The known story of Maxwell Place comes from Sir Walter Scott's letters and journals. He recalls that all the land where many Regency and Victorian houses were later built was, when owned by his seafaring uncle Captain Robert Scott, a formal park laid out by the Quaker Millar family who had come from Holland in the reign of William and Mary. The Millars later emigrated to the Americas, but left behind a superb three-volume illustrated work, The Gardner's Dictionary, of which hand-aquatinted copies are extant in the libraries of several aristocratic great houses of Scotland and England. It had over 300 copperplate engravings.
Scott, as a child, stayed with his aunt in 'The Garden Cottage' which is now called Waverley Lodge, and is notable for a bust of Scott and figure of his favorite hound mounted on its gable wall and gateway. It is at the town end of Maxwell Lane. He recalls the box and yew hedges, fountains, seats, formal walks and lead statues of the park. In particular, he stole down to a great 'mound of leaves' (an Oriental plane tree) at the age of around six or seven, to read Archbishop Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient Poetry' with its stirring ballads of war and strife. Under this tree was a folly, a mock structure like a ruined monk's cell, for the garden was formely the ground of Kelso Abbey.
Captain Robert Scott, who owned all this land, ultimately left it to young Walter Scott, who had such fond memories of his summers in Kelso, his schooling there, his fishing, hunting ducks, swimming, reading old ballads, and his childhood sweetheart Jessie (for whom he wrote down the words to 'Lammikin', the ballad Steeleye Span recorded as 'Long Lankin'). However, Scott owed feudal loyalty to the Duke of Buccleuch and not to the Earl of Roxburghe, in whose domain these lands lay. He fell out of love with Kelso, and refused to take over the estate - it was not grand enough for his ambitions, and too closely surrounded by those whose estates and titles he could never aspire to equal.
So, he sold the land to a number of speculators and property developers. The first house to be built was called Eden Bank, and architectural archaeology suggests that the banqueting house forms its central hall, as this has massive walls where none are necessary. Eden Bank was 'built' by a wine merchant called Robert Nicol from 1807 onwards, but changed hands rapidly, and expanded from a three-bedroomed villa to a Palladian mansion.
In Scots terms, 'mansion-house' means a house for multiple occupation, each part being a 'mansion' or 'little house' - 'my Father's house... many mansions' confuses many children reading the Bible, until you realise it means 'in my Father's apartment block there are many condos'. Writers who talk about large houses being 'mansions' use an ignorant modern idiom.
It changed name to Maxwell Place, being built on the Maxwheel stretch of the Tweed named from the Norman de Maccuswell family. Why 'Place'? It might sound grand to you, but in Scotland, 'Place' means a tenement block - multiple occupation. We can't change the name back to Eden Bank, as it appears on the 1823 map, because in the meantime another house has been named that.
In 1821, an older Sir Walter Scott, now wiser but still ambitious as ever with his vast neo-Baronial pile of Abbotsford and even huger reputation, accompanied his printer and publisher friend John Ballantine on a walk down the Tweed in Kelso. Ballantine was overseeing the workmen put the finishing touches to Walton Hall, his charming 'summer residence' dedicated to Izaak Walton and intended to house a small museum or shrine to the great angler. The friends ate and drank on the terrace, with the unfinished house behind them and the river below, the sun shining across from Friar's Haugh between the Teviot and the Tweed, to the south.
Ballantine's love of angling is shared by most visitors to Kelso today. Walton Hall neighbours one of the best and most expensive salmon beats in the world, the Junction Pool. Commercial break - you can visit the TweedNet service which allows you to book fishing on the Tweed (though not the Junction Pool) by clicking here.
Later in the day, they sat in the kirkyard near the Abbey and talked, then walked through the gate of the old Garden Cottage into the former park. Scott wrote that he wept when he saw how all the paths, walks, arbours, statues and hedges had been torn up and destroyed. He also wrote that he detested the 'vulgar, modern' building which had been constructed there. He was, regrettably, referring to the classical 'country Adam' freestone facade of Maxwell Place! What we now see as Georgian elegance, he saw as plain, stark, unromantic geometry. Scott preferred 'crawsteps' (gables with stepped bricks or stones), bartizans (overhanging tower rooms), pinnacles, steep roofs and red sandstone Gothic grandeur to go with his love of old Scotland and his sense of dramatic occasion.
Scott never returned to the garden again, or ever revisited Kelso with the same desire to retrace childhood steps. His stylish advocate's signature is on the 1806 deeds to Maxwell Place, affirming amongst other matters a covenant forbidding future owners from cutting down the great Oriental Plane tree which formed a marker for Maxwell Place's boundary wall closest to the Tweed. Why would such a covenant have been included in the deeds? Here the myth begins, because while all the above is reported fact and reasonable deduction, we can never be sure that this Oriental Plane, sacred enough to be preserved for all time, was also the one he sat under as a child.
However, it seems unlikely to be coincidence. He cared enough about the tree to record, in 1821, that there was no trace of it. He enquired why and found that a 'plague' has destroyed 'all of its species' in 1812. Even its location is now lost, hidden in the car park of the Mayfield Garden Centre, which continues the great tradition of the Millar family by providing plants and trees to gardening enthusiasts throughout northern England and south Scotland. Mayfield also fosters the mother bulbs for the fabulously huge Kelsae Onion, the largest of its race in the world. I would like them to plant a new Oriental Plane in the year 2012.
Scott also recorded, with sadness, that John Ballantine never lived to put the bust of 'old Piscator' in the pillared entrance atrium of Walton Hall. He built his summer house, but spent not a single summer in it, nor a salmon season.
Scott did not record that as he walked the evening wynds and haughs of Kelso in 1821, others were meeting with a new age in mind. The speculators who had developed the Garden, and built many grand freestone villas on this fertile riverside haugh during the second decade of the 1800s, also owned land closer to the old town - the other side of Maxwell Lane, which ran down the back of Maxwell Place. Scots houses were traditionally built with their rears to the road, and fronts to the garden, as the Scots have never believed in impressing people without first inviting them in, and were very practical about horses, mud, and boot-scrapers.
These gentlemen raised a public subscription in Kelso to set up the first town gas plant in Scotland, and provide street-lighting for their model market town. The fund-raising started around 1820, and by the early 1830s the gasworks was burning coal and producing gas piped into the streets and into many houses, including Maxwell Place. Fantail jets can still be found on some of the mantelpieces, pipes behind the shutters, and marks where jets were mounted on the inside window architraves. Curtains were not used then, but blinds and shutters, so there was little risk of fire. We have removed curtains from Maxwell Place today, and use the shutters again; it takes times to get used to the unusual feel of the room, and visitors often feel uncomfortable, but to us curtains now seem out of place where window-boards or shutters will do.
Sir Walter Scott was responsible for inspiring the gas pioneers, for a few years earlier he had put the first domestic coal-gas generator plant into Abbotsford during its building, and guests were amazed by his blazing chandeliers. He does record, however, that the stink and the trouble of maintaining this scientific experiment led to its early termination. By the time Kelso had town gas, Abbotsford was back on kerosene lamps and candles.
With a gasworks fifty yards from the courtyard of the house, what of its value and appeal? Four years after the gas came on line, it was sold by 'public roup' in the market square for no more than it was worth in 1806. The new owners let it to half a dozen genteel tenants; an Admiral's widow, maiden ladies, an officer, a gentleman. They passed their own days in cleaner air on their country estates - though one, in the mid-1800s, retired to the Greek island of Corfu with his German valet.
Owners came and went, and Maxwell Place was divided into three parts. A wine merchant called Robert Nicol MacDonald bought the central part in the 1960s, and discovered that its builder, Robert Nicol, was not only a direct ancestor but had run the same kind of business from the same town centre premises.
Icon Publications came to Kelso in 1988; we bought the central part from Bob MacDonald, and a derelict wing from a speculative developer. Later, we bought the remaining flat when its owners moved, and the house became one again. Printing and publishing, one of Kelso's oldest traditions, was already present at Kelso Graphics a few yards away on part of the old gas works site. The gas plant closed in the 1960s. The houses were on their way back to their early status, but commercial development was close by. The empty gasworks site with its old stone wall was cleared. A new high-tech estate of small industrial units suitable for designers, architects, and light trades was built. We obtained commercial office planning status for Maxwell Place. The new tenants for the main unit in the industrial estate were clients of Icon's, a design group, moving twenty miles from a country mill into Kelso centre.
So, within a few yards of each other, there are now probably as many people setting type and creating illustrations as there were in Ballantine's Kelso printworks at the opening of the 19th century. Sir Walter Scott, a great innovator and a round-the-clock workaholic whose days started at sunrise and ended at 2 a.m., would have grasped every tool we use with enthusiasm. He, a newly-ennobled aristocrat who gave orders for the Scots tradition of free access to his grounds to be extended to every citizen of Galashiels and never refused a visitor, would have been the first to link up to Internet and commune with the thousands of Waverley novels subscribers who made him a wealthy man.
That is another story - publishers today are often unaware that novels and reference works in the early 1800s were underwritten by private, advance subscriptions from readers.
Photography is another story, too. Scott would surely have tried photography himself or promoted it uses, but he died as it was being invented. His descriptive abilities and visual awareness would have attracted him to photography, without doubt. It was Scott who invited the artist Turner to visit the valley of the Tweed, and it was in homage to Scott's descriptive writing and Turner's visit that William Henry Fox Talbot, the father of the illustrated photographic book, traced those footsteps again for 'Sun Pictures in Scotland'.
So now you have heard the myth! If you want to learn more, you'll have to visit Scotland, and come to the Borders.
You'll have to walk out, early on a summer morning, from the Rhymer's Tower in Earlston, to Huntley Bank on the Eildon Hills. Bring your twelve-string, sit down under a shady tree, and if you're lucky the Queen of Elfland will invite you for a seven-year folk festival deep in those volcanic rocks.
Camp overnight on the crags of Smailholm Tower on the Eve of St John, and you might hear a lady at tryst with her lover... yet unaware that her husband had slain him three nights syne.
Search the Cheviot foothills for Carter Hall, and find a well with the wild roses which grow everywhere here hiding it; Tam Lin's there still.
Enter the darkness of Hermitage Castle if you dare, but watch over your shoulder for Lord Soulis and his vindictive familiar. After all, getting rolled in lead sheeting and boiled in oil in the centre of a nine-stone ring is no guarantee that you can't come back to frighten a few tourists.
If I have to go that way, I will!
David Kilpatrick