Transport & Trade · Across the Scottish Borders
Before the A7 and A68 — The Lost Roads of the Scottish Borders
Follow the Scottish Borders’ lost roads: Dere Street, Minch Moor, packhorses, drovers, the Herring Road, turnpike bridges and the Waverley railway.
Our journey begins long before the road numbers: with the Roman advance into northern Britain in the late first century AD, and with routes across the hills that were already old when the soldiers arrived. From there, we will follow the Borderlands through medieval trade, the great age of cattle droving, toll roads, coaches and railways. The A7 and A68 belong near the end of this story. For most of it, a road was something you walked, rode or coaxed an animal along.
Drive through the Scottish Borders today and the journey feels neatly organised. A sign gives you a destination, a number identifies the road, and a bridge carries you across a river without much thought. Between Galashiels and Hawick, or Lauder and Jedburgh, the landscape passes through the windscreen while the road makes the decisions. It tells you where to turn, where to cross and which climb will take you out of a valley.
Step away from that strip of tarmac and another country begins to appear. A grassy line climbs towards a ridge. A lane drops below the level of the adjoining field. An old bridge stands beside a newer one. On a map, the words Old Drove Road sit across ground that now seems quiet. These are pieces of the transport network that kept the Borders moving before the motorcar: routes carrying food, wealth, news, danger and people whose journeys were measured in effort rather than speed.
The Landscape Chose the First Corridors
The earliest travellers had to read the ground. A valley could offer a gentle approach, but it could also contain difficult crossings and wet land. A ridge might be more exposed, yet provide firmer going and a view of what lay ahead. A pass reduced the height that had to be climbed. The right choice depended on weather, season, destination and whatever a traveller needed to bring along.
That helps explain why an old upland road can look inconvenient from a modern car. We tend to favour the smoother valley journey, supported by drainage, engineered surfaces and substantial bridges. Without those things, a higher line could be sensible. Good ground mattered more than a route that looked short on paper. A packhorse struggling through mud could quickly cancel the advantage of a direct approach.
People also moved between places which no longer hold the same importance. A settlement that has dwindled might once have drawn traffic. A market, grazing area or defended residence could pull journeys towards it. The landscape remained, but the reasons for travelling changed. To understand an abandoned route, we need to ask where it led when it was useful.
Mark’s film exploring hillforts around Peebles offers a way into that older inhabited country. The sites have different histories, but they remind us that the hills were places of work, settlement and movement. Routes connected people living there long before anyone needed directions to the A7.
A Road Was Not Always One Narrow Line
Imagine a company of travellers reaching a stretch of wet ground. The first person takes the established path; the next avoids the worst hole; another moves a little farther uphill. Over time, the route broadens into a corridor of alternative lines. What looks like indecision on a modern map can be practical knowledge applied to changing conditions.
That is one reason old routes may survive as several parallel hollows. Repeated traffic, water and erosion can wear a track below the surrounding ground, creating a holloway. When one line becomes awkward, movement may shift beside it. A road used over a long period can therefore leave more than one mark, each telling part of the history of passage.
Those marks are rewarding to notice, but their age must be read with the rest of the landscape. A sunken lane is not automatically prehistoric. Farm traffic, packhorses and later carts can also cut into the ground. Its relationship with buildings, fields, mapped routes and nearby remains helps reveal what kind of journey it served.
The attraction lies in that combination. An old map gives a destination, a hollow gives a physical trace, and the slope explains why people chose the line. Together, they can make an apparently empty hillside feel busy again. We begin to see movement rather than simply scenery.
Dere Street Brings the Empire North
The Romans added a different scale of organisation. Their road now known as Dere Street linked York with the northern military network, passing Corbridge and continuing through the country that would become the Borderlands. Its northern stretches belong to the campaigns and occupations beginning in the later first century AD, rather than a road built across Scotland at the very start of the Christian era.
This was an artery for military power. Soldiers needed supplies, equipment, messages and reinforcements. A road connected sites that would otherwise require much greater effort to serve. It also made the landscape legible to an army: journeys could be organised around known approaches, crossings and stopping places.
The Roman road across the Cheviots takes us towards Chew Green and Pennymuir, rather than simply following the modern A68 over Carter Bar. That difference is worth keeping in mind when travelling through the area. The old and modern roads belong to the same broad north–south story, but their lines separate where their builders chose different ways through the hills.
Mark’s film at Woden Law and the Pennymuir camps beside Dere Street brings the route close. A grassy track and the outlines of camps can make the Roman presence feel surprisingly tangible. The empire did not arrive as an abstract influence. It arrived along a line on the ground, with people and animals who needed somewhere to go.
Pennymuir, Tow Ford and the Work of Crossing
Near Pennymuir, the route crosses the Kale Water at Tow Ford. Northwards it continues towards Whitton Edge and Cappuck, with the broader network leading into the central Borders. On open ground, the line can be much easier to appreciate than it is among modern fields and roads. The hills show both the opportunity and the labour involved in getting an army through.
A ford deserves more attention than it usually receives. A good approach to water could focus traffic over generations. The crossing needed to be usable by whatever was travelling: a person on foot, a laden animal, a cart or an organised body of soldiers. Water depth, the bed of the river and the condition of the banks all mattered.
In good weather, the crossing might be routine. After rain, the same place could delay a journey or make another route attractive. The road therefore depended on more than the quality of its dry sections. A single difficult river could reshape the whole day's movement, particularly when animals were carrying goods which needed to stay usable.
It is easy to imagine the Romans imposing a road on a blank landscape. Around the Cheviots, the region’s hillforts make that picture much richer. The newcomers were moving through inhabited country with its own routes, working ground and important places. Roman engineering changed movement, but it did not invent the need to travel.
Trimontium and the River Landscape
Near Newstead, Trimontium stood within the Roman network beside the Eildon Hills. Its position makes sense when you consider the country around it: the Tweed, the approaches through the Borders and the opportunity to control movement between different routes. A fort of this importance needed more than a commanding view. It needed connections.
Our modern habit is to think of bridges as dependable background structures. Earlier travellers had to think much more closely about crossings. The physical form of the Roman crossing in the Leaderfoot area remains a subject for archaeological interpretation, but the importance of reaching the other side is obvious. Road, river and military site belonged to the same practical problem.
Mark’s film at Trimontium is a useful companion to this part of the journey. It helps restore the scale of a place whose visible countryside now seems far quieter than its Roman history. The movement serving the fort would have reached beyond its defences into the surrounding region.
Travel north towards Lauderdale and Soutra, and Dere Street brings us to another surviving stretch of the old route. Here the road's history continues well beyond its Roman beginnings. Later people inherited a useful corridor and gave it new purposes. The road could outlast the political system that first organised it.
The Road After Rome
When Roman government ended in Britain in the early fifth century, the need for journeys remained. People still visited neighbouring communities, moved livestock, carried goods and sought protection. Old roads could remain useful even as their surfaces changed and their original military institutions disappeared.
The early medieval north was a country of competing rulers and households. A known route could help a messenger, a visitor or an armed company move between important places. Roads carried relationships as well as possessions. A ruler whose influence reached beyond his immediate surroundings depended on people being able to travel through that wider world.
Our Gododdin story considers the remembered expedition south towards Catraeth around AD 600. It gives an evocative human scale to movement across the Borderlands, while leaving the precise itinerary open. The story of Rheged approaches the connected north from the western side.
These journeys belonged to a landscape before the modern frontier. The significance of a road could change as kingdoms grew or lost power, but the hills and river crossings remained. A useful corridor might serve successive societies which would have described their country in very different terms.
Soutra: A Road with Help Along the Way
At Soutra, the road story meets the history of a medieval hospital. The remaining aisle stands in an exposed landscape close to Dere Street, whose line continued to matter through the Middle Ages. For a traveller, institutions offering help could be as important as the road itself. A difficult journey was made of people and stopping places, not merely distance.
Think about the approach in poor weather. Clothing gets wet, daylight shortens and the next destination becomes harder to judge. A person who is ill or exhausted has problems which a signpost cannot solve. The presence of a hospital near a major route gives us a glimpse of how travel and care could meet.
Soutra also makes continuity visible. Roman soldiers and medieval travellers belonged to different worlds, separated by many centuries. Yet both could be drawn towards the same broad line through the hills. Its purpose changed, and the institutions beside it changed, while the geography continued to favour passage.
Our Soutra Aisle pictures let you linger with the surviving place. It is a small remnant of a much larger story. Beside the old road, it encourages us to imagine the traveller whose successful journey depended on more than strong legs or a reliable horse.
Abbeys Needed Roads as Much as Prayers
The medieval Borders became a landscape of great religious houses, but their work reached far beyond the church walls. Estates, farms, livestock and workshops had to be managed. People carrying messages and goods connected distant holdings with the central house. Roads made the economic life of an abbey possible.
Wool and hides did not arrive at a market by wishful thinking. Someone had to collect, prepare and transport them. Food and useful materials moved in the other direction. A loaded horse brought together the labour of the people who produced the goods and the commercial relationships which gave those goods value.
Our story of wool, hides and medieval trade follows that wider economy. The lost roads form its working connections. Between grazing ground, abbey, royal town and port lay a succession of journeys, each made easier or harder by the routes available.
The Border Abbey Trail story introduces the great houses themselves. Looking at their roads adds another dimension to the ruins. A magnificent building could be the centre of a business network whose everyday activity stretched across valleys and beyond the region.
Minch Moor: The Highway on the Hill
One of the most evocative old routes crosses Minch Moor, connecting the country around Traquair with approaches towards Selkirk and Yarrowford. It belongs to the east–west movement through the Borders, linking Tweeddale with country farther east. The high ground which now attracts walkers once formed part of an important working journey.
The route appears on William Roy’s mid-eighteenth-century mapping as a road from Peebles to Selkirk. Its history reaches much farther back, and later use included droving. Different lines developed over time, so the familiar modern walking route and the older road do not match at every point. The landscape preserves a corridor with a history of choices.
That is a rewarding thought when climbing from Traquair. The effort feels recreational today because the purpose is to enjoy the place. Earlier travellers climbed because they had somewhere to reach, something to carry or animals to deliver. The same rise could be part of a working day with much less freedom to stop.
The country towards Selkirk also belongs beside Mark’s film on the Battle of Philiphaugh. Routes which served everyday movement could acquire sudden military importance. A path used by carriers and drovers could become an approach, an escape or a line along which news of a battle travelled.
The Packhorse and the Carrier
For much of this history, the packhorse was a practical answer to a difficult road. A horse could carry a substantial load along a path too narrow or rough for a wheeled vehicle. Sacks and baskets allowed useful goods to move between settlements without requiring the kind of continuous engineered surface a cart preferred.
The carrier’s knowledge mattered. Loads needed balancing; animals needed care; the route had to be judged against weather and ground conditions. A familiar crossing or stopping place could save time and reduce risk. Experience was part of the transport system, passed between people rather than written on a roadside board.
Imagine meeting a short train of loaded animals on an upland path. The scene contains more than picturesque travel. It represents work undertaken for somebody waiting elsewhere: grain for a household, goods for sale, materials needed by a craftsperson. The consequences of a delayed journey could be felt far from the place where the delay occurred.
That makes the old road an economic artefact. Its usefulness lay in the journeys it allowed other people to depend upon. A route which could support regular carrying helped connect communities, made exchange more practical and gave places with awkward approaches a way to participate in a wider market.
Fish across the Lammermuirs
The Herring Road gives the story a particularly human example. It connected Dunbar and Lauder across the Lammermuirs, carrying fish from the coast towards inland markets. Its strongest associations belong to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although the inland fish trade has earlier records. The name tells us what made the journey worth doing.
People bringing home salted fish and fishwives carrying creels were part of that traffic. The road was a link between different resources: a coastal catch on one side and customers on the other. A product which had value inland gave travellers a reason to cross the hills with burdens that could make every climb count.
Its line also appears to have shifted. Old maps show variations in the route, reminding us that a named road could remain recognisable while the preferred ground changed. Weather, wear and practical experience helped shape the journey. The name preserved a purpose more consistently than it preserved one exact line.
It is an especially good example of the people who can disappear from grand accounts of transport. We readily picture an army marching or a coach arriving at an inn. The person carrying food over a moor might leave much less ceremony behind, yet such journeys helped keep inland communities supplied.
Drovers: Wealth Walking on Four Legs
Cattle droving expanded the scale of movement. Animals could travel to market under their own power, carrying much of their value with them. A drove road therefore served a different kind of traffic from a narrow packhorse path. Water, resting ground and grazing mattered, as did the ability to keep the animals moving together.
The journey depended on knowledge of both livestock and country. A drover needed to judge how far the animals could go, where they could recover and how to manage difficulties along the route. Too much hurry could damage the very value being delivered. Getting cattle to their destination in saleable condition was the purpose of the journey, and shaped its pace.
Around Peebles and Yarrow, the old route through Gypsy Glen and the Minch Moor corridor help make this history tangible. Parts are incorporated into the promoted Cross Borders Drove Road. The present recreational route brings people into landscapes connected with livestock movement while making its own choices about access and passage.
Stand beside a broad green way and imagine it occupied by animals, voices and the slow adjustment of a moving herd. The silence changes. What now seems remote becomes a piece of working infrastructure, joining local ground to a trade which reached beyond the Borders. The road carried wealth because the animals themselves were wealth.
The Fair at the End of the Journey
A market gave movement its purpose. A drove might cover a long distance, but its success was judged where buyers and sellers met. The road therefore belonged to a larger system of gathering, bargaining, payment and onward movement. Towns and fair grounds became important because they concentrated that activity.
The Borders’ livestock markets and fairs drew people as well as animals. News could pass between those arriving from different districts. Goods changed hands, arrangements were made and the town benefited from the presence of people who needed food, accommodation or services. A market day connected country which might otherwise seem widely scattered.
This is part of the reason old route networks can look untidy from the standpoint of a modern through-road. Several approaches might converge on a fair, a common or a crossing rather than on the fastest journey between distant cities. The priorities belonged to the users who had business there.
If we follow those priorities, the quiet lane regains its meaning. It may have been a route towards opportunity: the chance to turn months of work with animals into money, to acquire supplies or to meet people whose arrival could only be expected at particular times. Travel was woven into the calendar of the working year.
Reivers Knew the Ways through the Hills
In the later medieval and early modern Borderlands, routes could carry danger as readily as trade. The Border Reivers needed knowledge of ground, crossings and approaches. A successful raid involved getting away as well as reaching the target, particularly when livestock had to be moved with the raiding party.
That makes a valley route part of the story of a tower. Defended households stood within a country people moved through. Their occupants needed access to useful ground and neighbours, while also watching the approaches through which danger might arrive. Roads and protection belonged together because movement could benefit a community and threaten it.
Mark’s Turnbull Country film and his exploration of Mossburnford, Dolphinston and Crag Tower bring that relationship into view. The buildings become easier to understand when we see the surrounding routes, distances and river country.
A traveller without a powerful following had reasons to value safe passage. The same road which allowed goods to reach a fair also exposed their carrier to loss. Before we make an old journey too romantic, it is worth remembering that knowledge of the route could be part of staying alive and keeping hold of what you carried.
Bridges Changed the Balance
A dependable bridge could change the way people approached a river. Routes concentrated towards it; journeys became less dependent on a particular ford; wheeled traffic gained a more reliable crossing. Building one required money, materials, skill and a decision that the connection mattered enough to justify the work.
At Leaderfoot, Drygrange Old Bridge, built in 1778–80 to a design by Alexander Stevens, crosses the Tweed. It gives the eighteenth-century road story a substantial surviving form. Nearby railway and modern road structures make the place especially revealing: successive transport systems occupy the same river landscape, each answering the crossing in its own way.
Look at that group of structures and the journey through time becomes visible. The river is the continuing problem. The bridge design, the type of traffic and the approach change. What feels like one familiar crossing area is actually the accumulated work of several generations choosing how to move through it.
Mark’s film on Pease Bridge and Cockburnspath opens another part of this engineering story. Bridges could make an awkward landscape more manageable and turn a difficult passage into a dependable connection. Their importance is measured in the journeys they made possible.
Paying for a Better Road
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, turnpike trusts brought a new organisation to many main routes. They were empowered to charge tolls and use income for improvement and maintenance. Roads became something which could be planned and financed more systematically, with responsibilities attached to their upkeep.
The changes could be felt directly. Drainage helped keep a surface usable. Improvements to gradients and alignments made wheeled travel more practical. Bridges reduced uncertainty at rivers. Milestones and toll points gave the journey a more formal structure. A traveller was still at the mercy of weather and horses, but the road itself was being treated as an engineered service.
There was a price for that service. Tolls entered the cost of moving goods and livestock, and influenced decisions about which route to use. Improvement did not make every old way disappear immediately. Different travellers had different needs, and an older track could remain useful beside a road built for heavier or faster traffic.
The landscape sometimes keeps the change in a simple arrangement: an old line curving away from the improved road, a bridge approached by a lane which now carries little traffic, or a milestone beside a route that has lost its former status. The road moved, leaving its previous choice behind.
Coaches Made Time Part of the Road
Coaching added a different expectation to travel. A regular service could connect destinations according to a timetable, relying on roads, horses and stopping places working together. The journey became more predictable, although its reliability was still built from human and animal effort.
An inn along a coaching route could become a place of activity out of proportion to its surroundings. Horses needed attention, passengers needed food and the next stage needed preparation. Arrival brought noise, messages and the expectation of departure. The building participated in a network whose usefulness depended on keeping people moving.
It is easy to picture the passenger and forget the labour behind the service. Stable work, maintenance, cooking and care of the road all contributed to the promise of a scheduled journey. The improved road supported that promise, but did not fulfil it alone. A timetable was the visible edge of a much larger working arrangement.
Some places prospered when a main route served them and became quieter when traffic shifted elsewhere. That is one of the recurring themes of the lost roads: importance can move. A settlement can remain in place while the journeys which once sustained its business begin to pass at a distance.
The Railway Rewrites the Journey
The railway brought another scale of change. The line from Edinburgh reached Hawick in 1849, and the through connection to Carlisle opened in 1862. Together, these formed the celebrated Waverley Route through the Borders. Towns connected to it gained access to a transport system able to move passengers and goods in ways an old road could not match.
Stations changed where journeys began and ended. Goods could be taken to a railway yard rather than carried the entire distance by road. People planned around departures. The route required cuttings, embankments, tunnels and viaducts, leaving an engineering landscape which remains legible even where trains no longer run.
Mark’s Neidpath Railway Tunnel film explores a surviving feature of the wider Borders railway story. It reminds us that the region’s rail history included more than the principal north–south line. Railways formed networks, just as the older roads had done, drawing different places into new patterns of movement.
The Waverley Route closed in January 1969. Passenger services between Edinburgh and Tweedbank began on 6 September 2015 with the Borders Railway. The reopening restored an important connection while leaving the old line farther south as a different kind of survival. Once again, a route's physical presence and its current use tell separate parts of the story.
What the A7 and A68 Inherited
The modern roads belong to this long history, but their relationship with it is richer than a single ancient track becoming tarmac. The A7 links Edinburgh and Carlisle through towns including Galashiels, Selkirk, Hawick and Langholm. The A68 approaches the Borders through Lauderdale and Jedburgh before crossing at Carter Bar. Both use opportunities offered by the ground, with changes in alignment made to serve later traffic.
On some stretches, an older line is close; elsewhere, the modern road takes a different passage. Bridges and road improvements have shifted approaches. Through-traffic has different priorities from a carrier heading to a local market or a drover seeking grazing. The same landscape can support several answers to the question of how to get across it.
That is why the little road beside the main one deserves attention. It might preserve an earlier approach, lead towards an old crossing or connect a settlement whose position mattered under a different pattern of travel. Its quietness tells us about its present role, not necessarily about its past importance.
Our Talla Reservoir story takes a more personal journey through the western Borders. It captures something the fast road can conceal: the way a drive becomes more memorable when the landscape stops being background. The lost roads invite a similar change of attention, from getting through the country to noticing how people once moved within it.
Reading the Traces
Old maps are an excellent place to begin. Roy’s Military Survey, made between 1747 and 1755, records a landscape before many later improvements. Nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey sheets show roads, railways, settlements and tracks in greater detail. Comparing editions can reveal a route shifting, a connection disappearing or a new structure changing the approach to a river.
The ground adds another kind of record. A hollow, a raised line, an old bridge or a set of parallel tracks can help explain what the map shows. Aerial photographs and lidar can make features easier to see, particularly where vegetation disguises their form. They reveal shape; dating and interpretation still come from relationships with other evidence.
This is also why a boundary earthwork should be examined on its own terms. Our Catrail story explores the questions surrounding those banks and ditches. A long line across the countryside is not automatically a road, and a road near an earthwork does not by itself explain who made either feature. Both can contribute to the history of a much-used landscape.
The reward comes when several clues begin to agree. A mapped track, a worn line and the approach to a crossing can recover the logic of an old journey. We may not know every person who used it, but we can begin to understand why they went that way.
The Roads Are Still Part of the Story
The lost roads of the Borders are not all lost in the same sense. Some survive as paths. Some remain under later surfaces. Others are visible only in short stretches or on an old map. Their former importance may be the thing that has disappeared, leaving a quiet line where generations once had pressing reasons to pass.
Follow the thought from a Roman road to a packhorse track, and from a drove road to a coaching route. Each carries a different working society. Soldiers need supply; abbeys need connections; households need food; drovers need markets; passengers need a dependable arrival. The road is the meeting point between the shape of the land and the lives being lived upon it.
That is what makes a grassy track so compelling. It can bring the everyday past closer than a grand building does. The labour is easy to imagine: the balanced load, the animal refusing a crossing, the climb which must be completed before dark. These are journeys through familiar ground, made under conditions which modern roads have allowed us to forget.
Next time you travel the A7 or A68, look for the other lines. Notice the old bridge, the lane beside the main road and the track climbing away towards a ridge. Beyond the windscreen lies a country of earlier journeys. The road number is recent. The need to find a way through the Borders is very old indeed.
Your memories and comments
Do you remember this place, or have something to add? Share a memory, ask a question or help us fill in the story.
Loading comments…