Selkirkshire is one of the smallest historic counties of Scotland, an upland shire in the central Borders bounded by Edinburghshire, Peeblesshire, Roxburghshire and Dumfriesshire, its rivers the Ettrick and Yarrow rising among lonely hills around St Mary's Loch before uniting to join the Tweed below the county town. Selkirk itself, the shire's only burgh and a royal burgh of considerable antiquity, was, by the 1790s, home to barely a thousand people, many of them working small feued or leased plots, alongside an inkle-weaving works and a tannery; the town's shoemakers, remembered in song as the 'Souters of Selkirk', had once supplied markets well beyond the county.
Sheep farming dominated Selkirkshire's economy almost entirely, its flocks, of both the old hardy native breed and the newly fashionable Cheviot sheep prized for finer wool, numbering some forty thousand across a landscape too mountainous for much arable farming; cattle were raised chiefly for sale on to lowland feeders rather than fattened at home. This pastoral character had a darker origin in one of the most sorrowful episodes of Scottish history: a hundred men of Selkirk followed James IV to Flodden in 1513 and perished with their king, a loss still mourned in the haunting lament 'The Flowers of the Forest', composed to commemorate the town's sacrifice. A century later, Selkirkshire was again the scene of national disaster when the Royalist army of the Marquis of Montrose, encamped nearby at Philiphaugh, was surprised and routed by Covenanter forces under General David Leslie in September 1645, Montrose himself escaping with a handful of companions over Minchmoor toward Peebles as his cause in Scotland collapsed in a single morning.
Mary Scott, celebrated in ballad as the 'Flower of Yarrow', and the county's long identification with the pastoral verse and song of the Ettrick and Yarrow valleys gave Selkirkshire an outsized literary reputation for so small and thinly peopled a shire, a reputation the county would go on to secure permanently when Sir Walter Scott, still a young advocate at the time this account of Scotland was written, was appointed Sheriff of Selkirkshire in 1799 and served the county for more than three decades.