Ancrum House

Ancrum House stood just north of the village, and west of the A68 road four miles north of Jedburgh. The first house was built on the site of a castle erected by Robert Ker around 1558 and its remains were incorporated into the house. It was destroyed by fire on 2nd December 1873 and Sir William Scott immediately commissioned the Edinburgh architects Wardrop and Reid to build a modern mansion in its place. They did so, but this mansion in turn burned down in 1885. These two total-loss fires cost the insurers £30,000 and £25,000 respectively. Undaunted Sir William Monteath Scott, the 7th Baronet of Ancrum who had been born in 1829 and succeeded his father in 1871, commissioned the third mansion in Scots Baronial style.                      

It had a chequered history after his death in May 1902 his only daughter and successor Constance Emily, granted the use of the house as a hospital for the wounded soldiers on the outbreak of the first world war in August 1914, but in the February the following year she intimated her desire to occupy the house herself and moved back in. 

This came as a blow to the medical authorities because although up to that time the demand for occupation had not been great and the medical arrangements at the house were considered excellent it was expected that the accommodation for the wounded would increase as the war progressed.

Constance Emily died in 1933 at the age of 72 and the contents of the house were sold by auction at the end of October 1938 by Dowell’s Limited of Edinburgh. She was unmarried and lived alone in the prestigious Grosvenor Place, London, attended by a lady’s maid, parlour maid, cook, house maid, kitchen maid and scullery maid.

At the outbreak of the Second world war in September 1939 the ninety boarders at Esdaile School in Edinburgh were evacuated to Ancrum House and the army moved into their former school premises. The land girls were also based at some point at the house. After the war the house became home to Barns School in May 1946. This school had initially opened in 1940 as Barns Hostel School under a Society of Friends initiative to house difficult schoolboys who were proving too difficult to evacuate. It closed in 1953, and the house was finally demolished in 1970.