Berwickshire occupies the south-east corner of Scotland, its coast washed by the German Ocean, the Tweed and the English border curving along its south-east flank, Roxburghshire closing it on the south, and the Lammermuir Hills marking its northern edge toward Haddingtonshire. An 1799 topographical survey divided the county into three distinct tracts: the rich, level Merse in the south, the pastoral valley of Lauderdale along the Leader Water, and the bare, heathy Lammermuir uplands, a threefold character that still shapes the county's landscape today. Berwick itself, the county's ancient and proper capital, was lost to England some four centuries before that survey was written, so uniquely among Scottish counties Berwickshire has never contained the town from which it takes its name.
The Merse's deep clay soil had, by the late eighteenth century, been brought to a pitch of agricultural improvement that contemporary writers judged the equal of anything in England, its wheat, barley and turnip crops feeding a prosperous class of tenant farmers. Along the coast, Eyemouth was growing into a busy fishing port, while inland the ruined priory at Coldingham, once a dependency of Durham Abbey, and the dramatic gorge of the Pease, later spanned by a soaring stone bridge, drew travellers on the old post road from Berwick to Edinburgh.
Dunse gave the world the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus, born there in 1274, while nearby Lauder witnessed the summary hanging of King James III's unpopular favourites from its bridge in 1482. In June 1639, the hill above Duns known as Duns Law became the mustering ground for General Alexander Leslie's Covenanter army as it faced down King Charles I's forces camped six miles off across the Tweed, a stand-off vividly described in the letters of Robert Baillie and resolved without battle by the Pacification of Berwick. Hume Castle's defiant reply to a Cromwellian summons to surrender is still remembered as the likely origin of the Scottish children's game of 'castle', and the abbey ruins at Dryburgh, resting place of Sir Walter Scott within a generation of that survey being written, complete a county whose fertile lowlands and turbulent border history sit side by side.