After visiting my daughter and her family between Christmas and New Year I was travelling home through the Tweed valley between Coldstream and Kelso. Late afternoon and a clear sky. Amid the seasonal hurly burly this view was, in every sense, a breath of fresh air.

Just ten miles from the English border, Jedburgh Abbey is one of Scotland’s most striking monastic ruins. Its story stretches back to the 9th century, when the area was part of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria and the first church was gifted to the See of Lindisfarne. In 1118, Prince David, later King David I, […]

At the meeting of the waters, you’ll still hear folks reminiscing about the time they used to picnic by the river before ‘the new bridge’ was built. Constructed in 1974 but still thought of as new and just as much maligned as the day it arrived. Along from here is Abbotsford House, historically important and […]

Kelso Abbey was founded in the 12th century by Tironensian monks during the reign of Alexander I, and once stood as one of Scotland’s most powerful monastic houses. Overlooking the meeting of the Tweed and Teviot rivers, it occupied a strategic site near Roxburgh, the intended southern stronghold of the emerging Scottish kingdom. This abbey […]

Founded in 1150 when Hugh de Morville invited Premonstratensian canons from Alnwick to settle here, their arrival marked the beginning of centuries of devotion and resilience. The abbey endured fire and destruction during the border wars, burned by English troops in 1322 and again by Richard II in 1385, yet it rose from the ashes […]

Melrose Abbey was founded in 1136 by Cistercian monks at the request of King David I, and became Scotland’s most important monastic house until the Reformation. The abbey’s east end was completed in 1146, and over the next fifty years its soaring Gothic architecture took shape in the form of a St John’s Cross. Though […]