Fortunately, perhaps, we were not around to witness it, We were just a twinkle in Evolution's eye, and it would be nearly 400 million years before we arrived to set up home in the wreckage. Meanwhile, successive Ice Ages, and the rivers in the inter-glacials, formed the landscape of today, grinding and gouging, lifting and depositing as they came and went.

Rivers have been often been used to define regional boundaries,, but this approach has little relevance in modern life. As a traveller, the only sense of transition that I get is when I cross the hills, using one of the numerous routes across the Pennines, or travelling across Rannoch Moor. The sense is strongest at Carter Bar, with the possibility of great views across the Borders and a steep, but largely hidden, descent into Northumbria. But the modern tourist industry has designed the crossing to look like a border post.

To be fair, for many years it was the site of the annual tryst where the English and the Scots Lairds of the Marches met with their men to settle outstanding grievances under the rough laws of this wild landscape.

I remember from my childhood that it was just a place to stop for some fresh air, and a bit of a pic-nic. But now when I stop there, I sense the transition of the high pass and I think of many other "summit" areas where competing families could have met in "no-man's land" to prevent the worst excesses of territorial rivalry.

Beattock has even more of the mountain pass about it, with Glasgow beckoning to the north and empty border lands to the east and west, and down the valley of the Eden to Carlisle

The hard road from Carlisle to Hawick, passing by the grim Hermitage Castle on what is now the A7, similarly takes us through a landscape where sheep outnumbered people many times over, and they and the hardy cattle were the currency of generations of rievers. Over generations this land was ravaged by the territorial ambitions of Scots and English kings, queens and nobility.

The main split in North Britain is not north-to-south, but east-to-west. The uplands form the natural barriers. The populations of Barnoldswick and Todmorden have become apoplectic in the past at the slightest hint that a boundary line on the map might be altered. Sometimes it is difficult to believe that the Wars of the Roses were over 500 years ago.

7500 years ago, immigrants were still walking into the region across what was to become the bed of the southern North Sea (Doggerland) and the English Channel. The sea levels were to rise a further 3 metres over a few hundred years soon afterwards, inundating mesolithic settlements off the coast of southern England and the Isle of Man. This was caused by a relatively small pulse of ice melt-water. In the previous 7000 years there had been two step changes in sea-level, each with a magnitude of the order of 20m, as the planet re-adjusted from the weight of massive ice sheets, and the resulting flow of meltwater into the seas. Following this third sea-level rise, we were collection of islands, and the sea was to figure more strongly in our cultures.

The western Celts probably arrived by sea and colonised Hibernia, the isle of Man and western Scotland. As anyone who has read Sellers and Yeatman will know, the “Scots” originated from Ireland. (It is likely that these folk never called themselves “Scots”, but were named by the Romans as “outsiders” or “raiders”). Meanwhile, the Gaels came in from central Europe and ended up in Wales, Cumbria and, possibly, Galloway. They spoke a form of gaelic that is now called brythonic, as distinct from the goldelic languages of their western cousins. The Romans wrote about them living in the Borders and Lothians.

Over 2000 years later, the art of metal working would meet other innovations in North Britain in a convergence that would bring about the "advanced" world that we know today. (As a small example, the modern plough was developed in Berwickshire). But both agriculture and large-scale war would be slow to take hold in our corner of Europe; it was society that was clearly developing here. The Bronze Age and Iron Age technologies and cultures ask interesting questions about the extent of the immigration of people, set against the migration of ideas. But history shows that our bleak and windswept region was still attractive to those who were living in even harsher environments.
 
1200 years ago the Vikings arrived in Orkney and began to settle in the region, establishing a parliamentary assembly at Tingwall in Shetland. There is some debate about whether they killed off any original Pictish inhabitants or whether there was some accommodation with inter-marriage. (In a parallel case, genetic research in Iceland has recently proved that Icelanders are more Irish than Viking). Although they had a fierce reputation, most of the Vikings could turn their skills to farming, sailing and trade. Well organised, but with a sophisticated tribal culture, they arrived at the Isle of Man and established Tynwald, the Isle of Man parliament that is still in place today, making it one of the oldest unbroken parliaments in the world.
 
The Vikings also settled in Orkney and Shetland, giving the name Sutherland to the northenmost part of mainland Britain. Even more confusing to us southerners, they named both of the largest islands of Orkney and Shetland as "mainland". They sailed even further south and established a successful trading port at Dingwall, at the head of the Firth of Cromarty, not far from Inverness. Having negotiated with the Scottish chieftains, the Vikings were allocated any land that they could sail round, leading to some spectacular boat-dragging across dry land on various peninsulas, often leaving the norse place-name “Tarbet” or “drawboat” to commemorate the feat.

Less than a thousand years ago we saw the beginnings of the British Empire, with the Norman invasion of 1066 (and all that). Here was a step change in society. Before this time, in the “Dark Ages” families, villages and districts assembling at the Viking “tings” or the Anglo-Saxon “folkmoot” for collective government, facilitated by sophisticated “laws” about procedure and decision-making. Now there was to be a rigid hierarchy backed up by ruthless martial law.

The Normans were particularly brutal with their subjugation of the areas around York, Bradford and other northern towns. Villages and crops were burned and the local population slaughtered. As part of this “ethnic cleansing” strategy, the stronger of the Viking chieftains were paid to leave. Vast areas of land were given over to powerful Norman families, who based themselves in wooden forts at first, then later in stone castles which were to dominate the physical and political landscape of the north of England for hundreds of years.

The Scots, by virtue of of their difficult territory (and some would say their difficult temperament), refused to submit to the Normans. They were, of course, assisted by logistics, as they had been against the Romans - the further north the would-be conquerors went, the more their supply lines became stretched and the less hospitable was the climate and the landscape.However, the threat from their southern neighbours was to push them towards a similarly baronial and nationalist future.

Scotland was a part of Norway before it ever achieved nation status in its own right. Indeed for a short period Norway was ruled from Orkney. Around the 1000AD Scotland came into being as a recognised country. Malcolm Canmore made definite attempts to extend and consolidate land under his control. This brought the Scots into conflict with the English for the first time as the Border was pushed South from the Forth to the Tweed and beyond.
After nearly 200 years of harassment and counter-attack, the Scots were finally able to assert their independence as a nation by defeating the army of King Edward 1 of England at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. This was followed in 1320 by the Declaration of Arbroath: a document comparable to the Magna Carta in establishing ideas of freedom and democracy within a nation state. The declaration also contains a reference to the celtic origins of the Scots that agrees very well with recent evidence about the early settlers.

1695 the Bank of Scotland was founded with the help of William Paterson in Edinburgh. Flushed with his earlier success in founding the Bank of England a few years earlier, Paterson had travelled to the Americas. He became beguiled by travellers' tales of Darien, a wonderful land on the Isthmus of Panama, as told to him by a sailor he met in a bar in London. Returning to Edinburgh, Paterson persuaded the Scottish government that Scotland should not be left behind in establishing colonies in the New World. Unfortunately, England, France and Spain were already fighting over the best bits, so Patterson used his “insider knowledge” to recommend Panama as the place most likely to to provide Scotland with its colonial base. The resulting expedition to “New Caledonia” was both a personal disaster for Patterson, and ultimately a national one. Analysts have estimated that up to a quarter of the money in circulation in Scotland was lost in trying to claim the Central American swamps. Many families lost their life savings. Scotland, first in so many technological advances, had the dubious privilege of being the first nation state to go bust, and was bailed out by the London government through the Act of Union of 1707.

It was probably events like this that led Burns to describe some of his compatriots as “a parcel o' rogues”. It was an eerie parallel with the great banking crisis of 2008, when a similar venture, this time into the virtual swamps of the global financial markets, was to bring down the two major Edinburgh banks, leading to a bail-out by UK taxpayers. (At the time of writing, there is no equivalent to the Act of Union on the horizon.)

The new British Empire was on the rise, with international trade leading to the growth of the great mercantile cities of Liverpool and Glasgow, with tobacco and slavery as early benefactors. We also saw the sucess of our east coast ports such as Hull, with the wool trade providing much of the early investment, as it did in the west. With the arrival of Empire, the textile trade would specialise with cotton in Glasgow and Liverpool and jute in Dundee.

While at Glasgow University in 1769, James Watt came up with a radical improvement to Thomas Newcomen's steam engine, used since 1712 for pumping out flooded mine-workings. Watt's improvements gave a step-change in power and efficiency. In 1775 he established a company to manufacture steam engines with the businessman and metal-basher Matthew Boulton. Mills could now be built anywhere, as long as they could get the coal.

Iron ore was readily available and the first efficient blast furnace was established at Furness in the Lake District in 1711. The furnace was fuelled by charcoal, but a few years later a coke-fired furnace was in operation at Little Clifton, not so far away at Workington. John “Iron mad” Wilkinson was born there when his father was working as pot-founder. He went on to be a major shareholder in Abraham Derby's Iron Bridge and to launch the first iron barge. “Iron Mad” was approached by Boulton and Watt for help with the cylinders for their new steam engine and obliged by developing a suitable manufacturing technique. All manner of metals and alloys were now available, and the forging and machining techniques to shape them. The manufacture of powerful engines was now possible.

Now Nature, too threatens our precious cities with a potential rise in sea-levels. Many of our major urban areas are at low elevations; for good reasons, as those of us who live among the hills will know. If sea level rise does happen, there will be a considerable displacement of our population into the uplands, as the Greenhouse Britain scenarios show.