To cook: gooseberry and elderflower fool

High summer in a Borders garden means gooseberries, which nobody quite knows what to do with, and elderflower, which is everywhere along the burn in June and worth picking and freezing for later. Together they make the easiest and most old-fashioned of puddings.

Top and tail a pound of gooseberries and cook them gently with three or four tablespoons of sugar and a good splash of elderflower cordial until they collapse — about ten minutes. Crush them roughly and let them cool completely. Whip half a pint of double cream to soft peaks, then fold in the cooled fruit so it streaks through rather than blends, and a spoonful more cordial to taste. Spoon into glasses and chill. That is all. Serve with a shortbread finger if you’re feeling industrious, or on its own if you’re not. It tastes of the hedgerow and the start of the school holidays.

A word: dover (or dover-ower)

A Scots word for a light doze, the kind you fall into in a chair in the afternoon without meaning to. “He was doverin’ by the fire.” There is no exact English equivalent — “doze” is close but lacks the gentleness, the involuntary sweetness of a dover. It is the precise word for what happens to a person after a hill walk and a good lunch, in a quiet cottage, with the window open and the burn going by outside. We recommend it.

A small thought

Summer asks to be filled — with events, with daylight, with the sense that one ought to be making the most of it. But the valley teaches a different lesson. The long evenings are not a thing to be used. They are a thing to be sat in. The best hours of a Borders summer are the empty ones: the dover by the fire, the slow walk back from dinner under a sky that never quite goes dark, the morning when you decide to do nothing at all. Make the most of the summer, by all means. But remember that sometimes the most is the least.

This is the walk to do in late summer, when the hills above the Yarrow turn purple with heather and the air is full of the coconut smell of gorse and the hum of bees. It climbs from the village of Yarrowford up to one of the great landmarks of the Borders: the Three Brethren, three huge drystone cairns standing nine or ten feet high on the skyline, each one a small tower rather than the usual heap of summit stones.

They are old. The first was built in 1512 by Alexander Pringle, Laird of Yair, and two more were added later, so that the three together mark the meeting point of three estates — Yair, Philiphaugh, and the burgh of Selkirk. They have stood for over five hundred years. Riders of the Selkirk Common Riding still climb to them each June, as their forebears did, to check the marches. To stand among them is to stand at a boundary that has mattered to people for half a millennium.

Start from the telephone box on the A708 in Yarrowford, where a green right-of-way sign points to the Minchmoor Road — one of the oldest roads in the Borders, a drove road along which cattle were once walked between the Tweed and Yarrow valleys, now part of the Southern Upland Way. Follow it uphill. The climb is steady rather than steep, and the views open behind you as you rise: the Yarrow Water threading its valley, the hills folding away to the south. Near the top, join the Southern Upland Way and follow it the last stretch to the cairns.

“To stand among them is to stand at a boundary that has mattered to people for half a millennium.”

From the Three Brethren the view is enormous: a great sweep of the Southern Uplands, the Eildon Hills catching the eye to the east, ridge upon ridge of moor and forest and grazing. This is a place to linger — to eat your sandwiches in the lee of a cairn out of the wind, and watch the cloud shadows move across the hills. Then return the way you came; the descent gives you the views all over again, downhill and easy, back to Yarrowford.

Take a map (OS Landranger 73), proper footwear, and more layers than the morning suggests — the top is exposed and the Borders weather changes its mind quickly. There is nothing at the start, so bring what you need; but Selkirk, a few miles on, has everything, and the Gordon Arms is not far for afterwards.

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery, a boutique one-bedroom cottage at Ladhope 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.

July and August in and around the valley.

Wild swimming with Tweed Valley Wilding — through the summer

Guided wild swims in the River Tweed with a qualified wild-swim guide, running through July and August. There are gentle morning pool swims and longer evening saunter-and-swims, with guidance on reading the river and swimming safely. The loveliest possible way to cool off on a warm Borders evening. Booking required; see the Go Tweed Valley events page for dates.

St Ronan’s Games, Innerleithen — 11 to 18 July

Instituted in 1827, the oldest organised sports meeting in Scotland, and the centrepiece of an eight-day festival in Innerleithen. The mysterious Cleikum Ceremonies recall the town’s patron saint, St Ronan, who is said to have fought the Devil himself and driven him from the town. The week ends with a torchlit procession and the Burnin’ o’ the De’il on Caerlee Hill. Strange, ancient, and wonderful.

Fringe on the Tweed — 29 July to 2 August

Brand new for 2026: a five-day festival in the heart of the Tweed Valley offering a pre-Edinburgh showcase of theatre, performance and multi-artform work. A chance to see shows before they head north to the big Fringe, in a far gentler setting and at far gentler prices.

Selkirk Gravel Classic — 8 August

A gravel-cycling event sending riders out through some of the most beautiful trails in the Borders, from the Tweed Valley into the neighbouring Yarrow and Ettrick valleys. Three distances, from a manageable 35km to a serious 65km. If you ride, bring the bike; if you don’t, the cavalcade of cyclists through the valley is a sight in itself.

Peebles Show, Cardrona — 15 August

One of the largest agricultural shows in Scotland, with a vast entry of livestock, show jumping, dog shows, nearly a hundred trade stands, and family entertainment all day. The Borders is farming country, and the summer show is where it celebrates itself. A proper day out.

Beyond Borders International Festival, Traquair — 29 to 30 August

Held in the grounds of Traquair, Scotland’s oldest inhabited house, this festival gathers writers, broadcasters, thinkers, diplomats and artists to talk about the pressing questions of the moment, alongside music, performance, film and well-being. A weekend of ideas in one of the most atmospheric settings in the country.

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery, a boutique one-bedroom cottage at Ladhope 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.

On the second Friday after the first Monday in June — the Borders keeps its dates by old and complicated reckonings — the town of Selkirk wakes before dawn to the sound of a flute band playing through the streets. By six in the morning several hundred riders are mounted in the Marketplace. By the time the sun is properly up they have ridden out to the boundaries of the common land, the burgh’s ancient marches, and returned. And then, in front of a silent crowd of thousands, the standard-bearers cast their flags — a slow, ceremonial furling and unfurling of the burgh colours, each man alone in the middle of the square. It is one of the most moving things you will see in Scotland, and almost nobody outside the Borders knows it happens.

The Common Ridings have their roots in the practical business of the Middle Ages. A burgh held common land, and once a year its men rode the boundaries to check that no neighbour had moved a march stone or encroached on the common. In the Borders, where the line between Scotland and England was for centuries a place of raid and reive and burning, this was not a quiet administrative task. It was done on horseback, in numbers, armed. The riding of the marches was an assertion: this is ours, we know its edges, and we will defend them.

Selkirk’s riding carries something else as well, something darker and older. The town’s particular grief is Flodden — the battle of 9 September 1513, where James IV and the flower of Scottish nobility were destroyed by an English army, and where, the tradition holds, eighty men of Selkirk marched out and one came back. His name was Fletcher, and he returned carrying a captured English flag, too broken by what he had seen to speak. Unable to tell the waiting townsfolk how complete the disaster had been, he cast the flag around his head and dashed it to the ground — a gesture that said, without words, that all the rest were dead.

“And one came back, carrying a captured flag, too broken to speak.”

Whether the story is literally true matters less than what the town has made of it. Every year the casting of the colours re-enacts that moment. The Royal Burgh Standard Bearer — the Cornet, a young man of the town chosen for the honour — casts the Burgh flag, and then the standard-bearers of the trades and the associated bodies cast theirs in turn, each one a feat of strength and grace, the heavy silk flags swept in great circles around their heads while the crowd holds its breath. A lament is played. The names of Flodden are remembered. Grown men weep, openly, in the Marketplace, and nobody thinks it strange.

What strikes the outsider is how unselfconscious it is. This is not a heritage performance for visitors. There are visitors, and they are welcome, but the riding is not for them. It is the town speaking to itself, across five hundred years, about loss and belonging and the land under its feet. The young men who ride did so as boys, watching their fathers; they will watch their own sons ride in turn. The continuity is the point.

Selkirk’s is the largest mounted gathering in the Borders, and arguably in Europe — some years more than four hundred horses ride out. But every Border town has its version: Hawick in early June, with its cry of “Teribus ye teri odin”; Langholm with its famous Common Riding at the end of July, where emblems of a barley bannock and a salted herring nailed to a board are carried through the town;

Lauder, Jedburgh, Kelso, each with its own day, its own rituals, its own remembered grief or triumph. If you are in the valley across the summer, you will almost certainly hear a flute band at dawn somewhere, or meet a cavalcade of horses on a back road, or find a town dressed in its colours. Stop. Watch. You are seeing something very old, and very alive.

If you’d like to see the Selkirk Common Riding, it falls in mid-June; the associated festivities run for the better part of a fortnight. Hawick, Langholm, and the other ridings are spread across June, July, and August. Ask us and we’ll tell you what’s on when you visit. See you in 2027

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Last issue I sent you over the hill to Gattonside. This time you needn’t even leave the valley. THE GORDON ARMS sits at the meeting of the Yarrow and Ettrick roads, the old coaching inn at the crossroads where, the story goes, Walter Scott and James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, used to meet. It has been an inn for a very long time. What it is now is one of the best places to eat in the Scottish Borders, and it is barely eight minutes from the cottage.

It is run by Bryn and Oxana Jones, and it is a family affair in the truest sense. Bryn cooks alone, a chef-patron in the old style, one man in the kitchen, no brigade, building seasonal menus on the principle he states plainly: maximum flavour, minimum fuss. Oxana leads front-of-house with a warmth that the guidebooks keep trying and failing to describe, and bakes a good number of the desserts herself, under the name ‘She Likes Baking’. There are seven tables. That is the whole restaurant. Seven tables and one chef and a wife who makes the puddings.

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Seven tables and one chef, and a wife who makes the puddings.

The food is produce-led to an almost literal degree. They have an established kitchen garden and greenhouse now producing a great deal of their own fruit, vegetables, herbs and salads. The Scottish growing season is shorter than the south of England’s, but they have adapted around it, and some of what reaches the plate has travelled, in Bryn’s own reckoning, about ten steps from the soil. The rest comes from Borders farmers, estates, and coastal suppliers — the same web of small producers that makes this corner of Scotland quietly one of the most interesting places to eat in Britain. The restaurant menu changes weekly and the five-course tasting menu monthly, so no two visits are quite the same. The cooking is rooted in classical technique and entirely unshowy. Balance and depth matter more than theatre. Nothing arrives on a slate or under a cloche. It is just very good food, cooked by someone who has nothing to prove and a great deal of skill.

The recognition has followed, as it tends to. The Good Food Guide named THE GORDON ARMS Restaurant with Rooms among its Best 100 Local Restaurants in Great Britain. It holds a Green Tourism Silver award, and in 2026 was named Winner – Independent Hotel of the Year, Scottish Excellence Awards 2026. It has been listed among The Scotsman’s 12 Best Restaurants with Rooms in Scotland and SquareMeal’s 25 Best Restaurants with Rooms in the UK. But none of that is the reason to go. The reason to go is that it is a small, serious, deeply hospitable restaurant in the middle of a quiet valley, run by two people who care enormously, and you can walk back out afterwards into the dark and the silence and the stars.

Book ahead — seven tables go quickly — and go hungry.

THE GORDON ARMS, Yarrow Valley, Selkirk TD7 5LE. Restaurant Bookings direct through gordonarmsyarrow.co.uk is preferred; you’re also welcome to telephone or email. 01750 82261.

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery, a boutique one-bedroom cottage at Ladhope 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.

On the corner of Market Place in Selkirk, the hill town that sits where the Ettrick and Yarrow valley meet, there is a small gallery you could walk past if you didn’t know to look. Inside,the walls are hung with paintings, there are cards and art materials on the shelves, and Radio3 is playing quietly.

When you come in, Charly or Javier will say hello and tell you about the artists if you want to know or leave you to look in peace if you’d rather.

The back room belongs to Javier, who makes frames there by hand. This is Burnside Gallery, and it is run by two people who happen also to be married to each other.

Charly is from the Borders. Javier comes from Seville. Charly trained in typographical design at the London College of Printing and then retrained in figure painting at Glasgow School of Art and the Art Students League of New York, part-time, because she had to earn the money to learn.

She paints and draws: the wood, the riverbank, the dry stone dykes winding up the hills, the Forestry Commission trees that she once described as showing almost black,hurtling down the hill like steam trains.

She paints the Yarrow Valley because it is where she lives, in a cottage she and Javier spent a year and a half repairing, and because, as she puts it, she wants to share the images she sees around her.

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The stories we make up about things and places, and to communicate what delights me about the world.

Three of Charly’s watercolours hang in The Scullery. Guests ask about them more than almost anything else in the cottage — where the places are, whether they can buy one. They are of the valley just outside the window: the same hills, the same water, painted by someone who has spent years learning to look at them properly. To have a painting of the Yarrow on the wall, made by a painter who lives in the Yarrow, is a particular kind of pleasure, and it is one of the quiet reasons the cottage feels of its place rather than simply in it.

Javier has two crafts. The first is photography, he works in the old processes — cyanotype, albumen, silver gelatin prints — the chemistry of early photography, slow and physical and unrepeatable. His subjects range from the Borders to the Andes, from Castilla-León to the Roma and Traveller communities he has photographed over many years.

The second craft is framing: Javier makes traditional frames by hand from oak, ash, walnut, tulipwood and maple. He will listen to the history of whatever you bring him — a painting, a photograph, a child’s drawing, a medal — and work out with you what it needs: the right moulding, whether it wants a mount or glass, what finish will suit it. Floating frames, hand-finished bevels, mounts cut to show the deckled edge of the paper. His eye for it is, quite simply, the best I know.

Together they have built something that is increasingly rare: a working gallery in a small Borders town that shows the work of local and international artists, as well as their own. If you are visiting the valley, Burnside is worth the short drive into Selkirk. Go and say hello. Take something to be framed. Buy a painting of the hills you’ve been walking. And if you’ve stayed with us and admired the watercolours on the wall, now you know whose they are.

Burnside Gallery & Frames, 48 Market Place, Selkirk TD7 4BL. Open Wednesday to Saturday, 9.30–1 and 2–4. See charlyternero.co.uk and javierternerophotography.com, or the gallery at burnsidegallery.co.uk and on Instagram @burnsidegallery.

From The Scullery

Letters from the Scullery is a bi-monthly publication from The Scullery, a boutique one-bedroom cottage at Ladhope 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.

Cross the iron suspension bridge over the Tweed at Melrose — the one J.M.W. Turner sketched in 1834 when it was barely a year old — and you find yourself in the small village of Gattonside. Tucked down a quiet lane in a former village inn is The Hoebridge. It has been there in various forms since 2015, and it has quietly become one of those restaurants that people in the Borders mention with the slightly proprietary tone of locals who know they’ve got something special.

It is run by Hamish Carruthers and his husband Kyle Tidd. Hamish grew up in Gattonside and worked at the inn as a youngster before training as a chef and spending years in New York. They came home in 2015 and turned the place into something different — whitewashed stone walls, bare wood tables, monthly menus built around small plates that change with whatever is best from their suppliers.

Shaw’s for meat. Ross Dougal for seafood. Mungoswells for flour. Tempest Brewery for the beer. The list reads like a roll call of the producers who are quietly making the Borders one of the most exciting food regions in Britain right now.

If you stay with us at The Scullery, this is where I’d send you on the second night of your visit.

The cooking is what one critic called “flavour-packed, internationally influenced,” which is true enough but undersells it. What’s distinctive is the discipline. Nothing is overcomplicated. Local langoustine with wild garlic. Lamb rump with broad beans. Scallops with seasonal asparagus.

The Michelin Guide picked it up some years back and has kept it there. It is consistently rated among the best restaurants in Scotland, never mind the Borders.

Book ahead. The dining room is small and word has travelled. It’s twenty minutes from Ladhope and worth every one of them. If you stay with us, this is where I’d send you on the second night of your visit. The first night, you cook in the Scullery’s kitchen with something fresh from the farm shop. The second night, you go to The Hoebridge.

The Hoebridge, Hoebridge Road East, Gattonside TD6 9LZ · 01896 823082 · thehoebridge.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

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.