Edinburgh and the Borders, down the A7 and back up the A68

Almost every visitor leaving Edinburgh heads north over the Forth or west towards Stirling. The Borders are thirty miles the other way, and the result is a landscape of abbeys, river valleys and small stone towns with a fraction of the traffic.

It also makes for a better day’s driving. The A7 and A68 are proper roads through open country rather than tourist routes, and on a weekday in spring you can go twenty minutes without meeting anything.

The chapel is a single building about the size of a large parish church, and every surface inside it is carved. Foliage, faces, biblical scenes and a good deal that nobody has satisfactorily explained, packed into a space you can cross in twenty paces.

A novel made it famous and the crowds that followed have thinned since, which is a mercy. It still repays a morning slot rather than an afternoon one, and an hour and a quarter is about right unless you are the sort of person who reads every panel.

Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Kelso were all founded within a few years of one another in the twelfth century and all four were wrecked in the same border wars. They are within twenty miles of each other and each takes an hour.

Doing all four in a day is possible and produces a curious flattening effect where they blur into one long ruin. Melrose for the carving and Dryburgh for the setting is the pairing we would suggest, with Jedburgh added only if the party is genuinely keen.

Scott bought a farm on the Tweed, renamed it, and spent thirty years turning it into an idea of a Scottish house that did not previously exist. The result invented a great deal of what the world now thinks Scotland looks like, and it nearly ruined him.

The house is kept as he had it: armour in the hall, a library of nine thousand volumes, and a study with the desk he wrote himself out of debt at. Ninety minutes, and the walk down to the river afterwards is part of it.

The A68 climbs out of the Borders to a thousand feet at Soutra Hill, and then the whole of the Lothians appears at once: the Forth, the bridges, Arthur’s Seat and the city under it. On a clear evening it is one of the great views in Britain from a public road.

We time the day so that leg happens in the late afternoon. It costs nothing and it is the difference between driving back and arriving somewhere. There is a lay-by at the top and it is worth five minutes.

The alternative day runs south-west from Edinburgh on the A703 to Peebles, then along the Tweed to Traquair House, which claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited house in Scotland and has a brewery in the grounds.

It is a quieter and greener day than the Melrose loop, with more river and fewer ruins. Where a party has two days in the Borders, doing the eastern loop on one and the western on the other covers the whole valley without repeating a mile.

Most guests who take this day are in Edinburgh for three or four days and have already done the castle, the Royal Mile and Holyrood. The Borders are the obvious second excursion and they are considerably easier than the Highlands, which need two days to be worth the drive.

The car collects from the hotel, runs the loop and returns by early evening in time for dinner. During the festival in August the city end of the day takes longer than it should, and we build in an extra half hour at each end.