Other Country Project

The Capon Tree, the last great survivor of the Jed Forest

These Scottish Borders stories are generically similar to the Welsh legends contained in the thirteenth century great Welsh epic The Mabinogian (because in Celtic times the people in the Scottish Borders were ethnically related to the Welsh, or the 'Cymri').

The name speaks of a period, centuries before the formation of the Scottish and English kingdoms, which saw the great Romano-British warlord King Arthur do battle; and according to legend, after being slain by Mordred he entered into the Eildon Hills (near Melrose in the Scottish Borders) where he sleeps with an army of knights and horses. It is from this Other World that local folklore says that he will emerge one day with his army to rescuye Britain when it is in deep peril

The Other Country also harks back to a time when in 600 AD, Mynndog the leader of the celtic Kingdom of Goddodin (approximately6 the area that was to become the Lothians and the Eastern Borders) wined and dined his warriors in Dunedin (the name for seventh century Edinburgh) before leading them to annihilation by the Northumbrian warlord "Ida the Flame-Bearer" at catterick in Yorkshire.

These dramatic events comntinued when in 603 AD the Scots under King Aedan advanced south to oppose the Anglian King Athelrith's invasion of the south of Scotland which then belonged to the Britons. However, the Angles defeated the Scots at Degsaston (near Jedburgh and Hawick in the Scottish Borders

The blood and fire epochs which foged the culture and heritage of the Borderlands continued with the wars between the emerging Scottish and English kingdoms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

More conflicts followed with the Scottish Wars of Independence when the Black Douglas and William Wallace all featured prominently in Border history. William Wallace was appointed Guardian of Scotland in the "Kirk of the Forest" in Selkirk. This forest was the great Ettrick forest, a large remnant of the once great Caledonian forest that once covered much of Scotland.

By the sixteenth century the Borderlands had become the refuge of the Reivers, the local population being reduced to a life of raiding and plundering in order to survive in the warzone that had become The Borders. This is the age of the Peel Towers and Bastle houses. It is the time when the hard suffering local population composed much of the Border Ballads, such as the ballad of Johnny Armstrong or Kilmont Willie, immortalised in Sir Walter Scott's Ballads of the Scottish Minstrelsy, and which still make a large and significant contribution to Scotland's cultural heritage.

However, the time of the Other Country also speaks of a more peaceable epoch when the Celtic saints Aidan and Cuthbert and the monks of Iona and Lindisfarne tramped through the misty woodlands of Ettrick and Teviotdale, still inhabited with wolves and wild boar, to preach the Gospel to the pagan Celts who believed in the Other Country, and founded their chapels on ancient pagan sites.

It is also in the Border Country that the literary geniuses James Hogg, known as the "Ettrick Shepherd" and Sir Walter Scott lived and preserved much of Border folklore and ballads, some of which have their distant origins in the Other Country legends of the Celts.

We are dedicated to the preservation of Border heritage by producing films and digital videos on local subjects, especially those that may be forgotten and lost in the mists of time if they are not preserved and popularised in the present.

Through the medium of digital video production, Other Country Project is also concerned to preserve for posterity cutural events happening no for current and future appreciation.