The scenic Scottish town you really should visit

Melrose, Scottish Borders. It’s a small and ancient town of red sandstone in green countryside. Does its name ring a bell? Not if you’re talking about Melrose Abbey, whose bellringing programme presumably took a whack on the various occasions on which the building was trashed by the English.

Still, “Melrose” is currently a name you’ll be hearing often. This is partly because of Patrick Melrose the TV drama series, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays the eponymous upper-class junkie, first seen in the novels of Edward St Aubyn; and partly because of Melrose, the turnaround specialists who last month completed a hostile £8bn takeover of the engineering firm GKN. 

Is all publicity, whether coincidental or tenuous or unfortunate, good publicity? Will angry industrial protesters, hoping to storm their new bosses’ office but finding only an abbey, bring some accidental tourist dollar to Melrose? Will convoys of misguided Cumberbitches (for that is how the actor’s fans self-identify) unload themselves on the Scottish Borders?

Certainly there’ll be visitors next month for the Melrose Festival (June 17-23), which celebrates the town’s long history. Melrose has already had its rugby sevens festival this year, (this being where sevens was invented), and will have hosted the Borders Book Festival (June 14-17) just before the Melrose Festival begins. A busy summer then. As any visitor to the abbey over the past few hundred years could tell you, it was about time they raised the roof.

We went on a day so hot you could have boiled a Scotch egg on our bonnet. This is optimal weather for enjoying the majority of Melrose; not the abbey, whose ruins probably derive some atmospheric benefit from winter grunginess, but certainly the hills and fields outside the town and the gardens within it. In fact, in the town centre, there are two walled gardens within a few yards of each other. This is a fairly lavish quotient of walled garden for a town whose population can’t number many more than 1,000. They could all probably fit into Priorwood Garden, cramming themselves in among its apple trees and sculptures, and then decamp to its bitter local rival, Harmony Garden, and do much the same on its lush lawn. It’s fairly Edenic, at least until you learn that Harmony Cottage, which the garden surrounds, was built on plantation wealth. Ho hum.

Even outside festival season, you’ll probably meet at least a couple of walkers here. Some of them might be tackling St Cuthbert’s Way, which starts at the abbey and finishes 62 miles later at Holy Island. Others might scale the Eildon Hills, a bobbly trio immediately to Melrose’s south. Others still might find that the café on the square also does whisky, decide they’d rather have a dram than a yomp, and stay put for the rest of the day.

A day’s visit is probably enough, provided you’ve got time to see Abbotsford, the fantastical Scottish baronial house that Sir Walter Scott designed for himself nearby, and the Leaderfoot Viaduct, the beautiful, spindly Victorian bridge that crosses the Tweed to Melrose’s north. 

Longer-term residents include retirees from Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the heart of Robert the Bruce, removed from his body for an abortive posthumous “crusade” (they got as far as Spain), before eventually being buried in the abbey.

When Cumberbatch and GKN are forgotten, the heart will still be here, the ruins will be just as ruined, and this scenic little town might just be able to reclaim the title of the most pre-eminent of the Melroses.

Five good reasons to visit Melrose

The gardens

Entry is free at both Harmony Garden and Priorwood Garden. The first offers pristine lawns and scented borders; the second a more rustic feel.

The abbey

Entry is free at both Harmony Garden and Priorwood Garden. The first offers pristine lawns and scented borders; the second a more rustic feel.

The café

Come for the light lunch, stay for the shelves of Scottish booze at Abbey Fine Wines and café.

The house

Abbotsford House is weird and elaborate and magnificent, and you don’t need to be a Scott fan to marvel at it all. The gardens are lovely too. A family ticket costs £28.

The museum

The Romans had a fort just south of Melrose: Trimontium, named for the three Eildon Hills. Artefacts from the fort and from other Roman settlements are on display at the Trimontium Museum on Market Square. A family ticket costs £5.