Tweed Green

The picture I showed you yesterday was taken looking in the opposite direction. I have turned around now to look along Tweed Green towards the old hospital.

If you were born in Peebles, at home or in the hospital here, you are a Gutterbluid, a native, but if like me you chose to come and live here you are known as a Stooriefit, an incomer (with dusty - stoorie - feet from travelling here). The gutter blood takes more explaining but let's just say that today the name is earned by anyone whose parents were resident in the town at the time of their birth! That's because most Peebles babies are born in Edinburgh hospitals since the closure of this one at Tweed Green.

The pavilion at the left side of my photo was where for a small fee you could hire a putter and ball for a game of putting on the Green, or your deck chair to sit relaxing out in the sun. Under the domed roof was another area where you could sit shaded and sheltered from the heat, watching the putting games going on outside. Local people still know this area of the Green as the Putting Green, even though no-one has putted here for years.

The path takes you along the row of pollarded lime trees, past the old washing poles on the left, to the river and Priorsford foot-bridge. Old by-laws permitted people who lived facing the Green to hang their laundry on ropes fastened between the poles, and as far as I am aware it is still perfectly legal to do that still - though of course no-one does! I mean, what would the neighbours say?