The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland

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At the end of the Marches is a Chronology which I found very interesting, defining The Middleland before AD100 up to the present days. The Middleland is a term invented by Brian Stewart:

The miracle of The Marches is not so much the treks Stewart describes, pulling in all possible relevant history, as the monument that emerges to his beloved father." -- NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Altogether, I found the book fascinating and enjoyed the good fortune Stewart had in his relationship with his father who, in the text, is always calling him "Darling," querying his thinking, and adding his own experience to the mix. The miracle of The Marches is not so much the treks Stewart describes, pulling in all possible relevant history, as the monument that emerges to his beloved father." -- New York Times Book ReviewStewart's evaluation of his father feels entirely justified, but his self-deprecation not so much. I suspect his father -- who continued to call his son "darling" right up to the end -- was immensely proud of his son's accomplishments, and felt he was leaving his world in good hands.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. The miracle of The Marches is not so much the treks Stewart describes, pulling in all possible relevant history, as the monument that emerges to his beloved father. NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Stewart proves to be a captivating tour guide... He brings archaic languages and traditions vividly alive, wrestles with nationalism and nationhood and, in a poignant closing section, traces his father's war years and last days... Beautiful, evocative and wise, The Marches highlights new truths about old countries and the unbreakable bond between a father and son.”— Malcolm Forbes, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNEPease, Howard (1912). The lord wardens of the marches of England and Scotland: being a brief history of the marches, the laws of march, and the marchmen, together with some account of the ancient feud between England and Scotland. London: Constable.

Suggests an open-mindedness in Stewart, a tolerance and flexibility that could make him an exceptional politician while it also continues to define him as a writer’ New York Review of Books One predominant theme, intended or not, is Stewart's love of Britain's "lived in" rural landscape. The small village, the stone fence enclosures, the sheep and cattle, the neighboring farms and farm houses, where everyone knows everyone. A certain coziness. After the Norman conquest, the Middleland area was cleared of habitation and reserved as royal forest for the king's hunting. Stewart looks on forest as a form of desert. The Office of Warden of the Marches;its Origin and Early History". Oxford Journals. Archived from the original on 13 July 2012 . Retrieved 18 December 2011.The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. Moreover, Stewart combines his trekking observations with a tribute to his father -- a man who was an amazing example of a certain vigorous type of polymath and adventurer spawned by the British Empire -- and a deeply moving, bittersweet testimonial to the unusually close relationship between father and son. The book begins with Stewart's memories of his father as a child, and ends with his father's death at 93 in 2015.

His book becomes a history of the Middleland, or ‘The Marches’. Britain, he argues, is an island whose natural boundaries are the sea, a nation split by a colonial empire that drew a line on a map, separating tribes and families.

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Travelling across mountain ridges and through housing estates they uncover a forgotten country crushed between England and Scotland: the Middleland. They discover unsettling modern lives, lodged in an ancient place, as their odyssey develops into a history of the British nationhood, a chronicle of contemporary Britain and an exuberant encounter between a father and a son. His father Brian taught Rory Stewart how to walk, and walked with him on journeys from Iran to Malaysia. Now they have chosen to do their final walk together along ‘the Marches’ - the frontier that divides their two countries, Scotland and England. Fascinating Stewart provides wonderful insights as he visits Roman fortifications, medieval castles, and Hadrian s Wall. This is an informative, thoughtful, and timely mix of history and travelogue. BOOKLIST Ik weet niet of ik auteur of zijn vader in de dagelijkse omgang sympathiek zou gevonden hebben, maar dat doet er niet toe. Uit elke zin blijkt de liefde en de eerbied die zij voor elkaar voelen en dit wordt zéér goed overgebracht en mooi verwoord. Wat een rijkdom om zo een relatie met een ouder te mogen hebben. Ik was, toen het onvermijdelijke gebeurde, ook echt ontroerd. How much Stewart regrets this growing apartness is hard to know from this account. The delight of it lies in his encounters with the specific rather than in ruminations about the general. He has an alert eye for the awkward detail – the things that don’t quite fit with the tone of a scene. It makes him an enjoyable and persuasive writer.