Location

 

 

 

 

Galashiels is a busy town on the A7 road from Carlisle to Edinburgh. It lies in the bottom of the steep-sided valley of the Gala Water a mile upstream of its confluence with the River Tweed. Though the town has worked hard to diversify in recent years, Galashiels' history has been closely tied to the fluctuating fortunes of the textile industry in the Scottish Borders.

The A7 splits as it runs through Galashiels, forming the one way system surrounding the town centre. Overlooking the junction where the road comes together before heading south to Selkirk is the town's most striking building, the Burgh Chambers.

Originally built in 1867, the impressive clock tower added in the 1920s incorporates the town's war memorial and includes a beautiful statue of a mounted mosstrooper or border reiver. Galashiels' war memorial was built to remember the 635 men from the town killed during the First World War, a strikingly large town centre, by Bridge Place and by Market Street.

If you head east from the Burgh Chambers, you start to appreciate the reason for Galashiels' growth. Here the riverside, bar the odd break for a modern supermarket, is lined with the woollen mills that caused the town's population to soar from 600 people in 1776 to a peak of 17,367 in 1890, when there were 21 mills in the town.   

The best known of the mills remaining in operation is Lochcarron, which with 140 workers is Scotland's largest producer of tartan clothing.

The population of Galashiels declined in the late 1890s following problems with trade to traditional markets in the USA, and stood at 13,600 in 1901. The slow growth over the following decade followed improvements to Galashiels' environment, and the construction of a secondary school and a technical college, which given its focus on textiles was perhaps inevitably known locally as the "Woolly Tech".

Our Offices in Galashiels are situated in Bank Close, which is located between Channel Street and Bank Street

 

 

Duns

The attractive market town of Duns was for much of its history the county town of Berwickshire, an odd arrangement made necessary when Berwick-upon-Tweed itself finally ended up on the English side of the border in 1482.

Duns itself was frequently caught up in the cross border wars between England and Scotland and the town you see today dates almost entirely to the years since 1545. That was when Henry VIII's troops destroyed the original town of Duns, located generally to the north of the current site and nearer to Duns Castle.

The original Duns probably dated back to the 1000s, and in about 1320 Duns Castle was built as a tower house. One of Duns' earliest claims to fame was as the birthplace in 1265 of the philosopher John Duns Scotius. He claimed that religion was based on faith not reason. This was a deeply unpopular view in his day and the word "dunce" became part of the language as a description of an educational under-achiever.

Our Offices in Duns are situated in Murray Street, which lies just off Market Square.

 

ŠIain Smith & Partners 2005