Forty-five members of the Old Gala Club gathered in the Upper Volunteer Hall to hear Mr. Gordon Gilfeather give a talk entitled "Stobs Camp - Then and Now 1903~1959". Stobs Castle, the ancestral home of the Elliots, was burnt down in mysterious circumstances in 1712. The family replaced with a mansion house designed by Robert Adam but still called it "Stobs Castle". In 1902 the government bought the land for training military personnel because it most resembled the High Veldt in South Africa where the army was fighting the Boers. Initially it was meant to be a camp where men would undergo two weeks military training in the summer. In April 1903, 200 men were detailed to set up the camp. The tents stretched for an area of 7 miles by 2 miles and by the end of that summer 20,000 men had passed through the camp. The officers were billeted in the castle.

In 1914 engineers built fortifications round the camp, and several permanent buildings were constructed including a YMCA as the camp was now being used all the year round. Cavalry and light artillery units joined the infantry on site. In the same year Prisoners of War started to arrive at the camp and £50,000 was spent on 100 huts with a partition down the middle, each half holding 30 PoWs making 6000 in all. One night there was a riot of celebration when there was a rumour that a U-Boat had sunk a British troop ship but most of the time the PoWs were well behaved helping local farmers with the harvest in summer and sweeping the streets of Hawick free of snow in winter. They built a proper sewage works, proper drying rooms for their clothes (which can still be seen today), ran a local newspaper which sold for 1d. had a library of 3000 books and carved bones that they got from the cookhouse. All these activities were encouraged by the British to ward off "Barbed Wire Disease" which today would be diagnosed as depression. They were also encouraged to study for professional qualifications. There were only three attempted escapes by groups of 3, 5 and 6 men. All were recaptured. Those that got the farthest were three men in a rowing boat who were picked up by a British naval vessel in the North Sea. There was also a hospital with a British CO and two German doctors.

In 1939, 1500 men were detailed to refurbish the camp for military personnel, and a proper power station was built together with a major building programme of Nissan huts. Proper gunnery ranges were constructed with concrete block houses every 100 yards down them (some can still be seen), and there was a tank maneuvering and practice range towards Rubers Law. The whole camp was buzzing with activity for the whole of World War II and was known as the Scottish Aldershot. After the war the camp was used for the resettlement of Polish soldiers before they returned home and in 1959 the whole camp was totally dismantled and sold off. Today the reservoir dam is breached, the holding ponds are dry and silted up, a few concrete buildings still stand and the bases of some of the buildings can still be discerned. The ghostly silent slit trenches occasionally trap unwary sheep, which die because they cannot scramble out. Nature is steadily taking back her own.