Mow and Mowhaugh are places up the Bowmont Valley, outside Yetholm, and places that used to exist as towns and no longer do – leaving in Mowhaugh a set of ramshackle farm buildings at the side of Mow Law and at Mow some tombstones lying in nettles.
It has taken us three attempts to find the place – the first time we ended up along ‘The Street’ near Hownam, the second up Mow Law and dislodging a stone which rolled down through the roulette wheel like iron age ring to fly out and hit one of the buildings. It certainly didn’t gather any moss but a lot of momentum.
A flight over the Borders later that day saw us attempt to see Mow from the air – but rotor from the complex Cheviot hills made us turn back.
We finally made it by Stuart driving the All Road over a ford and Mike in shorts being attacked by nettles and thistles to see the tombstones. I ended up walking over a Ford to see if I could see remains of a church in the river but ended up with a fine stick to help me back over the ford from a lovely tree at the side of the river.
Tim Tam Slamming is not an olympic sport yet – it consists of biting the diagonal ends off a TimTam biscuit (an Australian version of our Penguin biscuits) and sucking up tea, coffee, milk and honey, ovaltine or whatever happens to be in the cup or mug at the time. The biscuit gets soggy (reverse dunking) and has to be shovelled into the mouth within seconds before there is a catastrophic structural failure of the biscuit – and a mess over the desk. Your hands end up covered in milk chocolate in any event – which is not necessarily a bad thing.