Singing in the Borders

Traquair Choir was founded in 2014 after a Hogmanay ceilidh brought Elaine Heron and Julie Harvey together, and the choir was born! We now have over 50 members. We sing a range of styles of music in unison and harmony; classical, world music, folk, jazz and pop. We welcome singers of all ages and musical backgrounds…

The Importance of the River Tweed

Salmon sport fishing on the Tweed started commercialising in the 1850s with the arrival of the railways, but was still largely social till the 1970s. The situation is now that a major local industry has been built on a changeable natural resource and a major change is underway at present as salmon runs switch from later to earlier and from Grilse to Salmon…

Managing a Borders Rural Estate

Tracing the history of the Estate from Roman times through the 400 years of the Murray family’s ownership to 1888, when the land was sold to William Strang Steel, founder of Steel Brothers, who traded in rice and teak in Burma. I will cover the civil war battle of Philiphaugh 1645, which I will describe in some detail…

Galloway Hoard

The Galloway Hoard is the richest and most varied collection of rare and exotic Viking-age objects ever found in Britain and Ireland. It is internationally significant, containing silver, gold and jewelled treasure from Ireland, the Anglo-Saxon world, the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires, and beyond…

Sunshine, Pollution & Seismic Rumbles

This talk aims to highlight how 11 acres of windswept moorland became one of the UK’s foremost geophysical Observatories, detail some of the notable scientists who have worked there, the world-class monitoring and research carried out there and how the observatory, in some ways, changed the lives of the peoples of the Esk Valley…

Carham 1018: The Start of the Borders Story

The Battle of Carham of 1018 is an enigma. There is a scarcity of primary sources for these times, and of what was written, much is confused or contradictory, and there is hardly one undisputed fact about the battle itself. There is disagreement about the date, the location, and the consequences of the battle…