There is no better way to find out about a place than by walking round it. Detailed booklets for many towns and villages are available from the Scottish Borders Tourist Board. These short walks, mostly between 2 miles (3km) and 5 miles (8km) in length, take you through the fascinating history and architecture of the towns and villages of the Scottish Borders, and extend to easily accessible viewpoints providing wonderful panoramas of the surrounding areas.
Click on the town name for more details of each route.

The name Galashiels derives from the Old English word gwala, meaning full stream, and shiel, meaning shelter, from the Norse. Hunters and foresters found shelter here by the river. Galashiels is known to locals simply as Gala.

The town trail is split into two parts. The main walk is 4.5km (2¾ miles) long and the extended walk is approximately 3km (1¾ miles) long.

Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott, is nearby on the banks of the Tweed.

In 1100, the main settlement in the area was a castle standing between the Teviot and Tweed. With the founding of the abbey in 1128, a settlement across the river known as Easter Kelso grew up around the abbey site.

At the beginning of the 18th century Kelso was a town of low stone-built houses with small windows, thatched roofs and outside stairs. With incrasing prosperity from manufacturing, larger house were built on the outskirts and it became an important coaching stop on the road between Edinburgh and London.

Some time before AD650, a monastery was founded beside the Tweed at Old Melrose by St Aidan of Lindisfarne. 500 years later, King David I brought Cistercian monks from Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire to Melrose and established the abbey in its present location.

After destruction by English armies in 1322, the abbey was rebuilt at the expense of Robert the Bruce, whose embalmed heart was buried in a leaden casket within its walls.