Smailholm Tower was built by the Pringle family - originally Hoppringle - probably in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The Pringles held the lands of Smailholm from the early 1400s as followers of the Earl of Douglas, managing part of Ettrick Forest for their feudal lord. A peel tower of this kind was the typical fortified house of the Border country: rectangular, four storeys, basalt rubble walls 2.4 metres thick, designed not to withstand a siege but to keep its occupants safe through the few hours an English raiding party might spend looting. The tower was attacked in 1543, 1544, and 1546 - the last assault by the English garrison of Wark Castle, who carried off prisoners and cattle. In 1640 Sir Andrew Ker of Greenhead defended it successfully against another English force. The Scotts of Harden, ancestors of Sir Walter, acquired the property after that and rebuilt parts of the tower and its barmkin courtyard.

By the eighteenth century the Scotts had moved into nearby Sandyknowe farm and the tower was decaying. In the 1770s, Walter Scott - born 1771, a Edinburgh advocate's son, lame from childhood polio - was sent to live with his paternal grandparents at Sandyknowe for the sake of his health. He spent hours below the tower listening to the old Border ballads, the stories of cattle raids and elopements, the songs about feuds between Kers and Scotts and Maxwells and Johnstones. The Borders were perhaps a century out of the reiver era by then, but the stories were still being told as living memory. Scott absorbed them. They would become the raw material for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802 and, through that, the foundation of his career - poems like The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, then the Waverley novels that effectively invented the historical novel as a genre.

Scott repaid the tower in his work. Smailholm is the explicit setting of his ballad The Eve of St John, in which the wife of the Baron of Smailholm waits for her lover on the night before St John's Eve, only to discover that her husband has murdered him and that the lover's ghost has been visiting her. The tower also appears in Marmion. As Scott's fame grew, his uncle restored the tower around 1800 to ensure it would not fall down. J.M.W. Turner, the great Romantic painter, visited Smailholm with Scott in the author's last years; his sketch of the tower was included in Scott's Poetical Works. Shortly after, Henry Fox Talbot - the English pioneer of photography - retraced Turner's route through the Borders and published Sun Pictures in Scotland, considered the first photographic travel book in history. The tower stands in Talbot's calotypes as it stood for Turner: a square block of stone on a crag against the Border sky.

The last private owner, the Earl of Ellesmere, gave the tower into state care in 1950. Historic Environment Scotland restored it in the 1980s, and a more recent project in 2010-11 reinstated a turf roof over the entire structure - an experimental damp-proofing approach now used at other historic Scottish properties. In June 2007 VisitScotland awarded Smailholm its maximum five-star rating, a designation then held by only nine sites in the country. Inside, the tower now houses a display of model figures by two local artists, depicting Scott's ballads and the history of the Pringles in embroidery and modelling techniques. From the parapet walk, the view is what it was in 1500: the rolling Border country, the distant Eildon Hills, the line of the Cheviots on the southern horizon, and the wind coming off the moors that the small Walter Scott once stood in, listening to ballads.