Qualla: Dryburgh Abbey

Dryburgh Abbey: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Sir Walter Scott is buried here. So is Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces on the Western Front in the First World War. The man who all but invented the historical novel and the man who presided over the Somme lie within yards of each other beneath the roofless red-sandstone arcades of Dryburgh Abbey, founded in 1150 on the banks of the River Tweed by a Scottish noble and a community of white-robed canons from Northumberland.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Dryburgh Abbey: Premonstratensians on the Tweed

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0. On Martinmas - 10 November 1150 - Hugh de Morville, Constable of Scotland, signed an agreement with the Premonstratensian canons of Alnwick Abbey to found a new house on his lands in the Borders. The first abbot, Roger, and his community of canons arrived on 13 December 1152. The...

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Image: Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dryburgh Abbey: Burned, Rebuilt, Burned Again

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014, CC BY-SA 4.0. The abbey's stone tells a story of repeated catastrophe. In 1322, after Robert the Bruce raided Northumberland and used Dryburgh as a base, Edward II of England retaliated by sacking the abbey on his retreat. Bruce generously funded Melrose's rebuilding nearby but, for reasons no...

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Image: HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dryburgh Abbey: Two Famous Graves

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Allan, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the abbey passed to David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, in 1786, it became a romantic ruin in the eighteenth-century sense - artfully decayed, suitable for poetry. Sir Walter Scott, who as Sheriff-Depute of Roxburghshire knew the Borders better than almost anyone, came to lo...

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Image: James Allan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dryburgh Abbey: Fat Lips and the Chapter House

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014, CC BY-SA 4.0. The abbey's last full-time resident was supposedly a spirit. After the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, a woman who lost her lover in the fighting moved into the ruined abbey and lived there alone for years. She claimed she had a companion: a small man in iron boots called Fat Lips, who ...

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Image: HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014 | CC BY-SA 4.0