The left-handed Kerrs of Ferniehirst

Some advantages are not won in the field but built into the ground beneath the fight. A family that understands this early enough will spend generations quietly arranging the stones, the doors, the hand a boy is given his first spoon in, so that when the moment comes the contest has already been decided. The Border knew this. The Border had to.

THE HOUSE ON THE JED

Sir Thomas Kerr of Ferniehirst held the castle on the Jed Water two miles south of Jedburgh, in the Middle March of the Scottish Border, where the English wardens raided north and the Scots wardens raided south and the kirk session at Jedburgh kept its minutes in a hand cramped by the cold. The Kerrs had stood at Ferniehirst since the fifteenth century. Their cousins at Cessford held the other half of the name. Between the two houses ran a feud, a wardenry, and a habit of mind: the conviction that a Border laird who had to ask the king for help had already lost his land. Sir Thomas had been Warden of the Middle March, had ridden with Mary's party in the civil wars, had seen Ferniehirst slighted by the English in 1570 and built again from its own stones. He fought, as his father had fought and his grandfather before him, corrie-fistit, with the sword in his left hand.

THE STAIR

It is a late afternoon in the autumn of 1580, the light already going amber on the inside wall of the south-east tower. The staircase at Ferniehirst turns the wrong way. Every other tower in the kingdom spirals clockwise as it climbs, so that a right-handed defender coming down has his sword-arm out into the well of the stair and a right-handed attacker climbing up has his sword-arm jammed against the newel post. Ferniehirst turns the other way. The mason who set the first tread did so on a Kerr's instruction, and every tread since has carried that instruction up into the stone. Sir Thomas stands at the upper landing with the laird of Hunthill beside him. Below them, four steps down on the spiral, two boys are at the practice. His own son, sixteen years old, has a wooden broadsword in his left hand. The Pringle boy opposite him, a guest of the house, has his in his right.

THE HOUR'S WORK

They have been at it an hour. The Pringle has the better grip. The fencing-master at Kelso who trained him is the best in the March, and the boy's cut is clean, his guard high, his footwork patient on the stone. None of it will serve him here. Each time he climbs, his right shoulder turns against the central pillar and his sword-arm dies. Each time the Kerr boy descends, his left arm swings out freely into the open well of the stair, and the cut comes down at the unguarded face. Sir Thomas has corrected his son three times in the hour on the grip and on the angle of the cut. He has not corrected him on the side. The side was settled before the boy could walk. Hunthill watches and says nothing. He has seen this lesson given before, in this stair, by Sir Thomas's father, to Sir Thomas himself, when Sir Thomas was the boy with the wooden sword and the wrong hand was the right one.

THE SECOND ON THE STAIR

There is a moment, near the end of the hour, when the Pringle boy understands. It is a small understanding, the kind a sixteen-year-old has and then has to live with. He sees that the cut he was taught at Kelso, the cut every laird's son between Tweed and Teviot is taught, will never reach the man above him on this particular stone, in this particular tower, in this particular house. He sees that the lesson is not about the sword. The lesson is about the building. And he sees, because he is a Border boy and not a stupid one, that this is what the Kerrs have been doing for as long as anyone remembers: not winning the fight on the stair but writing the stair so that the fight, when it comes, is already won. He lowers his practice sword. Sir Thomas, at the head of the stair, does not smile. The Kerrs of Ferniehirst do not smile at such moments. He says, in the Border Scots of the house, that the stair is the answer, and the man on the stair is whoever the stair was built for. The phrase has come down in three slightly different forms; the kirk session at Jedburgh would later record it in its own. None of the boys present that afternoon will forget it, though none will write it down for another thirty years.

THE WIDER MARCH

Outside the tower the Border ran its old account. In the years on either side of that afternoon the Kerrs rode in the great raids and were ridden against, suffered the burning of Ferniehirst and rebuilt it, lost men at Reidswire and gained them at Carter Bar, and kept the wardenry in the family by the patience of men who knew that a March warden's first duty is to outlast his cousin. Sir Thomas's son grew into the hand he had been trained to. So did his son after him. By the time the kirk session at Jedburgh in 1611 made the minute that is still the earliest written record of the practice, the clerk wrote, without surprise or comment, that the Kerrs of Ferniehirst had trained their sons to the left hand for some six or seven generations. The minute did not need to explain why. Every man in the session-house knew the stair.

THE WORD ENTERS THE LANGUAGE

What a family does for long enough, a language eventually notices. By the seventeenth century the Scots tongue had taken the surname and made it a common adjective. Kerr-handed, meaning left-handed, entered the speech of the Borders and from there the Scottish National Dictionary, where the etymology is given plainly as the family name. A herd at Hawick who had never been within sight of Ferniehirst would call a left-handed neighbour kerr-handed and not know he was naming a house. The word outlived the wardenry, outlived the reiving, outlived even the line of chiefs who had carried it. It is the rarest of monuments: a surname that became a hand.

THE STAIR STILL TURNS

The slighting and rebuilding of Ferniehirst went on into the next century and the one after. The senior Kerr line passed through the earldom of Lothian into the marquessate; the castle on the Jed Water passed with it and is held by the Marquess of Lothian still. In 2007 the Department of Anatomy at the University of Leeds drew blood from the modern Kerr-surname population of the Borders and reported a rate of left-handedness of about thirty per cent against the expected ten. The sample was small. The Border historians, who have the habit of an Edinburgh advocate on the bench, recorded the finding and waited. The stair at Ferniehirst turns counter-clockwise still. A visitor climbing it on an open day in autumn will find, four steps below the upper landing, the place where the light falls across the inside wall and a right-handed sword-arm goes dead against the stone.