I live in the remnants of empire and so as the result of cultural conditioning for a world that's been and gone, I know far too much about the dismal isle that has recently brexited itself into a brand new, tiny and pathetic, less influential and increasingly scared future. Nevertheless, that cultural legacy has been enough that my default method of thinking about weights and measures, is the imperial system, that my default Monopoly board in my mind contains Mayfair as the most expensive property (and the anomaly that the ground rent for Piccadilly is £22 and not £24 as it should be), and that motorway signs should by right be blue even though they never have been in my country.
Also, because I have a mind like a steel trap (everything that goes in gets mangled), I know a lot of facts which are only useful in trivia quizzes and/or circumstances which can be useful in technical areas. One of those facts is that the border between Queensland and New South Wales on the eastern seaboard is the River Tweed in the UK the border between Scotland and England on the eastern seaboard is the River Tweed.
This is the part of the story where someone on a forum didn't believe that I knew that or even how I could possibly know that; much less that I could pinpoint the exact point where the motorway crosses the border. Very sharp-eyed visitors to Scotland may have noticed that as you travel north on the M6, at the point where it loses the English name of M6 and magically turns into the M74, a weird thing happens. There is a line crossing the motorway.
Why would someone in Australia know that? They did not believe me. They wanted to prove me wrong; because clearly it is outrageous that someone in Australia should assert something as idiotic as without having proof; so they dared to prove me wrong.
Oops.
The English and Scottish are as traditionally unfriendly at the governments which exist in Australia. It used to be that if you wanted to go from Brisbane to Perth, you had to take five different trains because the gauge of track changed four times. Likewise in the United Kingdom, although the Highways Agency was responsible for building all the motorways, there was famously a gap new Gretna Green where six lanes of M6 Motorway ended to become a wee gally-petticoaty little two land goat track before becoming the M74 on the other side. This remained a stupidity for years and years until eventually someone bit the bullet and completed the through road.
Now, the M6 just turns into the M74 and the only thing to let you know this is that the big blue motorway sign on the Scottish side of the border reads "M74" and the big blue motorway sign on the Scottish side of the border reads "M6". England and Scotland still bicker over who is responsible for maintenance but the bickering ends at one very discrete line. I put it to you that there is actually a far more sinister reason than just the current playing out of an ancient grudge between the Lion and the Unicorn. This has to do with taking legend seriously; along similar lines to when the people of Lancashire built the Pennines to keep out the people of Yorkshire.
Why then does this line exist? England and Scotland were united by personal union of the Crowns in 1603 after Elizabeth I died and James IV of Scotland by virtue of having married Margaret, the eldest daughter of Henry VII of England, solved the succession crisis. The formal union happened in 1707 with the Act of Union. This line is not to mark a border, when the two countries have been united for a very long time. The reason for this line is... Haggis. Haggis is quintessentially Scottish. Haggis is as Scottish as violence at the football, pavement pizza on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Tunnock's Tea Cake, and people being very angry as thistles can grow waist high and nobody has invented trousers.
A line like this extends for miles and miles along the border between Scotland and England and it is because haggis is considered to be an "invasive species" in England. This is a bit like installing a grid on the road to prevent cattle and sheep from walking away; since haggis fear stepping over the line. Do not question why. There are some things which just are. It is us to know but never to find out why.
This line is a bit like the Berlin Wall in that it was built to keep the haggis in Scotland by Scottish engineers, lest they cross the border and are shot on sight by over-zealous English wildlife officers. Haggis is not known for its intelligence and once it strays over the border, it becomes subject to immediate extermination by English wildlife officials.
This line also prevents other things such as selkies, chickens, dolphins, aerospace engineers from crossing the border going south, and inadvertently, from salads and fruit from heading north. Scotland is a nation which is unusually devoid of salad and this is unfortunately a result of this line; which is seen as necessary in preventing their precious haggis from straying too far from home. Yon chieftain of the pudding race is a national treasure; the accidental scarcity of salads and fruit is but a case of wee collateral damage.
This line does not need to extend all the way across the country as the aforementioned River Tweed acts as the border in the east. It should be pointed out however, that the River Tweed is not as effective. Selkies and chickens, do not head south but dolphins and aerospace engineers are able to cross the border at that point. Curiously though, salads and fruit are still not able to head over the border north; which I can only put down to salads' and fruit's lack of aquatic abilities. That river border in the east unfortunately does make Scotland vulnerable to migrating coconuts which have been known to travel for more than 200 days and distances of more than 10,000km on ocean currents, though as coconuts are shy, they may be collected and herded reasonably easily.
To the untrained eye, this looks like nothing more than a simple expansion gap between two vast slabs of concrete. As always when something looks simple, the truth is often far far weirder. To those who know, this is part of a stranger (and untrue) story.
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