Yes, there used to be a railway station in Moffat! By the 1870s, many people wanted to visit the spa town of Moffat. But the only way to get to Moffat was by horse and cart*. So, as you might have guessed, people decided that Moffat needed a railway. Unfortunately, the Caledonian Railway decided not […]

A little past the Beef Tub, near the head of the Cross Burn, on the A701 heading towards Tweedsmuir, is the Postie Stone. It commemorates the lives of John Goodfellow, a coach driver, and James McGeorge, a coach guard. These two good friends were taking the mail coach from Dumfries to Edinburgh in February 1831. […]

Lord Dowding is probably Moffat’s most famous son as, during the Second World War, he led RAF Fighter Command in its defeat of the Luftwaffe, saving the UK from a Nazi invasion. Wartime prime minister Winston Churchill dubbed him the ‘architect of deliverance’. Dowding was born in Moffat at St Ninian’s Preparatory School. He was […]

The Devil’s Beef Tub is a dramatic, 150 metre deep, hollow, about 5 miles north of Moffat on the A701. It is formed by four hills: Great Hill, Peat Knowe, Annanhead Hill and Ericstane Hill, and is one of the two main sources of the River Annan. The Beef Tub was used by the Border […]

We arrived in Berwickshire, in the wide valley of the River Tweed and its tributary the Whiteadder, for our stay in Allanton. All around were huge combines, tractors and trailers cutting, winnowing, baling and carrying off barley and specialist wheat. This is a land of big estates and large farms. The population is much sparser […]

Beneath our feet lie geological clues about our distant past and evidence of how life evolved on Earth. In Berwickshire and north Northumberland, the most common rocks are Carboniferous limestones, mudstones and sandstones. In the lowlands surrounding the River Tweed, the bedrock is covered by thick glacial deposits of clay, silt and sand. Embedded in […]