Because of the way the border runs, when we travelled from our holiday home in Lower Burnmouth to Paxton House we crossed into England and back into Scotland again. Here I am on the way down crossing into the country, and indeed the county (Northumberland), of my birth.
Paxton House was designed by John and James Adam in 1758 and built between then and 1766. The National Gallery of Scotland describes it as “perhaps the finest example of an eighteenth-century Palladian country house in Britain”. It has extensive interiors (c1773) by Robert Adam, as well as furniture by Thomas Chippendale. In 1811, the Edinburgh architect Robert Reid added the largest purpose-built picture gallery in a Scottish country house which today contains paintings from the National Galleries. Visiting is by guided tour only and no photography is allowed.
However, there is plenty to photograph outside with 80 acres of grounds, gardens, riverside and woodland.
The engineer enjoyed visiting the old waterworks.
I preferred the children’s Fairy Trail …
… and the sculpture by Julia Hilton – Entrances, inspired by the stages of an opening bud.
Paxton has a good café in the old stables which we used for morning coffee and lunch. When we had exhausted its delights we decided to stop off in the Northumbrian town of Berwick-upon-Tweed on the way back to Burnmouth. We liked the sign on the wall of the carpark wall, showing that it had originally been the cattle market, and this rather less than pleasant street name.
Berwick was founded by Anglo-Saxons and for hundreds of years was affected by border wars between the Kingdoms of England and Scotland. Possession of Berwick changed hands several times until 1482 when Richard of Gloucester retook it for England. It’s a traditional market town and also has some notable architectural features, in particular its medieval town walls, its Georgian Town Hall, its Elizabethan ramparts, and Britain’s earliest barracks buildings, which Nicholas Hawksmoor built (1717–21) for the Board of Ordnance. We set off to walk the walls and ramparts. Here are some highlights.
Part way round, we spotted this lovely little car. Such a pretty colour – and two days later we would spot it again.
Having stopped at the English border on the way out, we had to stop on the other side of the road as we returned. Welcome back to Scotland!
There was still a lot of afternoon left, so we decided to visit nearby Bughtrig Garden as well. Bughtrig, which means farm on a ridge, has belonged to only three families in its traceable history 
The formal garden, however, is a delight and we spent some time wandering about, as well as relaxing on these rather unusual loungers (which were quite tricky to get off).
Just inside, a woodland path led up to the 218m summit of Duns Law. As we climbed, we could see the castle gateway below us with the Cheviot Hills behind it.
On the hill’s flat summit is a Covenanters’ Stone, which marks the spot where General Alexander Leslie raised the Covenanters’ standard in 1639 in defiance of King Charles I’s imposition of Episcopalianism on his Scottish subjects.
We descended part-way, then struck off across the flank of the hill where we passed a stone on the site of the old town of Dunse (sic), destroyed in the border raids of 1588. We could also see the castle peeking through the trees below us.
This third visit to Eyemouth may have ended our holiday, but there are several gaps still to fill in. There’s much more information about this part of Scotland to come.
The path reached the road at the upper part of Burnmouth. As the old sign tells us, it’s 6 miles to Berwick and 52 to Edinburgh. The pub is The First and Last – the first or last in Scotland, depending on your direction of travel.
After spending the afternoon in Eyemouth we had to walk back. Remember The First and Last in Burnmouth? We naturally stopped for a beer and some good pub grub. I liked the way it was decorated with old advertising boards.
On a hill overlooking Eyemouth Harbour, there is also a commemorative wall, built in 2017, with each lost man represented by a pebble at the base.
The town’s small museum has more information and displays about the disaster. (These are all fairly terrible pictures because of reflections in the glass cases.) The poster below has a quote from Alex Burgon, Skipper of the Ariel Gazelle – “We’ll not see Eyemoth today boys”. The men clearly knew what was coming. Pickit Men by Emma Mackenzie (2010) has a figure for each of the 129 Eyemouth men lost, standing together in their crews. Pickit is a Scots word meaning plucked. “Ye wad juist think that they had been pickit” was a frequent comment made about the men at the time.
Burnmouth is the last village on Scotland’s east coast before crossing the border into England. It’s also one of those divided villages with a steep, winding road down to the harbour. We booked a cottage in Lower Burnmouth for a week last July / August, and I was surprised to find that the small settlement around the harbour actually counts as four villages!
However, when we arrived we were very disappointed to find that it looked like this:
It would be some days before high tide was at a suitable time for us to see it, i.e. not while we were out during the day or while we slept. However, we found the view endlessly fascinating and have many pictures in different conditions of weather and tide. Here’s more from the main bedroom:
It’s one part of a memorial to the East Coast Fishing Disaster of 1881, of which we’d never heard, and we made it our mission to track down the other three sculptures. The whole of my next post will be dedicated to the disaster.
Benbecula is a small island – eight miles by eight miles – squashed between North and South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. It’s generally flat, more loch than rock, with its high point, Rueval, at 406 feet not much of a challenge. Still, we climbed to the top and here I am gazing out at the landscape spread before me. For the full story see 
Today’s post is proof that you might think you will get extensive views when you climb to the top, but it’s not always the case. Above is John at Renish Point in Harris. He’s looking quite happy – probably just as well that there is no picture of me at this point.
These images are both from the last couple of years, so I think most of you will have seen them before. Just in case, here are links to the full posts.