Melrose – to Old Melrose

Always keen to share our favourite local walks with you, this 8-mile circular route takes you to Old Melrose, the original site of Melrose Abbey.   

The Melrose to Old Melrose path is a fascinating route that passes Trimontium Roman Fort and the Rhymer’s Stone. Old Melrose is famed as being one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon monasteries in northern Britain and the first spiritual home of St Cuthbert. The Melrose to Old Melrose Trail is a total of eight miles with minor roads and mainly good paths, frequently across open country so boots or walking shoes are recommended.

Walkers can also enjoy a refreshment and a browse along the way in one of the old estate buildings at Old Melrose. Within the old dairy farmhouse you will find a cafe serving light lunches, home baked cakes and a wide variety of teas and coffees, and there are showrooms selling furniture and antiques and local arts and crafts as well as a small second hand bookshop. Take a stroll outside through beautiful woodlands overlooking the river and you can visit the Old Melrose Interpretation Centre to learn about the original site of Melrose Abbey.

FOR FULL ROUTE download from the Walk Scottish Borders website

The History of Old Melrose

Old Melrose, or ‘Mailros’ meaning ‘bare headland,’ is a natural promontory formed by a looping meander of the River Tweed cutting into Bemersyde Hill about 2.5 kilometres east of Newstead.

It is a site of great archaeological potential that could have been used as a centre of ritual and religious ceremony from pre-Roman times. It is most famously associated with St. Cuthbert as the probable site of the Anglo-Saxon monastery where he began his monastic life in the 7th century AD. This small monastery on the Tweed was the initial link in the chain of sites associated with St Cuthbert connecting Coldinham, Holy Island, Inner Farne and Durham Cathedral where his bones rest.

The monastery was burned down around 849AD and remained in a broken-down condition until The Archbishop of Durham built a pilgrimage chapel at Old Melrose dedicated to St. Cuthbert as part of the cult that made him, arguably, one of the most celebrated of the Northern British saints in the Middle Ages. In 1136 King David I granted this chapel to the new Cistercian abbey and monastery of Melrose that he founded at the hamlet of Little Fordell (modern Melrose). The final destruction of Old Melrose chapel by the English is recorded during the reign of Robert the Bruce and the chapel struggled on throughout the 15th century in a ruinous state until the Reformation in the 16th century finally ended the long religious history of the site. Subsequently, it fell into private ownership and in 1575 it became the site of the Border Pele Tower of Baron Ormiston, a later country house and the current farmhouse and steading of 18th and 19th century date.

Photo © VisitScotland / Paul Tomkins