Roxburghshire is a historic county of the central Scottish Borders, its rivers, the Teviot and the Jed, draining into the Tweed as it runs along much of the county's northern edge before turning south toward Berwickshire and England. An eighteenth-century topographical account traced the traveller's route from the fertile parish of Ednam, birthplace of James Thomson, author of the enormously popular poem 'The Seasons', through the market town of Kelso at the meeting of the Teviot and Tweed, and on to Jedburgh, seat of the county's courts and famous even then for the quality of its orchard pears. It was to Jedburgh that Mary, Queen of Scots came in October 1566, and from there that she rode some twenty miles to Hermitage Castle and back in a single day to visit the Earl of Bothwell after he was wounded in a Border skirmish, an exertion that was followed by a grave illness that nearly cost the queen her life in the house still shown to visitors as Mary Queen of Scots' House.
Melrose Abbey, founded by David I in 1136 on the banks of the Tweed beneath the triple peaks of the Eildon Hills, was already ruined but romantically celebrated by the 1790s, its carved stonework and the legendary burial there of Alexander II and the heart of Robert the Bruce drawing visitors up from Kelso. Hawick, in the county's hillier south, had built a flourishing trade in carpets, stockings and coarse cloth, supplying both the domestic market and, increasingly, England, while the wide sheep-walks of upland Roxburghshire supported large flocks whose wool and ewe-milk cheese were the mainstay of many farms.
The county's long exposure to Anglo-Scottish warfare left a legacy of ruined peel towers and battle sites, and its people took pride in a roll of native talent out of proportion to its size: the physician Sir John Pringle, later President of the Royal Society; the poet-physician Dr John Armstrong, who praised the River Liddel in his verse; and Lord Heathfield, defender of Gibraltar during its great siege, were all natives of this single Border county, a shire that saw as much distinguished learning as it did border strife.