WALK AROUND DENHOLM VILLAGE
Andrew Haddon
5^th September 2005

On a gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon, twelve members of the Old Gala Club gathered outside Text House, the home of Mr. Andrew Haddon who was to take us on a tour of the village of Denholm. Andrew explained that the house was built by one of his ancestors, a Dr. John Haddon (1845-1924), who wrote a ground breaking book on diet which concluded that eating either too much or too often accounted for much general ill health and people should try to restrict their appetite. This was a revolutionary concept as in those days a fat person was considered a healthy person whilst a thin one must by ailing in some way. In 1882 he embarked on a round the world journey and his diary of this, then very unusual and hazardous trip, was serialised in the Hawick Express. On the outside of his house he wrote two enigmatic statements "Tak Tent in Time Ere Time be Tint" and "All Was Others, All Will be Others" which being translated mean "Take care with time or it will too quickly pass you by" and "Others lived in this house before you and others will succeed you when you are gone".

  We moved on to Westgate Hall, the oldest building in the village, built in 1663 by the Laird, Sir Archibald Douglas, on the site of a medieval West Castle built around 1300 by Guy of Denum which itself is believed to have been built on the site of an Anglo-Saxon fort. Facing the centre of the village, it was in a good strategic position to be defended from the rear as the ground falls away sharply down to the Dean Burn, a natural moat and rampart. The outside staircase was added much later to give direct access to the upper floor, which was used as the village hall from 1907 until the 1950s. Further up Dean Road we passed a private house called Broomieknowe which used to be the "smiddy" and next door was Rosecroft that used to be one of the many stocking mills in the village - in 1844 there were 87 working stocking frames and a cart came from Hawick once a week to collect the product.

  We turned down a small path to a little wooden bridge over the Dean Burn, an idyllic spot, where John Leyden, the fourth most important Scottish poet after Sir Walter Scott, Robbie Burns and James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, is said to have conceived his most famous poem, "Scenes of Infancy" - all 60 pages of it! We then moved back to the village green in the centre of which is a monument to Leyden who was born in 1775, walked to Edinburgh at the age of 15 where he joined the university and got degrees in both Theology and Medicine. He helped Scott to collect ballads for the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders", took up a medical appointment in India, learnt several oriental languages and died of a fever in Java at the early age of 36 in 1811.

  There are many listed buildings round the green including 3 Main Street on which is a plaque commemorating John Murray who was born there in 1837. Despite having to leave school at the age of 14, he was a teacher in Hawick at 17 and a Headmaster at 20. He moved to London and started work as Editor of the New English Dictionary, later the Oxford English Dictionary. He was knighted in 1908 but did not live to see the completion of his work. He died in 1915 after working on the dictionary for 35 years still struggling with the letter "r.