Qualla: Galashiels

Galashiels: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sour Plums. That's the town's motto, written in Scots as Soor Plooms, and it commemorates the day in 1337 when a band of English soldiers stopped to pick wild plums on the slopes near Galashiels and a group of Scots came across them by chance and killed them all. The town's coat of arms shows two foxes reaching up into the fruit tree. It is one of the more unusual civic emblems in Scotland - a memorial to a small, savage, almost accidental act of violence - and Galashiels has carried it for nearly seven centuries. The townspeople still sing it. Once a year, in summer, the Braw Lads ride through the streets and the old song goes up: sour plums in Galashiels.

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Image: Walter Baxter | CC BY-SA 2.0

Galashiels: Before the Town Had a Name

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0. To the west of modern Galashiels runs an ancient earthwork called the Picts' Work Ditch, or Catrail. It extends many miles south, its height and width varying, and nobody agrees on what it was for - a boundary marker, a defensive line, a cattle drove route. On the north-western e...

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Image: Walter Baxter | CC BY-SA 2.0

Galashiels: Mills on the Gala Water

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit james denham, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1599 Galashiels received its Burgh Charter. For two more centuries it remained small - around 800 people at the start of the 19th century. Then came the textile revolution. The Gala Water, which gives the town its name, ran fast enough and clean enough to power machinery, and ...

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Image: james denham | CC BY-SA 2.0

Galashiels: The Songs and the Singers

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Robert Burns wrote two poems about Galashiels: Sae Fair Her Hair and Braw Lads. The second is sung at the Braw Lads Gathering every summer, a tradition formalised in 1930 with the support of the local artist and watercolourist George Hope Tait, who served on the town council for ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Galashiels: The Great Tapestry

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IMF121, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 21 August 2021, after years of planning and £6.7 million of investment, the Great Tapestry of Scotland Centre opened in Galashiels. The tapestry it houses - 160 hand-stitched panels telling the entire history of Scotland from the geological formation of the land to the modern ...

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Image: IMF121 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Galashiels: The Train That Came Back

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1969 the Waverley Line - the railway that had connected Galashiels and the Scottish Borders to the national network for over a century - was closed in the Beeching cuts. For 46 years the Borders had no trains. The campaign to bring rail back never went away. In 2006 the Scotti...

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Image: Walter Baxter | CC BY-SA 2.0