When you visit Cumbria and meet the real people a strange series of family stories emerges - especially if your name is Storey or Armstrong or Bell or Kerr or Crozier or Routledge or Graham.
Everybody seems to know about the problems their Ancestors had in co-existing with their feuding neighbours. There is still a tendency to recall the disputes between many of these Border families.
I described to a local Historian how my father & his uncle would clean their shoes & shave on Saturday rather than on Sunday morning - Sabbath observance. My Historian friend was confident that this indicated Reiver or Border mentality and that my Ancestors had carried these customs with them to Ireland and eventually to the U.S. & Canada.
The Bewcastle Journal published two or three times annually contains folklore, myths & legends about these unique Border people.