This book looks at the events and processes which shaped the land and its people in prehistoric times, during the period of Roman Britain, and up to the establishment of early Christian kingdoms in southern Scotland. Particular attention is paid to how and where people lived, and their relationship with the natural world. The Borders contains many places of exceptional interest, and to help the reader experience some of these, the text contains a list of sites with access arrangements.
The landscape of the Scottish Borders evolved at a leisurely pace over thousands of years, until the whole tempo suddenly altered in the eighteenth century.
The agricultural and industrial revolutions set Britain and the world on a course of accelerating technological change. In the course of a century the growing population of the Borders was redistributed among the developing industrial towns, while enclosure and tree planting transformed the countryside.
Turnpike, railways and shipping carried borders goods and borders surnames to remote outposts of the world. At the same time, local government had to cope with the rapid growth of towns and the social problems that this created.
This book is a companion to Early Settlers in the Borders , Christian Heritage in the Borders and Warfare and Fortifications in the Borders. It examines that period of Borders history when the turbulent frontier province was transformed into a hive of production and industry with links worldwide.
The Borders contains many places of exceptional interest and, to help the reader to experience some of these, the text contains a list of sites with access arrangements.
At times, this border, and Scottish Independence, has been imperilled by the ambition of England's rulers - particularly Edward I and Henry VIII - who have vented their anger on the lives and property of the Scottish Borderers.
From continual warfare grew a level of lawlessness, unique in these islands, when nothing and no one was safe from the activities of a special class of ruffian; the Border Reiver.
This book is a companion to Early Settlers in the Borders and Christian Heritage in the Borders. It looks at the turbulent history of the Scottish Borders, and the towers, ruined abbeys and other sites which owe their existance to war.
The Borders contains many places of exceptional interest and, to help the reader experience some of these, the text contains a list of sites with access arrangements.
After the Ice Age, woodland covered the region and this became home to early hunting peoples, whose descendents gradually removed the trees to build their homes and clear the land for cultivation.
The population grew and two nations developed, which was to define the historic role of the region. Castles and towers outnumber medieval abbeys and churches thereby reflecting the violence that consumed the Borders between 1300 and 1600.
After 1700 the landscape was planted with many trees and hedges, arable land was reorganised, rural cottages were rebuilt and towns expanded, linked by new turnpike roads and railways. In both the towns and countryside the need for building has left a magnificent architectural heritage, which matches the natural beauty of the region.
Companion titles, explore these themes more fully, are Early Settlers in the Borders, Christian Heritage in the Borders, Warfare and Fortifications in the Borders and Farm and Factory: Revolution in the Borders.
This book is intended to help people visit and enjoy places with historic associations as part of a wider heritage that includes other cultural and natural aspects of the Scottish Borders
Paperback, 96 pages, 185 x 245 mm, b/w & colour photographs & illustrations.
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The Borders contains many places of exceptional interest, and to help the reader experience some of these, the text contains a list of sites with access arrangements.
A Guide to Wartime Aircrashes in the Cheviot Hills
by Peter Clark
But what were these aircraft and what were they doing over the Cheviots. In the small rural communities surrounding the Cheviots, the stories of these aircraft and their crews have become almost folklore.
This guide attempts to accurately chronicle the histories of these mishaps
A Guide to Wartime Aircrashes in the Border Hills
During the Second World War, a not insignificant number of military aircraft crashed on this high ground. These crashes were perhaps the only way in which the war made any impact on the sparse and isolated rural population, for war or no war, upland farming had to carry on, and the reverses of Dunkirk and Tobruk etc, would not stop the lambing or any other traditional operations from taking place.
The contents of this book are a mixture of the memories of people of the Border area, surviving wartime aircrew, and facts recorded in official documents at the time the events took place.
Paperback, 138 pages, 210 x 150mm, b/w photographs
A Sense of Wilderness
by Tony Hopkins
Expansive and elegiac, the Cheviot Hills are a natural and cultural divide between England's wild north and Scotland's verdant south. Windswept heather and rolling grasslands cover a massif of volcanic lavas and granite. In every direction, ridges and hills drift away to a ghosy-grey horizon.
This is the first book to do justice to the Cheviot landscape. It combines superb photographs and paintings with an authoritative text, rooted in first-hand experience and steeped in the spirit of the Border hills.
Tony Hopkins conveys the magic of walking to rock art and ancient sites, tracking otters and walking in the footsteps of the hardy people who have risen to the challange of living in the Cheviots. He writes with authority and wit: the connection between people and the land, the ebb and flow of the countryside and its wildlife. His photographs are taken with the eye of an artist, his paintings drawn with the perception of a real naturalist.
H/B 144 pages 235 x 220mm Colour & B/W illustrations and photographs
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It gives both a graphic description of the countryside over which each hunt ran and an interesting insight into Borders country life in the first half of the 20th Century. In addition, there are fascinating biographic notes about his favourite hunters and anecdotes of people and incidents which happened, such as his early encounters with the "Horseless Carriage". Also included is a fold out map showing the most memorable of his hunt runs.
Throughout the book, many of the poems of Will H. Ogilvie, the well-known poet, a near neighbour and friend of the author's and himself a keen hunting farmer, appear and greatly enhance the book. Revised by the Author's family, this second edition has further been enhanced with illustrations by equestrian artist Judith Stowell.
George Scott Watson was born at Easter Softlaw, near Kelso, and died in 1958 at the age of 80 at his birthplace. For much of his life he farmed Eccles Newton, near Coldstream, and Harelaw, in the foothills of the Lammermoors. Harelaw and Easter Softlaw have been farmed by five generations of the Scott Watson family, since 1832, currently by the Author's younger son and grandsons.
Paperback, 101 pages, 280 x 190mm, illustrations & map
This collection of random documents written to, from and about him, are all that remain of a considerable correspondence. Their contents gives a rich and fascinating insight into his life and times, with detail which is not generally found in academic records of the period.
Paperback, 135 x 210mm
The Mosstroopers of the Border
by Michael J. H. Robson
This account does not attempt to describe the great period of international dispute and Border raids, nor does it offer a description of the way people lived at that time. It aims to present the substance of unpublished and little known records of those Borderers who were called the mosstroopers, to comment on the families, places and aspects of life mentioned in these records, and to show how on the evidence provided even the most obscure streams and lonely hillsides may at some moment become involved in colourful and perhaps dramatic events.
P/B 53 pages B/W map & photographs
Making full use of previously unpublished material, this book will be of particular interest to those researching family history in the Borders.
Paperback, 118 pages, 150 x 220mm, b/w photographs, illustrations
James Small (c.1740-1793) of Berwickshire & Midlothian
This book makes full use of previously unpublished material.
Paperback, 22 pages, 150 x 220mm, b/w photograph, illustrations
Border Family History in Earlier Days
Michael J. H. Robson
The Author of Surnames and Clansmen has not attempted to reproduce a Border Tale already familiar. He has sought to assemble, mostly from original and seldom used records, a picture of the way families organised their lives in former days. Nearly four hundred surnames are mentioned, three of them - Chisolm, Mader (Mather) and Yarrow - in detail, with places to which they were attached, the 'clan' groups in which they were found, and the events, in some instances stranger than fiction, in which they were involved. The ordinary Borderers of more than three hundred years ago are here met, not at war, though often in dispute with their neighbours, inheriting land, at work in towns and villages, suffering plague; and their story is explored from beginnings in Dark Age or Norman times, into the future for their descendants.
A History of Boundary and Field Enclosures in the Borders
Since prehistoric times the inhabitants of the Scottish Borders have marked out their territories - estates, farm holdings, fields, town and village properties - with boundaries and enclosures formed in various ways and reflecting the manner in which life was organised.
This book describes the changing ideas and methods that lie behind the pattern of divisions created across the rural landscape and in the centres of population. It indicates the mediaeval (or earlier) ancestry of boundaries, in some cases still in use today, gives examples of dyking work and contracts from the 1500s, and for those in pursuit of family history names numerous masons and other skilled craftsmen in the dyking business.
P/B 100 pages 148 x 210mm colour photographs
August 1948 was an exceptional month. There were 90mph gales in Belgium, snowfalls in Switzerland and in the Scottish Borders one of the heaviest rainfalls ever in one day, while the Tweed received more than a third of its annual rainfall in only six days. The flood plain of the Tweed could just about cope with the deluge, but smaller rivers such as the Tyne at Haddington, the Biel, the Blackadder, Whiteadder Water, Rivers Till and Eye were disaters waiting to happen.
The main problem was not the twenty-four-hour deluge but the rain of the previous two weeks that had already seen the rivers rise to bursting point. 'The Glorious Twelth' was a day of disaster and the next few days were to affect the Borders for months to come.
P/B 126 pages 165 x 235mm over 100 B/W images
When Walter Scott published The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1803/4, he hoped it would be definitive, a collection of the ballads of the Borders made in the nick of time, just as the transition was beginning to wane. Scott had help in his great enterprise, distinguished help in the shape of James Hogg, John Leyden, Robert Shortreed and others. And what they all achieved remains magnificent and fascinating. Sir Walter would have been delighted to know that his collection turned out not to be definitive, not the last but only the first.The time-honoured Border tradition of making poetry has waxed and not waned. Walter Elliot has compiled a New Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and it too is a magnificent achievement. He had no help, this volume is the loving labour of a lifetime. Its pages glow with warmth, with passion and fun, and they write a new and different history of the Borders. Told by voices rarely heard, it is a history of the two hundred years since Scott and his collaborators produced the First Minstrelsy. The poems chart centuries of immense change - when Borderers moved off the land to come to live in their famous town, when agriculture gave way to the textile industry and when two worlds wars wreaked tragic destruction.
And this is history seen through the eyes of the people who lived it and expressed their feelings in poetry about what they saw. These are the extraordinary words of ordinary Borderers, the dykers, shepherds, housewives, ministers, shoemakers, doctors, farmers, bakers, drunkards, land-girls, poachers, soldiers, millworkers, teachers, emigrants, immigrants, sailors and tramps who put pen to paper and had the determination and luck to get their poems published of remembered. This New Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is their story.
by Alistair Campbell
A collection of aerial images and ground photographs that reflect the historical development of communities in an ever changing landscape, Scottish Borders from Above, Album TWO - West records the area west of a line from Lauder to Jedburgh. The accompanying text describes detail of this area of Scotland.
A unique element is a selection of audio links associated with many of the communities. Access to these BBC Radio Tweed programmes, broadcast between 1983 and 1993, is via the internet and scram (Scottish Cultural Resource Archive Network).
by Alistair Moffat
A history of the Borders from earliest times
This is the story of an ancient place; where hunter-gatherers penetrated into the virgin interior, where Celtic warlords ruled, the Romans came but could not conquer, where the glittering Kingdom of Northumbria thrived, the place where David I MacMalcolm raised great abbeys, where the Border Reivers rode into history and where Walter Scott sat at Abbotsford brooded on an immerse past.
No narrative history of the Borders has been published since the 19th century , and 'The Borders' tells a long awaited story of a unique place with a sweeping, eventful and important posterity.
A collection of aerial images and ground photographs that reflect the historical development of communities in an ever changing landscape, Scottish Borders from Above, Album ONE - East records the area east of a line from Lauder to Jedburgh. The accompanying text describes detail of this area of Scotland.
