The Setting: Where is Teviotdale?
This photograph was taken on the road to Dryburgh
Abbey, not far from Melrose, Scotland. The hills and river valley are
typical of the area.
If you look on a map of Scotland today, you won’t find
a place called Teviotdale. The term was used in the Middle Ages to define
an area in the south east of Scotland which was drained by the River
Teviot, the River Tweed and their tributaries. Today, most these lands
lie within the part of Scotland known as the Borders, but some parts of
Teviotdale, such as Berwick, where the Tweed enters the North Sea,
are now part of England. The border between England and Scotland moved
many times before it finally settled at its present day location.
The land once called Teviotdale is part of the Southern
Uplands of Scotland. It is distinguished by steep hills and deep river
valleys in the north. Towards the south, the land becomes more gentle,
and as it reaches the sea to the east, it’s flater. In the 12th
century, Teviotdale was covered by forests of huge old oak and ash trees.
The forest are gone now, replaced by pastures in a long process
that began in the time this book is set, when the abbeys began to remove
forests to pasture sheep. This is what the hills look like today. Most
of the trees that were planted in more recent centuries are different species,
so even the forested hills are not the same.
Teviotdale contained many towns that were already vital
in the 12th century and still are today, such as Melrose, Selkirk, Jedburgh
and Coldstream. One other place mentioned in An Earthly Knight
, Lilliesleaf, was established as an Anglo-Norman settlement in the 12th
century. Today, it’s a small hamlet.
One of the larger towns mentioned in An Earthly Knight,
Roxburgh, no longer exists. The site of the old town of Roxburgh is
now empty fields just outside present-day Kelso, near where the Teviot
and the Tweed meet. The ruins of Marchmont castle lie just upstream,
neglected and all but forgotten. This photo showsthe banks of the
Teviot, very close to the site where the town once stood.
On the higher bank are the ruins of the stone castle
that replaced the 12th century wooden structure. Roxburgh was destroyed
so many times during battles with the English that the town was finally
abandoned. The stone castle that replaced the 12th century wooden motte
and bailey persisted until 1550. For a complete, brief history of
visit the town of Kelso's History Page.
Some of the places in An Earthly Knight exist only
in my imagination. Lang Knowes (which means “long hills” in Scots), where
Jenny and her family live, is not a real place. The two abbeys in the
book, Rowanwald and Broomfield, are also inventions, although Rowanwald
is very much like the Augustinian abbey established in Jedburgh in 1154.
Broomfield resembles the abbeys at Melrose and Dryburgh to some degree,
though neither had a healing shrine like St. Coninia’s well.