Traquair to Melrose

23 April 2011 - Traquair to Melrose

Distance - 17 miles

Weather - Mist and rain
We stayed at - Burts Hotel, Market Square, Melrose, Roxburghshire, TD6 9PL

As I've mentioned before, when we drew up the rules for our LEJOG, we said we wouldn't be precious about the direction of travel just as long as every part of the route joined up at the very end. So rather than drive two cars out to Traquair (which is a tiny place with very limited parking) we decided to just take the one and walk from Traquair to Melrose, then come back for it at the end of the day. Our route then was actually from Traquair to Melrose, rather than the other way round, following the Southern Upland Way for the majority of the day.

Looking through

The weather had really changed from yesterday and where there had

Point of Resolution

been strong sun, there was now murky drizzle. The first part of the walk featured rather a lot of climbing up through woodland onto Minch Moor via Piper's Knowe. I was really pleased to see that vast chunks of the dreary pine trees had been felled and were being replanted with native species to encourage the wildlife back to the area. Further on, the moorland had been sculpted into a big art installation called Point of Resolution. This is a "growing sculpture" created by Charles Poulsen in 2005. I thought it was really rather good.

Southern Upland Way to Brown Knowe

A little further on we passed the Cheese Well, this is a spring where

Low cloud at Brown Know

there has been an ancient custom of leaving presents of cheese for the fairies. We apologised to the them for our lack of cheese and carried on up to Minch Moor, the high point of the day at 567 metres. From there we pressed on to Hare Law, Brown Knowe and Broomy Law. The cloud cover was really low at Brown Knowe and we found ourselves shrouded in misty rain.

View from Three Brethren

From Broomy Law we made our way to the Three Brethren, which are three well constructed cairns - very like those we'd seen at Nine Standards Rigg, whilst walking the Coast to Coast. There wasn't any mist here and so we were able to take advantage of the lovely views across the surrounding countryside. We gradually descended through woodland to meet the Tweed at the B7060 near Fairnilee Farm. At this point we said goodbye to the Southern Upland Way as it wanted to do a big circuit up to Hog Hill and round the base of Gala Hill on the outskirts of Galashiels. As we we were doing our LEJOG and not the Southern Upland Way, we carried on walking along the B7060, but met up with it again briefly near Abbotsford, just before we crossed the busy A6091. We soon left it though to pick up the St Cuthbert's Way again, which we followed for most of the way into Melrose.