Photo by Karen Bryan

Hawick is the largest town in Scotland’s Borders Region. The Rough Guide to World Parties recently voted the city’s June Annual Ridings festival of the best festivals in the world.

The Ridings follows the ancient custom of riding around the town boundaries in order to look out for dawn raids. The proceedings last for several days. Events include the reinactment of the capture of the English flag in 1514, various ceremonies, and horse racing.

You can find our about local history at the Hawick Museum. Since 1910, the museum has been housed in Wilton Lodge, a grand Victorian mansion. Clotheshorses should know that Hawick is also known the “Home of Cashmere,” with a tradition of producing high quality knitwear. Peter Scott has an outlet shop in the town.

One of the new Hawick landmarks is the James Thomson Bridge—a modern footbridge—which crosses the River Teviot. The bridge is named after James Thomson (1827 - 1888) a local poet and songwriter best known for composing the lyrics to the “Star o’ Rabbie Burns,” the only song not written by the great baird to be sung at traditional Burns suppers.

Thomson also wrote songs and poems about the Hawick Ridings. A statue of Thomson, sculpted by local artist Bill Landles, sits at the bridge. Landles’ great great grandmother was a friend of Thomson’s. The two once lived in the same row of tenement flats. When the row of houses was demolished, Thomson carved Landles’ great great grandmother a goblet out of a wooden roof beam. A cast of the goblet sits prominently at the front of the statue today.

Photo by Karen Bryan

Dundee lies on the east coast of Scotland, 40 miles north of Edinburgh on the Tay Estuary. Quite frankly we used to think of Dundee as a very uninspiring place, wallowing in limbo after the decline of traditional manufacturing industries—but boy has it moved on.

Dundee’s renaissance started in the 1980s when the ship Discovery, built in Dundee and used by Captain Scott on his Antarctic trip, was returned to the city as a visitor attraction. The city is now a renowned center for biomedical research and the development of computer games. The View, one of the UK’s hottest bands at the moment, are from Dundee as well.

Dundee’s not trying to obliterate its past, either. There’s a award winning industrial museum, the Verdant Works. Some of the best known characters from the Beano and Dandy comics—published in Dundee since the 1930s—including Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, and Gnasher the Dog, are celebrated in bronze sculptures in the city centre.

Many of the Victorian facades in the city center have been renovated, the quayside has been developed, and Dundee has become a leading Scottish retail center. A couple of miles east of Dundee there’s a lovely beach at Broughty Ferry.

Best of all, as Dundee has changed it has become neither too gentrified nor too pretentious.