Icebergs on the Tweed During the hard winter of 2010 I was driving into Kelso and was astonished to see little icebergs floating down the river! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but I think the council was clearing the snow from the roads upriver and tipping it into the Tweed. An unexpected arrival […]

What a Romantic River – canoeing in the ice at winter time with my husband-to-be. [Peebles and Neidpath] In the 1980s I paddled down the Tweed from Peebles to the sea. It took me two days. The Tweed Canoe Club, based in Galashiels, meets in a pond at Tweedbank to teach young people to canoe. […]

The old highway to Edinburgh crossed the Tweed near Tweedbank. It was known as ‘Garthgate’, the King’s Road. Between Melrose and Galashiels there was a very old crossing of the Tweed called Pringles Bridge, which has now been completely lost. It was associated with the cannons being taken over the river for the battle at […]

When I booked into Robert Smail’s Printing Press in Innerleithen for a letterpress workshop, I needed some words to practise with. My friend, Lindsay Macgregor, is a gifted poet and she’d been commissioned to write a poem about Peeblesshire as part of an anthology of poems from across the UK. I think her riddle sums […]

Here is a concrete representation of pool names on the Lower Teviot Pools between Roxburgh and Kelso. It was published in a pocketbook by Polygon in 2001 called ‘The Order of Things’. The River Teviot is the largest tributary of the River Tweed by catchment area. The Teviot is an important river for wildlife, especially the Atlantic salmon.

I just wanted to share some of my childhood memories of swimming and jumping into the Tweed at the Dookits near Neidpath Castle, as well as at various other spots along the river. So many hours were spent during the summer holidays with gangs of friends, floating down the river on inner tubes, jumping off […]