Saturday 3rd August 2024

We woke late, around 8am, to beautiful blue skies and sun.

A light breakfast of tea and scones before pulling on our walking gear and changing plans.

Originally I had a circular walk planned towards Denholm, but we realised that would be a good 5 hours and then we wanted to get into Hawick.

So, we headed towards Hawick along the Teviot River, it’s a really nice walk through forest and grass then into a light-industrial bit that isn’t quite so nice (the local refuse collection point is a bit smelly).

We passed Hawick RFC and a lot of newly built flood defences, Hawick doesn’t seem to have flooded since 2015, but they’re taking no chances, and there’s a lot of new wall.

After a quick stop for a bag of sweets and a citrus drink we headed towards Wilton Lodge park and it’s fantastic.

A beautiful riverside path, and a diverse selection of trees, along with a cafe and museum and large grassy expanses.

We missed getting a table at the cafe, so headed into town, the Main Street is a little tired looking but with some nice shops and a couple of great looking butchers.

We couldn’t get into any of the food shops in town (not a lot of them, and we missed a bit) and we ended up in Morrisons cafe for lunch which was fine.

We picked up some snacks for dinner again and headed back to the site, a good 12 mile walk.

We sat reading most of the evening, I polished off “The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland” by Alistair Moffat which I really enjoyed, moreso because we’ve been around a lot of the areas covered in the book.