Kelso, Coal Market, 3 Simon Square

Situated at the corner of Simon Square and Abbey Row, No 3 Simon Square is used today as a garage and store but the building probably dates from the late eighteenth century and was in use as a school for part of the nineteenth century. Standing two storeys high, the Simon Square frontage is broad and built of coursed rubble with finely cut ashlar quoins (corner stones) and surrounds for the windows and front door. At the rear, fronting onto Abbey Row is a three-storeyed block which has a large window at the second floor overlooking the churchyard.

A house on this site once belonged to Sir Walter Scott's great-grandfather, who died there in 1729. A late nineteenth-century account of the building describes the original thatching and crowstepped gables. The writer also notes that Scott's ancestor, nicknamed 'Beardie' by local people, would often watch the children playing in the street and people strolling through the churchyard from his window, where he would sit so he might see the world pass by. Sir Walter Scott wrote that his grandfather, a fervent Jacobite, earned his nickname because of his long beard, which he swore he would never cut again until the Stewarts returned to the throne.

Text prepared by RCAHMS as part of the Accessing Scotland's Past project