Extract from an interview with Maureen Thornborrow who remembers growing up near the Fruid reservoir and attending Tweedsmuir Primary School.
If you’ve never been up to Fruid, you should go for a look and see where I grew up. And then subsequently all my children grew up after that. A wonderful playground, it’s very remote about eight miles from here, it’s about as far away as you can get. So we were very lucky. There was three houses up there. My sister and I grew up with my parents in one of the houses. There was another two boys in one of the other cottages and another two boys in the other. We were quite a little community of our own. And we made up most of the kids for the primary school.
Any opportunity the teacher took us down to the river for nature lessons. Took a sandwich down there. You got to paddle – those were the days when we were allowed to. Knowing all the flora and fauna and we used to see the salmon coming up the Tweed and we used to take fishing nets. We knew all the butterflies, we knew all the wild flowers.
And I can remember walking down the street near the church where the tree goes down and seeing the salmon, coming up the tweed to spawn. There were so many of them, you know, the water was moving, we felt that we could walk across the water. I have never forgotten that and never seen it again. They don’t get this far up nowadays.
Photo credit Jim Barton.
