Seventy-one members of the Old Gala Club packed into the Upper Volunteer Hall to see a slide show of various landmarks around the Borders given by one of our members, Mr. John Rogerson. John said that he had taken the pictures over a large number of years from when he started out as a gravedigger in Peebles to his present
occupation as a teacher in Earlston. He had entitled his talk "Berwick to Turn Again".

The first slide was of the Union Chain Bridge over the Tweed built in 1820 by Capt. Samuel Brown R.N. who lived at Nether Byers near Berwick. At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in Britain and is still the oldest. Moving up the river, the next slide showed the church at Ladykirk built by James IV in 1499. Next came the memorial to the Covenanters at Channelkirk, one of whom was imprisoned on the Bass Rock but, very surprisingly, was let off on the grounds of "ill health" provided that he left the country. This was followed by a Tithe Barn at Foulden, one of only two left, the other being at Whitekirk, an old building at Bunkle between Reston and Preston and part of a building dating from the 12th century on a farm at Grimshaws in the Lammermuirs. John told stories to illustrate his slides about a priest in Millport on Cumbrai who intoned "Bless all the people of this island and those of the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland, of John Duns Scotus who left the Borders in 1275 for Paris and then Cologne where he died at the early age of 33, of Polwarth which was once a substantial village, and of Greenlaw where a building that looks much like a church is in fact a prison with barred windows. There was one about James Thomson who wrote Rule Britannia and his father, the Rev. Thomas Thomson of Southdean kirk who was asked to exorcise a ghost, which he did but as he left the building he was struck dead by lightning! At Oxnam there is a stele to commemorate the Foot and Mouth epidemic, which caused such great losses to local farmers, and at West Lee there is a herd of very small cattle, said to give only seven pints of milk to the gallon!

There is a fine picture painted by Jimmy Russell in 1930 which includes likenesses of the locals, hanging over the fireplace in the Horse and Hounds at Bonchester Bridge, a Clapperton memorial on a spectacular site at Minto, David Erskine's Temple of the Muses at Dryburgh and the Waverley Hotel in Melrose built in 1869, the first building to be made of mass concrete without reinforcing rods. John's last story was probably apocryphal about the time when Mick Jagger was little and his mother wanted to anchor him in a shop whilst she made her purchases so she moistened his lips and stuck him to the window!

Norman Houldsworth gave the vote of thanks and suggested that John should communicate with the office of the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland in Edinburgh, as they were unaware of many of the fascinating items that John had shown this evening.

Reported by D.R.T. 1^st December 2005