A rhubarb and ginger cordial

The rhubarb at Ladhope is two feet high already. This is the easiest cordial you’ll ever make, and it’s the colour of a Borders sunset — somewhere between rose pink and amber, depending on how much ginger you put in. Keep it in the fridge and add a splash to cold sparkling water; or, if it’s a Friday and the week has been long, to a measure of gin and a wedge of lime.

You’ll need:

• 500g forced or garden rhubarb, chopped into 2cm pieces

• 300g caster sugar

• A thumb of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced

• The juice of one lemon

• 400ml water

Put everything in a heavy pan, bring slowly to a simmer, and cook gently for twenty minutes until the rhubarb has collapsed completely. Strain through a fine sieve or a piece of muslin into a clean bottle — don’t press the pulp, just let it drip, or your cordial will go cloudy. (The leftover pulp is delicious stirred into yoghurt the next morning.) Keeps in the fridge for two weeks. Makes about half a litre.

A loaf worth the time

If you’ve ever had a pastry from Twelve Triangles — they have a beautiful little shop on Market Square in Melrose, twenty five minutes from Ladhope, and four more across Edinburgh — you’ll understand why I’m sending you to their cookbook. Emily Cuddeford and Rachel Morgan have been baking slow-fermented sourdough and pastries from a tiny bakery in Brunswick Street since 2015. They named themselves after a line from a Dylan Thomas poem (A Grief Ago). They now run six shops, receive several tons of flour a week, and have just published a cookbook that gives away — properly, generously — the methods that built their business.

The book includes their sourdough principles in full: the cold/slow fermentation cycle, the three or four-day rhythm, the hand-shaping, the rejection of additives and improvers. It is, genuinely, the best home sourdough teaching in print right now, and the kindness of releasing the recipes feels very of-this-region — Borders generosity, written down.

The book is available from their shops or to order online from twelvetriangles.co.uk. Their Melrose café also does sit-in. Try a slice of their hazelnut and sourdough frangipane tart — it’s made with leftover breadcrumbs, and it is extraordinary.

Scots word of the issue

Gloaming (n.) — the soft fading light of evening, between sunset and full dark. The English have twilight, which is fine; the Scots have gloaming, which is better. The word comes from Old English glōm, meaning twilight, and it has the sound of a slow exhale in it. Best used in a sentence like: “We sat out in the gloaming and watched the bats come in over the river.”

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery at Ladhope Farmhouse, a boutique one-bedroom cottage in the Yarrow Valley, Scottish Borders. Join the Inner Circle at the-scullery.com for early access to dates and Inner Circle rates on midweek stays.

Distance: 7 miles, full loop · Time: 3 hours at a wandering pace · Difficulty: Easy, mostly flat

A short drive up the A708 from Ladhope brings you to St Mary’s Loch, the largest natural loch in the Borders and arguably the most beautiful. It sits in a basin scooped out by glaciers, fed at its head by the Megget Water and emptying east into the Yarrow. On a still spring morning the surface mirrors the hills so completely that the world seems to fold in half.

Start at the small car park at the northern end, near the Loch of the Lowes. The path follows the western shore for the length of the loch — open, easy walking with the water on your left and the slopes of Bowerhope Law rising on your right. In May you’ll likely hear curlew, lapwing, and golden plover in the fields beyond the path; if you’re lucky and quiet, an osprey overhead. Red squirrels are doing better here every year, thanks to Borders Forest Trust replanting native woodland on the slopes.

About halfway down the western side, take the short detour up to St Mary’s Kirkyard — the church itself is long gone, but the burial ground remains, and the views from up there over the loch are remarkable. This is the kirkyard where William Wallace was named Guardian of Scotland in 1298; it’s also where, three centuries later, the open-air “blanket preachings” of the Covenanters were held during the years when worship outside the established kirk was punishable by death. The hill above the kirkyard was used as a lookout. Stand up there now and you’ll see why.

Back on the loch path, continue south to the foot of the loch. Just before you cross the bridge to come back along the eastern shore, there’s another detour worth taking: Dryhope Tower, the ruined Scott stronghold that gave us Mary Scott, the “Flower of Yarrow,” who married Auld Wat Scott of Harden in 1576 and from whom Sir Walter Scott himself was descended. The tower is a roofless stub now, but it’s the kind of ruin you can climb inside, look up at the sky, and feel the weight of four hundred years of Border history pressing very gently on your shoulders.

Come back along the eastern shore for a different aspect of the loch, then back to the car park. If you can plan it for a clear evening, the walk works equally well in reverse, ending with the sun setting behind the western hills and the water turning to copper.

Tibbie Shiel’s Inn sits between the two lochs — sadly closed for some years now, but you can still see the building. It was once James Hogg’s regular haunt; his statue stands across the road, looking out over the water he loved.

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery at Ladhope Farmhouse, a boutique one-bedroom cottage in the Yarrow Valley, Scottish Borders. Join the Inner Circle at the-scullery.com for early access to dates and Inner Circle rates on midweek stays.

Whole season · Near Innerleithen

Traquair House - Scotland's Oldest Inhabited House

11 – 14 June · Harmony Garden, Melrose

Borders Book Festival

Four days, more than a hundred events, set in the gardens and orchard of the National Trust’s Harmony House with Melrose Abbey and the Eildon Hills behind. Politicians (Gordon Brown and Sir Jeremy Hunt this year), comedians, novelists, historians, sports stars. The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is awarded live on stage on the Thursday evening. There’s a Food and Drink Village, a Craft Marketplace, a Family Festival running through the weekend, and live music in the evenings. Tickets often sell out weeks in advance for the headline events, so book early.

Friday 12 June · Selkirk

Selkirk Common Riding

Selkirk’s is the most emotionally charged of all the Common Ridings. It commemorates the Battle of Flodden in 1513, when eighty men of Selkirk marched south with King James IV and only one came home. The Casting of the Colours in the Market Square, when the Royal Burgh Standard Bearer dips the burgh flag in silence in the centre of a packed square of townspeople, is one of the most powerful pieces of civic ceremony anywhere in Britain. It is half an hour from Ladhope. If you only see one Common Riding in your life, make it this one.

Whole season · Near Peebles

Kailzie Gardens

Forty-five minutes from Ladhope, Kailzie is one of the loveliest gardens in the south of Scotland — a walled garden enclosed by original early nineteenth-century walls, with herbaceous borders, copper beech hedging, and original Mackenzie and Moncur glasshouses. Open Wednesday to Sunday until June, then daily through July and August. The Laburnum Walk is at its astonishing best in late May, when the arches drop curtains of golden blossom — almost worth a trip on its own. Garden tours by arrangement (minimum four people, £10). Adult admission £8.50. The café here serves a supper club worth keeping an eye on.

24 – 25 July · Borders Events Centre, Kelso

Border Union Show

The most important agricultural event in the Borders calendar. Held on the last Friday and Saturday of July at the Springwood Park showground in Kelso, with over 500 open competitions for horses, livestock and industrial arts, around 200 trade stands, a Food Fair featuring producers from across Scotland, a Craft & Gift Marquee, and the kind of unselfconscious community atmosphere that you simply cannot manufacture. The Food Fair alone is worth the visit. An hour from Ladhope, well signed.

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery at Ladhope Farmhouse, a boutique one-bedroom cottage in the Yarrow Valley, Scottish Borders. Join the Inner Circle at the-scullery.com for early access to dates and Inner Circle rates on midweek stays.

There’s a kind of photograph you only get when the person behind the camera isn’t trying to perform photography — they’re just trying to notice. A child running through ferns. A pony seen from a stable door. Two girls bending over a flower in a field of dry grass. Nina Davidson takes that kind of photograph, and there is nobody else in Scotland whose work captures the texture of this country quite the way hers does.

Nina is French. She came to Scotland for a summer when she was twenty-two, took a café job in Edinburgh, fell for a man whose office was across the street, moved in with him two months later, and never went back. “I never moved back to France,” is how she puts it. She ran a bistro in the old neighbourhood for ten years. She has four daughters — Ada, Colette, Nico, and baby Stella — and the family is, you sense from her work, both the foundation and the favourite subject.

For me, it is a way of focusing on the good things, the little snippets in life, the beautiful moments I share with my family.

That’s how Nina describes her own photography on her website. “I make a point to print my family photos so there is an analogue feel and touchable object.” That instinct — for slowness, for the made object, for the moment that matters — runs through everything she shoots. Her aesthetic is cinematic without being staged, painterly without being precious, often in soft natural light or black and white, with a strong sense of season and place.

There is a stillness in the images that is, I think, distinctly hers. It is photography in the tradition of Sally Mann and Rinko Kawauchi — the great editorial photographers who understand that the best images are not constructed but caught.

She has just published a children’s cookery book in France. Her lookbooks and campaigns have appeared for niche children’s and family clothing labels including Fish and Kids, Bombolla Studio, and Little Miss. Beyond commercial work, she also has a long-running personal project documenting her own family — her four daughters, growing up in Scotland — and it’s that intimacy with her own children that gives her commercial photography of children its distinct quality. The brand work doesn’t feel like brand work, because she’s not switching modes when she picks up the camera. She is, simply, photographing childhood.

She takes on a small number of commissions each year — brand storytelling, editorial, family documentation. If you’ve been thinking about working with a photographer whose images last, and whose images are made to be lived with rather than scrolled past, she is exactly the right person to write to.

See Nina’s work at ninadavidson.com or on Instagram @ninadavidson_. Commission enquiries: hello@ninadavidson.com.

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery at Ladhope Farmhouse, a boutique one-bedroom cottage in the Yarrow Valley, Scottish Borders. Join the Inner Circle at the-scullery.com for early access to dates and Inner Circle rates on midweek stays.

If you walk far enough up the valley, past St Mary’s Loch and on toward the head of the Yarrow, you reach a stretch of country where the hills crowd close to the water and the wooded glens fall steep and dark. The old Scots word for these narrow wooded valleys is dens. And dowie, a word you don’t hear much any more, means dismal, sorrowful, mournful.

The dowie dens of Yarrow. The sorrowful, narrow valleys of this river. The phrase comes from one of the great Border ballads, a song so old that nobody quite knows where it began. Sung by shepherds and travelling folk for at least four hundred years, and probably longer.

The story is brutal and short. A young knight rides out into the Yarrow valley to meet, by some accounts, his lover’s nine brothers, or her father, or a rival suitor backed by armed men. The numbers vary; the outcome doesn’t. He fights them all, kills most of them, and is killed himself, treacherously, by the last one standing. His lover, warned in a dream that something has gone wrong, runs down the hill, finds him among the bodies on the riverbank, and weeps over him. Her father tells her not to grieve, he’ll find her a better husband. She refuses. In some versions she dies of sorrow on the spot.

Sir Walter Scott, who collected the ballad for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1803, believed it was based on a real event, a duel between two members of the Scott clan, possibly John Scott of Tushielaw or one of the sons of the Laird of Harden, killed somewhere on this stretch of the Yarrow in the late 1500s.

Modern scholars are less certain. A near-identical ballad exists in Scandinavia, called Herr Helmer, which suggests the story may be older and more universal than any single Border feud. But whether or not the duel actually happened, the song has been sung in these valleys for so long that it has become part of the landscape — the kind of folk memory that, as one writer put it, is older than any of the families who claim to remember it.

She kiss’d his cheek, she kaim’d his hair, / She search’d his wounds all thorough; / She kiss’d them, till her lips grew red, / On the dowie houms of Yarrow.

Houms is another word lost from English, the flat low ground beside a river. The ballad is full of these words, words that only survive now in the songs that carry them. Which is, perhaps, the truer reason to keep singing them.

What’s most remarkable about the song is its rhyme scheme. Out of fifteen verses, fourteen end on the word Yarrow, or words that rhyme with it: sorrow, morrow, marrow, narrow, arrow. The whole song is held in place by the name of this one river, repeated until the river itself feels like a character. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who grew up a few miles from where these events allegedly took place, said he had heard a version as a boy that no two singers in the valley sang the same way. Every shepherd had his own verses. Every singer added something. By the time Scott wrote it down, what he was collecting was less a poem than a living thing.

If you’d like to hear the ballad sung, look for the recording by Karine Polwart, below, or the older version by Davy Stewart collected by Hamish Henderson in the 1950s. Both are quietly devastating. Both are best listened to in the gloaming, with a window open onto the valley they describe.

The Scullery sits a few miles downstream from the deepest of those dens. The Yarrow Water runs at the foot of our garden. If you stay, and if you walk up the valley one evening, particularly in autumn, when the light turns copper and the wind drops, you may understand exactly why this song refuses to die.

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery at Ladhope Farmhouse, a boutique one-bedroom cottage in the Yarrow Valley, Scottish Borders. Join the Inner Circle at the-scullery.com for early access to dates and Inner Circle rates on midweek stays.