Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 35 on 15/11/2007.

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Scott's country home

Charles Douglas visits Abbotsford House at Melrose in the Scottish Borders, home of Sir Walter Scott

Ihave an enduring image of Sir Walter Scott, the mercurial Scottish author and icon, glimpsed through the window of his town house in Edinburgh late at night seated at his desk with his quill pen furiously writing to pay off his debts. Of course, that is certainly not how he would have wished us to remember him, which is why he created Abbotsford, his breathtakingly magnificent home set amid the Borders landscape of his childhood.

As a youngster he contracted polio, an affliction which would leave him lame in his right leg for the remainder of his life.

However, to convalesce, he was sent to his grandparents’ farm, Sandyknowe, at Smailholm, where he absorbed many of the folklore legends of the Scottish Borders which he would later put to masterly use in his novels. It was the beginning of a great love affair with the river valley of the Tweed with its undulating hills and rolling vistas.

Scott’s early career was as a lawyer and, in 1799, he was appointed Sheriff Deputy of the County of Selkirk. After 1805, however, his writing and poetry (The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The Lady in the Lake) brought him international fame and he founded his own printing and publishing press, copublishing the Quarterly Review in 1809.

In 1811, with the money he had accumulated, he bought the farm known as Cartleyhole, near Melrose, from a local minister for £4,000, and, through the subsequent purchase of adjacent properties, extended the estate to 1,400 acres. He then made plans to build a l.....

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By Sally Toms

Section : Scotland Houses

Page number : 14