Borders

Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of Scotland

by Kitty Cruft, John Dunbar, Richard Fawcett

The Scottish Borders, one of the most architecturally enticing regions of Scotland, encompass rocky coastlines, rolling moors, and farmland. The early buildings reflect a history of conflict, as do the ruins of the numerous great Borders abbeys. The River Tweed provides a delightful setting for the burghs of Peebles, Galashiels, Melrose, and Kelso, where small weavers’ cottages and colossal nineteenth-century mills remain from the once-mighty textile industry.
The region boasts country houses of exceptional quality and importance, including Thirlestane Castle, Traquair, and Paxton as well as Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott, which is world-renowned as the fount of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Other highlights of this comprehensive guide are little-known shooting and fishing lodges, rural steadings, arts and crafts villas, Art Deco schools, and the extraordinary Sunderland House, a building of Miesian purity by Peter Womersley.

841 pages, Hardcover

First published March 2, 2006

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow the combination of lack of significant buildings dating from before mid-16C or any churches that have not been completely rebuilt/altered throughout 18C-20C when matched with the lack of wit often brought to descriptions of places by Nikolas Pevner (and later John Newman) in many the Buildings of England series result in this being a guide to an area of Scotland one is not in any great desire to visit.