to return.
best wishes
Bill