The Scottish Borders: The Land Beyond Hadrian’s Wall

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

The Roman Empire never subjugated the primitive Scots. Repeated attempts to enter the land of those warlike Picts met such resistance that, in the second century AD, the Emperor Hadrian gave up and constructed the now-famous wall across the top of England.

It still stands. The land beyond the wall marked for fifteen hundred years the ever-fluctuating frontier between Scotland and its perpetual enemy England. This land, the Borders of Scotland, stood squarely in front of any English advancing army and Scotland’s fortunes ebbed and flowed with its success as a barrier.

The land shows this. Country homes still sprawling in splendor across vast estates of rolling hills; castles, many in ruins, brooding over more glorious times, now standing guard over flocks of sheep; abbeys, superb examples of Gothic architecture, lying gutted and ravaged by the armies of the past. The people may have suffered but the land has been surprisingly resilient. Today, home to Scotland’s woolen trade, it has become a solid respectable place to live and a fascinating destination to visit. Yet it’s still a relatively unknown destination, often passed through quickly by tourists hurrying to reach Edinburgh -- after London, the second most visited city in Britain.

A friend who lives there is sharing a cup of tea with his visitors. “No spot has more wealth of history and heritage that we have,” he says. He gazes over at the heather-clad Eildon Hills that rise gently above the Borders—1300 feet high, they can be seen from almost every spot in his domain. “Agreed we’re not the Highlands of Scotland, “he says. “We don’t have the jaggy land with white stuff on top. We’re different.

“But we are part of Scotland,” he adds with feeling. No wonder. The Borders spends, like all tourist areas, a lot on advertising. It sometimes places a lone piper playing on the huge boulder that marks where one road from England enters Scotland. It displays tartan and plaid in the huge tourist information center in Jedburgh, one of the major towns in the heart of the area—and on occasion even has bagpipers playing— yet foreign tourists still come in there to ask, “How far is it to Scotland?” Thus, to a degree, the Borders is the hidden Scotland, an undiscovered area with winding rural roads not yet congested and country folk, comfortable with themselves, more than happy to advise those who are strangers in their midst. It shows. Like Vermont, the countryside is of human dimensions: only 100,000 people live in its 1800 square miles and Hawick, the largest town has a population of only 16,000.

The Towns

The people live in the towns that lie about 20 miles from each other. The communities are friendly but close-knit. In summer the towns celebrate their land-rights by “The Common Riding.” Each year more than 400 inhabitants of Selkirk ride the boundaries of that town on horseback in a tradition that goes back centuries. Selkirk remembers its past in other ways. A marble statue commemorates a local GP, Mungo Park, who became a famous African explorer. Nearby, a life-size bronze pays tribute to the one Selkirk survivor from Scotland’s defeat at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. The Parish Church contains the memoirs of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s maternal ancestors.

Fifteen miles across the moors bring the visitor to Hawick, the center of Scotland’s knitwear industry. Hosiery knitting became commercial here in 1771; a hundred years later, production changed to woolen underwear, essentials in a country of damp winters and no central heating. You could tell in those days, it was said, how far north people lived in Britain by the thickness of their underwear.

The Hawick tourist information center publishes a free street map listing eleven knitwear outlets in the town. Conveniently downtown next to a small cafe is that of Peter Scott & Co., established in 1878. Asked why the industry started in Hawick, the Scott company’s sales manager grins and says “Because that’s where the sheep were.”

“It’s probably easy to sell cashmere,” we say. “The product must sell itself. You never see it advertised on television.”

“You don’t have to use TV,” he replies. “Our shop windows and the garment on your back are all the advertising we need.”

Something else that hardly needs advertising is the area’s great old dame of hotels, the Peebles Hotel Hydropathic.

Hydrotherapy was the rage when the Peebles Hydro opened in 1881. A fire leveled most of the buildings in 1905 but it rose from the ashes within two years. With its quaint main street that rambles through the town, Peebles, situated on the River Tweed, is our favorite Border spot and the Hydro, our favorite hotel. With 137 rooms and vast public areas, the Hydro copes equally well with both conventions like medical school reunions and romantic interludes like honeymoons. Over the years we’ve gone there for both.

The Hydro’s strength lies, as always with great hotels, in its staff; “We’re the complete family hotel,” says Gerard Bony, its manager.“ And we have our scenery, “for 20 miles around as good as any in Scotland—and south, wilderness with more sheep than people. Every morning we waken to this view,” he says. “Year after year,” then he adds with a Gallic twinkle, “some people don’t stay married that long!”

They would if they stayed in the Scottish Borders in this tranquility amongst people with such quiet, wry sense of humor.

On the other side of Selkirk, for example, in the little town of Innerleithen, lies a factory built in the mid 1700’s and now a listed building in Scotland’s heritage. It’s still busily producing Ballantyne Cashmere. One of its workers is leaving the building now. “What’s so special about cashmere?” we ask him. “There’s no fiber like it,” he says. “It’s light but warm. You pick it up—you’ve got to have it. A bit like a pretty woman but a wee bit less expensive.”

Melrose, about 25 miles to the east leads to Scott’s view a few miles out of town. Sir Walter Scott, the famous author, tarried there to enjoy the panorama of the Tweed river valley meandering up to the Eildon hills so often that, when his funeral carriage passed that spot, his horses stopped there automatically. Scott’s home, Abbotsford, is still home to his great-great-great-granddaughter and remains one of the top tourist attractions in the area, packed as it is with the curiosities he collected over his lifetime from Napoleon’s cloak clasp to Mary Queen of Scots crucifix.

The so-called Mary Queen of Scots house in Jedburgh was visited by that monarch in 1566. The interior, now turned into a museum, exhibits a life time-capsule of that ill-fated queen. Nearby, the tourist office stands in the shadow of Jedburgh’s impressive but ruined abbey.

The Abbeys

The early Gothic monastic foundations might have lasted more years in another place and another time but not the Scottish Borders in the 12th through the 16th centuries. The four great abbeys of the Borders lie ravaged at Melrose, Dryburgh, Kelso and Jedburgh. Jedburgh abbey has not been vandalized since 1545. It lies roofless but fairly complete, the best example in Europe of the monastic life.

The Homes and Castles.

The stately homes have fared better than the abbeys. Some owners reluctantly have opened them to the public to make ends meet . This sufferance is nowhere more obvious than at Traquair House, six miles from Peebles, a lodge that bears the claim “the oldest, continually-inhabited house in Scotland.” At the time of our visit, the 20th Lady of Traquair, who apparently detests photographers, was reprimanding a tourist who’d dared to raise his camera inside the 10th century dwelling.

All close by lies Floors Castle, the most magnificent of all the local castles. It was one of the locations for the Tarzan movie, Greystoke. It’s a huge sprawling estate, well organized for tourists and popular with them. Like Traquair, it has a restaurant on the premises. The Traquair cafe, located in a gardener’s cottage, has as part of its decor, an ancient steamer trunk, probably 18th century.

“How old is the trunk?” an American visitor asks the waiter.

“Och, ah wouldnae like t’say,” he replies. “What does that mean?” the American asks his wife. “It means he doesn’t know—but its older than us and in better shape,” she replies.

The waiter grins and casually flips the old trunk lid open. From it, like a magician bringing a rabbit, and showing that lack of reverence to the past so typical in Europe, he drags out—the restaurant vacuum cleaner. He sets to work with it below a Ballantyne’s Cashmere poster that declares: “The Borderland is at peace now. No more do the valleys echo to the sound of charging hooves and clashing steel . . ..”

Sic Transit Gloria.

Now we get the noise of vacuum cleaners.