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 noted on every single map of this region. But what your map doesn’t tell you is the place where Timothy and his friend rowed over the river to the fairy glen to have tea with the fairies. Only Alison’s dad the storyteller knows where that is. He thought Timothy lived at 5 Stirling Place, but that street doesn’t exist anymore and no-one’s really sure if it ever did.
Round this neck of the river, one man tells of how the riverbank provides a perfect ever-changing running route where he always stops to look even though it ruins his finish time. It’s where a cow stole Joe’s pants when he was four while paddling in the river, and during lockdown he swam from Melrose to Leaderfoot.
Someone else paddle-boarded from the Yiddy to Dryburgh two years ago, while Colin’s daughter would go out in her summer holidays and set up the water gauges along the river. Just up from the place Ethan ‘once might of caught a butter trout’ there now lives a sundial, welcomed into the world with a festival thrown by the whole village.
