Dryburgh Abbey

Sir Walter Scott and Douglas Haig are buried in the grounds of a ruined abbey — a monastery governing itself under an abbot — on the banks of the Tweed. Their tomb and headstone, with other memorials there, are collectively designated a Category A listed building — which means the graves carry a protection of their own, separate from the medieval ruin around them.

The abbey was nominally founded at Martinmas, 10 November 1150, by an agreement between Hugh de Morville, Constable of Scotland, and Premonstratensian canons regular from Alnwick Abbey in Northumberland. The canons themselves arrived with their first abbot, Roger, on 13 December 1152.

The Premonstratensian order had been founded only thirty years earlier by St Norbert of Xanten, a canon at Xanten Cathedral who was unhappy with the life his fellow canons led. He left the Rhineland for the diocese of Laon in northern France, where the reforming Bishop Bartholomew was making his see more apostolic; Bartholomew persuaded him to found a canonical order at Prémontré, in Aisne, in 1120. The order was Augustinian in form but its canons wore white rather than black. They lived austerely and were obliged to preach and teach beyond the monastery walls, and the order spread across Europe fast enough that a hundred and twenty abbots were attending the annual general chapter before the first Abbot-General, Hugh of Fosse, had died. They borrowed much from the Cistercians, including their land management and their use of lay brothers for the labour-intensive work.

Dryburgh was never richly endowed, and that shaped everything afterwards. Melrose nearby had royal patronage; Hugh de Morville, though a very wealthy noble, could not match a monarch. David I was not unsympathetic — a charter confirms various donations from de Morville’s wife, Beatrice de Beauchamp, and grants the abbey free timber from the royal forests for building. Hugh himself gave the lands of Dryburgh with their forests, grasslands and waters; the fishings from Berwick; the churches and lands at Mertoun and Channelkirk in his lordship of Lauderdale, and Asby in Westmorland; and the earnings from the mills of Saltoun and Lauder. Beatrice added the income from the church at Bozeat in Northamptonshire, and lands at Roxburgh that she bought expressly to give away.

In about 1162 Hugh turned his back on worldly affairs, as some other magnates of the period did, and entered the abbey church wearing the habit of the canons. He gave his elder son Richard his large Scottish estates and his younger son Hugh those in England, and died at Dryburgh that same year.

Richard continued as patron, but he also founded elsewhere — the hospital of St Leonard near his castle at Lauder in about 1170, and Kilwinning Abbey in the lordship of Cunningham between 1169 and 1187. Kilwinning was built on a grand scale and inadequately provided for, so Richard met part of its cost from his Lauderdale holdings, which produced a long-running argument between Kilwinning and Dryburgh over the share of the tithes from the church of Lauder. Founding the second house ensured that both remained in relative poverty.

Its position on the border did the rest. English troops burned the abbey in 1322; it was restored, and Richard II burned it again in 1385. It flourished through the fifteenth century, and was finally destroyed in 1544, surviving only briefly until the Scottish Reformation, when James VI gave it to the Earl of Mar.

David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, bought the land in 1786. The ruin is now a scheduled monument, and the surrounding landscape is included in the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland.