Tom Moss

Writer & Historian of The Borders

The pursuit of historical knowledge has always been a great joy to me. It is with pleasure that I settle in comfort with a worthy tome to re-enact in the mind’s eye yet another battle or wrestle with the conflicts that confronted intellects long gone.

Such delight brings yet further rewards as often I cannot wait to quit the comfort of the big armchair and journey to the places where men fought and died for a cause or see the places where the people of my reading lived and loved, were born or reached the end of their lives.

Until the 1980’s I lived in the textile mill towns of Lancashire before moving with my work to Carlisle. Here I have been ever since apart from seven years which I spent in Hawick, a lovely Scottish Border town. The moves, naturally for a lover of history, opened many a new avenue to me and have led to my great love of the Border country.

There is yet much more to see and read about.

Being brought up in the mill towns of Lancashire it seemed a natural progression that I would follow in the footsteps of many generations of my family and seek employment in the ‘dark satanic’ mills. This I did. I still work in textiles, it was lack of employment in the places of my youth that drove me north. I am currently the manager of a weaving mill in Carlisle. We prosper, I think, though times are hard and competition from the east is daily just below the horizon.

The move kick-started my love of Border history and, indeed my fascination with English\Scottish relationships to the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

Today I am a qualified textile technologist having studied the composition of yarns and fibres and their practical applications.

Technology and history might appear to be strange bedfellows but, in my case, I believe them to be the perfect foil. Both add interest and spice to my life. I pursue both with zest.

When I moved to the Border country it was if I had ‘come home’. I had a feeling of belonging, of this is where I should be.

Perhaps the fact,that for all my time in Lancashire, I was born near Blyth in Northumberland and am thus a Borderer, has something to do with my great love for the area and its history.