17-05-2025
The genteel Borders town the Scots keep for themselves
'This is the town that Scots seem to keep for ourselves,' beams Stewart Wilson, a guide whose enthusiasm for his Borders homeland risks letting the secret out, as he proudly shares a corner of the Tweed Valley settled since Neolithic times.
'It's crazy that today most people just zoom by heading further north as Melrose brings together many of the best bits of the Borders in one charming wee town.'
If us Scots are keeping Melrose under wraps today it's hardly surprising: historically, Melrose has not had the most polite of visitors. England's Edward I plundered through in 1300, his son Edward II continued the family tradition by sacking Melrose in 1322, before this market town was battered again during the 'Rough Wooing' of Henry VIII in the 1540s.
Melrose's most celebrated attraction, its landmark abbey, is a permanent visceral reminder of those turbulent times. The locals may be proud that the heart of Scotland's most celebrated monarch, Robert the Bruce (of Bannockburn fame), is interred here, but the abbey is but a romantic ruin – perhaps Scotland's most evocative – after Richard II's forces burned it in 1385 and the Reformation put the final nail in its grand Gothic coffin. The English legacies run deep – local legend even insists that King Arthur lies buried in the Eildon Hills.
We know that the Romans coveted the triple peaks of the Eildon Hills too, forging one of the largest forts anywhere in Britain, eponymous Trimontium, a stronghold of such significance it featured on a map produced by Roman geographer Ptolemy in the second century. At least one emperor, Septimius Severus, visited in 208AD, bringing with him the largest Roman army ever to march north into the country. Once again, though, the Romans were sent home tae think again.
'Scotland was ancient Rome's Afghanistan,' Thania M Flores, of Melrose's Trimontium Museum, tells me as their new virtual-reality headset experience vaults me back through the centuries to the days when Roman raiding parties tried to terrorise the local clans into submission.
'The united opposition to the Romans became so strong that we have found evidence during digs that Trimontium was abandoned with great haste,' continues Flores. 'This suggests a powerful, united enemy, centuries before Anglo-centric scholars even consider an embryonic Scottish nation. It's a potential game-changer for how we look at British history.'
The museum also runs walking tours around the Trimontium site, visiting the northernmost amphitheatre in the Roman Empire. I instead pitch forward through time to Burts. This stately, traditional hotel is a pleasing timewarp itself, and has been in the same family for 54 years. It has changed little since my wife and I decided on our first child's name here. Tara is now 17.
Over delicious Borders lamb and a pint of a crisp hoppy ale from the superb local Tempest Brewery Co, owner Nick Henderson tells me: 'We are all about tradition and heritage in Melrose and our hotel reflects that. We welcome guests to a gentler age where things were less hurried and people had time for each other. And it's so much quieter than the Lake District to our south.'
The Hendersons are the embodiment of Melrose's sense of tradition and community. Just across the picturesque High Street is the Townhouse Hotel, run by Nick's brother James. Both recline on a market square that evokes the days when we didn't need weekend farmers' markets in car parks as you could just pop into a proper butchers.
Wandering around Melrose is like exploring Camberwick Green or Trumpton. I half expect to meet Windy Miller. Instead, at the well-stocked Country Kitchen Deli, cheery Angela Abbey, who swapped the Cotswolds for Melrose for a 'gentler, slower life', greets me.
At Simply Delicious, I enjoy their tasty tablet – a sweet Scottish treat much tastier than it sounds – as the beaming welcomes continue. I'm greeted like an old pal in antique shops, wine emporiums, wee galleries and the sprinkling of tasteful gift shops that Melrose tolerates. Melrose even has a book binder – Felicity Bristow – who entreats me to come back for the annual book festival in June.
Melrose doesn't do chains. No Starbucks. No Costa. No hint of a supermarket; only Boots, who have an apologetically unassuming presence. This trim, liveable town makes a defiant stand against the world of supermarket hegemony, a battle Galashiels just a few miles upriver resoundingly lost a couple of decades ago with the arrival of a hulking Tesco and similarly suffocating Asda.
It's very tempting to stay wrapped within Melrose's cosy cocoon, but there are too many two-footed options to ignore. Melrose must be Scotland's best connected walking hub. An excellent network of trails ramble around the town's environs in the Melrose Paths community-led initiative. The coast-to-coast, 215-mile Southern Upland Way also surges through along the lifeblood River Tweed, while the St Cuthbert's Way sends walkers on a cross-border ecclesiastical foray to Lindisfarne.
I embark on a section of the 68-mile Borders Abbeys Way, a circular trail that takes in the ruins of the quartet of grand Borders Abbeys that were all sacked by unruly English visitors over the centuries.
If us Scots are keeping Melrose to ourselves, we've gone a step further and totally abandoned the hills that rise to the east. I hike above Sir Walter Scott's palatial home at Abbotsford and the only souls I see are of the white woollen variety, bar one deer interloper. It's just me, the gently rolling hills of the Tweed Valley – a tonic to the savageness of the Highlands – and the sort of eclectic forestry that you seldom savour in the vast tracts of grouse-beaten Highland estate.
The skies are blue and the spring sun is burning after a couple of hours, so I could be forgiven for thinking Cedar Hus Sauna is a mirage. The sense of surreality heightens when Laura Mitchell engages me with a smile and hands me a wool hat that is needed 'to keep your ears cool when I'm thrashing you with birch'.
It's quite an introduction from Mitchell and turns chilly when we take a dip in Lindean Loch as part of the ritual. Laura then joins me steaming away in her brilliant home-fashioned mobile sauna, steeping us with fresh pine fragrance, then doing the thrashing; much more pleasurable than it sounds.
