page_title: Walkerburn
section_title: Middle Ages to Great War
hierarchical_section_title: Walkerburn / History / Middle Ages to Great War
caption_attribution_description: English: Walkerburn Post Office On the main A72 road through the village.
context_page_description: Walkerburn is a small village in the Scottish Borders area of Scotland, on the A72 about 8 miles from Peebles and 10 miles from Galashiels.
  It was founded in 1854 to house the workers for the Tweed mills owned by the Ballantyne family. Walkerburn now has a population of around 660.
  The village also unusually houses a small number of science-based industries and many successful small enterprises. It is the home of the Ballantyne Memorial Institute.
context_section_description: All through the Middle Ages the production of cloth was a cottage industry in the Tweed valley. The crofter-weaver ran his own sheep, usually on common land, the whole community helped with shearing, the women carded and span the wool and the weaver himself warped and mounted his web and wove it in his handloom. The cloth was afterwards washed and ‘waulked’ or milled and beaten in a burn. Such dyes as were used came from local plants but for the most part the wool was undyed.
  Along the banks of the Tweed, especially where burns ran down the hillsides, small groups of these crofter-weavers would be established and it may be that the name ‘Walker Burn’ simply referred to the burn where weavers ‘waulked’ the wool.
  The Ballantyne family first appears as landowners and yeoman farmers of Bellenden Farm on the upper Ale Water with the name spelt Bellendaine, then Ballantin and eventually Ballantyne. Later, in 1666, a small colony of weavers in the village of Galashiels had as a member one William Ballantin and in 1672 the birth of his son Walter is the first entry in the baptism record of Galashiels Parish Church. Eventually, a descendant of William and Walter, Henry Ballantyne (1802-1865) rose to prominence as one of the most skillful developers of Tweed cloth. In 1846/7, looking around for a site for a new mill, Henry saw the possibilities of the site where the Walker Burn ran into the Tweed. He entered into negotiations with Thomas Horsburgh to buy a site around the Walker Burn on which to establish a mill to take advantage of a bend on the nearby River Tweed which would make it easy to build a mill lade taking water into the mill controlled by two sluice gates. The only buildings in the area on that side of the Tweed were Caberston farm and steading and 4 farm cottages. On the south side of the Tweed, West Bold Farm was much older and in other ownership – there was no bridge at this point.
  Work began on the mill and Frederick Thomas Pilkington was retained to design and build villas for the Ballantyne family and 115 houses for mill workers who initially came mainly from Galashiels, walking to and from work – and the working day was typically 14 hours. The blocks of flats at Plora Terrace were the first workers’ home to be built. In 1854 the village was christened Walkerburn after the Waulker Burn which runs from the hills above Priesthope into the Tweed.
  The first child was born in the new village in 1856 and the first shops opened in 1858.
  Gradually, more and more workers’ houses were built and by 1861 there were enough children to support an elementary school. The arrival of the railway and the opening of a Post Office in 1866 put Walkerburn firmly on the Peeblesshire map as an expanding, energetic mill village. The railway closed in 1962 but the Post Office is still in the original building.
  The Parish Church, built in 1875, was followed by a Methodist Chapel and then a Congregational Church in 1890, both now private houses. The Church of Scotland was built in 1883 and the Rugby Club founded in 1884, as the 25th member of the Scottish Rugby Union. And in 1877 the Good Templar Movement built the Public Hall which subsequently passed into community ownership in 1908. The Hall is now maintained as a charitable trust. A French style ‘pissoir’ was installed as a public toilet on the A72 beside the bridge over the Walker Burn. It is no longer in use.
  By 1878, when the first gas street lamps were installed, the population of the village was 1028, growing to 1500 by the turn of the century, and in 1882 the village got its own police station at the foot of Hall Street, which remained in use until a new police house was built opposite the mill gates. Both it and the original police station remain in use, though not by the police. In December 1883 there was the first meeting of the Walkerburn Co-operative Society, which played an active role in village retailing until it merged with the Innerleithen Society in 1966 and then with the Borders Society in 1969.
  There is still a co-operative store in Innerleithen but the Walkerburn stor
caption: Walkerburn Post Office
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