Walking in the Scottish Borders: Cheviots, Tweed, Ettrick, Moffat and Manor hills

By Ronald Turnbull

Guidebook presenting 45 day walks and one long distance route in the Scottish Borders. Split between the north and south Cheviots, Tweed, Ettrick, Moffat and Manor hills, the walks are a mixture of high and low-level routes and can be fully customised using multiple variants.

The day walks range from 3 to 14 miles (5-23km) in length and take between 1-17.5 hours. The long-distance route between Gretna and Berwick covers 121 miles (194km) and takes 7 days.

• 1:50,000 OS maps included for each walk
• Sized to easily fit in a jacket pocket
• Information on local points of interest
• GPX files available to download
• Information given on local geology and wildlife

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cicerone Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781783628360

Ronald Turnbull

Ronald Turnbull was born in St Andrews, Scotland, into an energetic fellwalking family. His grandfather was a president of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, and a more remote ancestor was distinguished as only the second climbing fatality in Snowdonia. In 1995 Ronald won the Fell Running Association's Long-distance Trophy for a non-stop run over all the 2000ft hills of Southern Scotland; his other proud achievements include the ascent of the north ridge of the Weisshorn and a sub-2hr Ben Nevis race. He enjoys multi-day treks, through the Highlands in particular, and has made 21 different coast-to-coast crossings of the UK. He has also slept out, in bivvy bag rather than tent, on over 80 UK summits. Outside the UK he likes hot, rocky areas of Europe, ideally with beaches and cheap aeroplanes. Recently he achieved California's 220-mile John Muir Trail and East Lothian's 45-mile John Muir Way in a single season, believing himself the first to have achieved this slightly perverse double. He has also started trying to understand the geology of what he's been walking and climbing on for so long. Ronald lives in the Lowther Hills of Dumfriesshire, and most of his walking, and writing, takes place in the nearby Lake District and in the Scottish Highlands. His recent books include The Book of the Bivvy , and walking/scrambling guides Loch Lomond and the Trossachs , The Cairngorms and Ben Nevis & Glen Coe , as well as Three Peaks Ten Tors - a slightly squint-eyed look at various UK challenge walks. He has nine times won Outdoor Writers & Photographers Guild Awards for Excellence for his guidebooks, outdoor books (including Book of the Bivvy), and magazine articles. He has a regular column in Lakeland Walker and also writes in Trail , Cumbria and TGO (The Great Outdoors). His current, hopelessly ambitious, project is to avoid completing the Munros for at least another 20 years. Ronald's weekly newsletter on mountains, hillwalking and history is at  https://aboutmountains.substack.com/

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Scottish Border Country, the historic battleground between England and Scotland, stretches from the Cheviots as far as the headwaters of the Tweed and what is today the M74 motorway. It’s a land of little green valleys and the shining rivers that run through them – whether those drain northwards to the Tweed or southwards into England. On either side rise steep but grassy slopes, cut by sharp little streams, and topped off with Iron Age forts and the occasional rocky tor.

The high country above and between the valleys is crisscrossed with green pathways. These were once busy with Roman soldiers, long-striding saints, cattle thieves and the occasional wandering salt salesman. Today they’re kept open by the shepherd on her quad bike – but also, increasingly, by walkers who value the solitude below the wide skies and the lonely cry of the plover. Here too is upland more austere: nodding cotton grass, dark heather stalks, silver puddles and black peaty bog. Such country has its own charm, but it’s often the lower hills, shaped and drained by the streams of the valley’s sides, that give the most rewarding walking.

Moffat Dale and the Ettrick Head hills (Walk 33)

This book starts with such hill country: the Cheviots, whether approached from Scotland or northwards out of England. It ends with the hills of the west: Ettrick and Moffat and the Manors. In between it’s the Tweed, the big river that drains out of Scotland but ends in England, whose every ford has run bloodstained from battle. Here are walks along the wide water, dodging below ancient castles for coffee in one of the brownstone villages or in the shadow of an abbey ruined by Henry VIII. Here too are small, free-standing summits poking out of the plain. Eildon and Rubers Law offer a more open and airy sort of half-day on the hill.

The great River Tweed and the five hill ranges that supply its waters: this country has a shaggy character all of its own, bloodstained in its history but (mostly) smooth underfoot. If you’re bored of the Borders, then you’re bored of life.

The borders of the Borders

In 1975, local government reorganisation lumped together the Scottish counties of Peebles, Roxburgh, Selkirk and Berwick into a region called Borders (its slogan: ‘Scotland’s top short break destination’). This is a smaller area than what has traditionally been known as the Border Country or the Scottish Borders. For this book, the country of the Border is considered as being the wide valley of the Tweed, along with the hills that drain into it: the Cheviots to the south, and the Ettrick, Moffat and Manor hill ranges around its headwaters in the west. Of the walks included, 25 are within the local government’s Borders region – or at least set off from there, as often we will be crossing the borders of Borders. But given that this is a book for walkers, geography has to trump politics: 13 of the walks actually start on the English side of the border, in the southern and eastern Cheviots or the lowest part of the Tweed. Westwards, 7 are in Dumfries & Galloway Region. Overall, 6 are fully international, crossing into both Scotland and England.

River Tweed near Norham Castle (Walk 16)

My Walking in the Southern Uplands, also published by Cicerone, is an overview of hill walks from Galloway to the Lammermuirs. This includes the high ground sections 1, 2, and 4–6 of this book. Some summits, such as White Coomb and The Cheviot, are necessarily included in both books; but this time around I’ve concentrated on slightly shorter and less severe ways up them, as well as on the rewarding smaller hills and the valley floor. There is also some overlap on the English side of the border with Cicerone’s Walking in Northumberland, by Vivienne Crow. There are five routes more-or-less common to the two books, though Viv and I rarely choose exactly the same route, even when we’re both aiming for the same hill.

Land of ballads

‘Every valley has its battle, and every stream its song,’ Walter Scott wrote in 1830, while inviting a friend to visit his Abbotsford house beside the Tweed. If there’s a true definition of the Scottish Borders, it comes from history. In the turbulent times of Scottish Independence after Bannockburn, the wide country between Galloway and the Tyne was fought and refought over so many times that the feudal structures of what then constituted civilisation broke down, reverting to an earlier time of local warlords and an economy based on stealing one another’s cattle. Coast to coast, from the northern tributaries of the Tyne to the southern tributaries of the Tweed and westwards to Gretna Green, neither England nor Scotland governed.

The way of life – which involved a high level of death, by starvation or sword-play – lasted for 150 years, ending quite abruptly at the Union of the Crowns in 1603. These everyday customs are recorded in the Border Ballads, collected 200 years later by Walter Scott (descended from one of the most dreaded Border clans himself). But more than that, you can read it in the country itself: the pele towers and the fortified farmhouses known as bastles; the sturdy Border townships with their seven-a-side rugby and riding of the marches; the truce cairns along the border ridgeline where disputes could sometimes be settled without anybody needing to get killed. And above all, in the emptiness (even today) of the long valleys with their winding silver rivers and hillforts on the horizon: Ettrick and Yarrow, Moffat Dale and Manor Water, Breamish and College and Coquet. Oystercatchers beep among the banks of shingle, and the curlews shriek and moan above the wide moors.

Dryhope Tower (Walk 29)

The people who lived here and loved these valleys – loved them right up until the hoofbeats came in the night and the thatch flamed above their heads – were Armstrongs and Elliots, the Johnstones and Scotts and Kerrs, the Forsters and Fenwicks and Grahams, and the small but vicious tribe of Turnbulls. They’re scattered across the world now, replaced by empty grazings of the Cheviot sheep. Nithsdale to upper Clyde is a continuous windfarm; Ottersburn a shooting range for tanks; Kielder a woodpulp plantation, the biggest in Europe.

But on a summer bank holiday, Breamish returns to its lively state of seven hundred years ago. Cars sparkle along the road verge like the river running beside them, as families and fellwalkers stream through Linhope on their way to the waterfall. The hill paths used by the cattle raiders – and before them by the saints trekking through to Lindisfarne, the Roman legions, the tribes of the Iron Age – are busy again with folk in waterproof jackets, little rucksacks on their backs.

Geology of the Scottish Borders

About 400 million years ago, what would eventually be called Scotland crunched into what would end up as England. On either side, the crumpled-up rocks form the hill zones of today: the Highlands and the Lake District, respectively. In between the two, deep ocean sludges were raised and crumpled like a trodden-on tube of toothpaste. The compressed sludges formed a rock called greywacke; their hill range, in the squash zone between England and Scotland, is the Southern Uplands.

Folded greywacke at Pettico Wick, St Abbs (Walk 17)

Greywacke is slabby and massive. It doesn’t form great cliffs, but eroded rocky scars and little gill streams. Where enough of it shows to reveal the bedding of the ancient ocean floor, you’ll see that it’s been folded and bent up vertical by the continental collision. Friable shale beds found in some gullies contain scratchy small fossils of ancient sea creatures (see Walk 36).

As the collision ground to an end, earth movements and friction heat deep underground melted rocks above. The rock-melt erupted as lava from volcanoes, or crystallised below the surface as granite. The resulting rocks now form the Cheviot Hills; granite at the centre, surrounded by volcanic lavas. Like the Southern Uplands, the hills are grassy (or peaty) and rounded. But they betray their volcanic origin in intrusive sills of tougher rock, and occasional little granite tors. The rocks, when you see them, are pinkish. The granite is crystalline; the featureless rhyolite can contain yellowish crystals of feldspar.

Granite tor, Bellyside Crag on The Cheviot (Walk 7)

Between the two ranges, the wide Tweed valley is made of much softer rock, the Old Red Sandstone. This formed in a hot desert climate, from debris washed out of the mountains. Where it’s seen in riverbanks, the contrast with the harder mountain rocks is obvious. But it’s more visible as an excellent building stone, forming the ruined abbeys and handsome towns.

Long after The Cheviot had calmed down again, some small volcanoes erupted through the red sandstone, to give us the rugged little hills like Rubers Law. At St Abb’s Head (visited on Walk 17), these jumbled lavas lie right alongside both the Old Red Sandstone and the greywacke.

Wildlife

Given centuries of heavy grazing by sheep, the plantlife has degraded to a mix of coarse grassland, bog cotton and sphagnum moss in the soggy places, and heather on the drier ground. In spring and early summer a few brightly coloured wildflowers peep out between the grasses; yellow tormentil, blue milkwort, pale purple lousewort.

Wildlife includes foxes (preying on voles mostly), roe deer in the woodlands, adders, wild goats, and otters in the rivers of the quieter valleys. Apart from the goats, you’re unlikely to see any of these unless you’re on the hill very early after sunrise.

In late spring, ground-nesting moorland birds, curlew, lapwing, oystercatcher, fill the sky with their distinctive cries. In summer the skylark takes over. Any small brown bird will usually be wheatear (one white flash in the tail) or meadow pipit (two white flashes). Buzzards and ravens are common; peregrine falcons can occasionally be seen. Daytime-flying short-eared owls have been considered extinct, but are making a come-back. Golden eagles have recently been reintroduced to the Southern Uplands. I’ve never spotted any, but you might be luckier!

Plants of the Borders: (clockwise from top left) cloudberry, cloudberry fruit, reindeer moss lichen, tormentil

When to walk

With a maximum altitude of 840m and few fearsome cliffs to fall off, the hills of the Scottish Borders can be enjoyed at any time of the year; and this applies especially to the lower walks of the Tweed valley. The very best months are usually April to June, when the air is cool and clear, and rainfall is lower than in other seasons.

In high summer, July and August, the hills are slightly busier, although even then are far from crowded. The grassland is a duller green, and the air is warm and hazy.

Autumn weather can be tiresome, with occasional brisk, windswept hill days sparkling within weeks of grey rain. As the range stretches across Scotland, the eastern end, with its generally lower rainfall, may well have better weather than the other. However, the lack of roads and through-routes doesn’t aid any last-minute shift from Ettrick to Coquet.

Winter hill-walking here can be a special experience, with its huge and solitary empty spaces. But snow cover is unreliable. Some winters are almost snow free. Because the hills are unfrequented (compared with the Lake District or even the Scottish Highlands) winter snow will not usually be trampled down along popular paths. While beautiful, the going may also be bothersome and slow.

Across a frozen Loch Eddy to Lee Pen (Walk 41)

The Mountain Weather Information Service provides daily forecasts for the Scottish, English and Welsh mountains. It happens to be based in Galloway, so its specific ‘Southern Uplands’ forecast (which includes the Cheviots) is no afterthought, but at least as carefully prepared as those for higher and busier bits of hill elsewhere. See www.mwis.org.uk.

Getting there

Berwick is on the East Coast main railway line, while the Waverley Line from Edinburgh reaches Tweedbank near Melrose. Long distance coaches run from all these places to the Border towns: Moffat, Peebles, Selkirk, Innerleithen, St Boswells, Kelso, the Yetholms and Wooler.

Travellers by car will typically arrive from the south via the A1 or A68 roads, or else via Carlisle and then the A7. From the north, access is via the same A1 and A68 from Edinburgh, or the M74 out of Glasgow.

For those arriving by air, the Border Country is reached from Glasgow (Prestwick, rather than Glasgow International for preference), Edinburgh, or Newcastle.

Down Cademuir Hill towards Manor valley (Walk 43)

Getting around

Along the Border ridgeline, from Kirk Yetholm westwards to the A68 at Carter Bar, you can walk for 44km or 27 miles without crossing a tarmac road of today. Okay, in that distance you’ll cross three Roman Roads, half a dozen old green hill roads of the drovers and cattle thieves, and two long-distance footpaths. But for those encumbered with cars, the Borders are a bit troublesome to get about in. A sudden decision to chase the sunshine from Moffat to Ingram, say, will leave you scratching your head (or satnav) between three different and indirect routes, each taking more than two hours’ driving time. It may be better to choose one area to explore rather than attempting to cover the entire area in one go.

Walks in the Tweed valley (Section 3) can be reached by local buses from the border towns mentioned just below. Elsewhere, the walks in the hills are typically at the ends of long, single track lanes – these lead romantically into the heart of the high ground, but are not on any bus route. To savour this country in car-free fashion, the best advice may be to make a multi-day trek of it, from village to village along one of the treks and trails listed in Section 7.

Accommodation

The Borders are full of options for staying the night, including Moffat, Peebles, Selkirk, Innerleithen, St Boswells, Kelso, the Yetholms and Wooler. Each of these towns is handsome and accommodating, with shops, cafés, pubs, camping or caravan sites, hotels and B&Bs; most also feature a ruined abbey or castle.

Border town of Moffat (Walk 39)

Maps

This book uses OS Landranger mapping at 1:50,000 scale. This is clear and accurate; its one drawback is that it doesn’t mark field boundaries (walls and fences), which are such a useful guide in the featureless higher ground. The mapping in this book is best used for navigation alongside more detailed maps, and there are many options available.

Ordnance Survey Explorer maps are at 1:25,000 scale, with excellent contour detail. They show paths and forest rides, although these do not always correspond with what’s on the ground. Their major advantage, if you’re planning routes in England, is that they mark the CRoW open-access land (see Access).

For the area it covers (Section 1 in this book) Harvey’s Cheviot Hills at 1:40,000 is the best map there is. As well as being compact and waterproof, its path markings correspond with what’s on the ground.

Various open-source and free maps are available for smartphones and GPS gadgets. I would not rely on these for navigating in hill country, as their contour detail is neither detailed nor accurate. The Viewranger app is one way of gaining OS mapping (in both Landranger and Explorer styles) for a modest annual subscription.

Access

Laws on access to the countryside differ between Scotland and England. In Scotland, there is a statutory right of access to all ground apart from growing crops and ground immediately around houses – and this includes for cycling and wild camping. This right must be exercised responsibly, with proper regard for land managers, other hill-goers, and the environment: see www.outdooraccess-scotland.scot. You won’t see any right-of-way markings on maps within Scotland.

In England, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (the CRoW Act) gives access on foot to most uncultivated, open country; the relevant ground being marked on Explorer (but not Harvey or Landranger) mapping. Outside these areas, access is limited to public footpaths and bridleways, as marked on