The Mill Dam was emptied once a year at the Annual Mill Holidays in August. Lots of the young lads would ‘guddle’ the trout that were left in the clearing [catch the fish with their hands]. The Dam also had a bridge over it at the end where it went into the Tweed. This was used by poachers of salmon to escape being caught by the bailiffs. Those days men poached to earn a bob or two.
The Boat Hole was a great place for us. Charlie Hislop hired out a few rowing boats in the summer. He had a whistle and a loud shout to any youngster who would be standing up capering in the boat! We were terrified of him, but we respected him too, because he really cared for we children of The Green.
Charlie was a fisher, and lots of other fishers would be around the Boat Hole when Tweed was in spate, and lots of tales would be spun. There was quite a ‘Swirl Pool’ here also, which was very deep. Tweed of course came right into the Banking at this point.
There was a ‘cauld’ [weir] from the Boat Hole side over to the other side of Tweed where we often saw the salmon leaping over it. Unfortunately this is long gone and there are islands in the Tweed now that were never there before. I’ve often seen poachers run the cauld, climbing over the dam bridge and up by the green to the Old Town to escape the bailiffs.
Sheila Laurie was born in Peebles in 1916. She worked in lawyers’ offices in the town.
Sheila shared memories of Peebles in the 1930s, which were recorded in the early 2000s and are reproduced here by kind permission of The Tweeddale Society from their 2005 publication ‘Peebles Remembered’. Whitie’s Books and Crafts in Peebles have copies.
The cauld at Peebles in 2026 © Anthony O’Neil (cc-by-sa/2.0) geograph.org.uk/p/8302576.
