Theme Week Scottish Borders – Melrose

25 October 2018 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  6 minutes

Market Square © geograph.org.uk - Walter Baxter/cc-by-sa-2.0

Market Square © geograph.org.uk – Walter Baxter/cc-by-sa-2.0

Melrose is a small town and civil parish in the Scottish Borders, historically in Roxburghshire. It is in the Eildon committee area. The town’s name is recorded in its earliest form as Mailros, ‘the bare peninsula’ (Old Welsh or Brythonic), referring to the original site of the monastery, recorded by Bede, in a bend of the river Tweed. The original monastery at Melrose is referred to in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle with the name Magilros. In the late Middle Ages, when the monastery had been re-founded in its present position, its name was symbolically represented by the visual pun of a mell (mason’s hammer) and a rose (symbolising the Virgin Mary, to whom all Cistercian abbeys were dedicated).   read more…

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