Border Reivers at Tosson Tower

The beautiful brunette made her way back from the glass and granite bar with a Pole Dancer cocktail in each of her hands and a twinkle in her big brown eyes. It was a quiet Tuesday night, and the piano music added to the ambiance as we worked our way through the leather-covered drinks menu. We knocked back a couple more fruit-filled iced glasses at last orders, and retired upstairs to a spacious suite complete with chandelier and sunken bath in the West Wing of the County Hotel in Newcastle, directly opposite the Central Station. I pulled the net curtains to one side and looked up the street illuminated by sodium lights, watching a few stragglers laughing, singing and wobbling up past the worn and weathered yellow sandstone of the church of St. John the Baptist rising in the dark sky opposite. We were celebrating the completion of my book ‘ Dick the Devil’s Bairns ’ with a rare night away to watch a Glaswegian comedian. Bairns didn’t have much humour in it, being a hefty hist...

Auld Watt’s son William Scott was a character who was caught sheep stealing once too often, despite his father’s warnings that times were changing after King James VI started to clamp down on the reivers. It wasn’t the Crown that young buck William had to worry about though, but an irate Sir Gideon Murray who is said to have offered the reiver a choice – the rope or the hand of his none-too-pretty daughter, known as ‘Muckle Mooth Meg.’ William was reputed to be full of bravado and said it was ‘nowt for a Scott to die’ but soon changed his mind and married the lass. Historians have subsequently proved the story as a tall tale, but it’s a good one. Robert Scott married an Elspeth Murray of Elibank at Aikwood in 1602, with their initials carved in a wall of the tower. The large pele was built in 1540 and now provides stunningly restored five star boutique accommodation in the Etterick Forest. It’s also a wedding venue and corporate setting near the town of Selkirk and b...

Walter Scott of Harden – or Auld Wat to give him his reiver nickname – was married to Mary Scott of Dryhope, a bonny lass known as ‘the flower of Yarrow,’ and they had six sons and six daughters. Auld Wat is famous for his dry line: “Aye, if you had fower legs, you wouldn’t stand there lang,” on passing a large haystack on his way back from one of his raids, while his bugle horn, complete with carved initials, is on display in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. He was also one of the chief riders in the rescue of Kinmont Willie Armstrong from Carlisle Castle. The substantial ruins of the tower at Dryhope are still standing beside Dryhope farm near Saint Mary’s Loch, surrounded by the beautiful green hills just off the Southern Upland Way, and can be visited.