Kith and Kin – Borders Family History Society
HAVE been researching a branch of the family tree who lived in Megget, Selkirkshire and decided to branch out and have a look at the neighbours and where they lived.
The parish of Megget was only about six miles long and not much wider, with the farms of Winterhopeburn and Meggethead at the top of the valley, and Syart, Glengaber and Henderland at the foot of the valley.
When the Megget reservoir was completed, and the valley flooded in 1983, the sites of Shielhope, Cramalt, Craigierig and Meggetknowes and of the church and school were lost.
The Statistical Accounts of 1792 and 1834 (www.stataccscot.edina.ac.uk) are always useful sources of historic information.
In the 1790s, there was about 80 people in the valley, living in 12 houses.
The valley had neither school nor church buildings until just after 1800 when a local farmer built a two-storey building with a schoolroom on the ground floor and church upstairs.
The school was open for part of the year, from Whitsunday to Martinmas, when the teacher lived as a guest in the parent’s houses. Several new houses, stone with slate roofs, were built by the Wemyss estate in the early part of the 19th century, improving the accommodation for some of the shepherds.
As the school and church building deteriorated, the valley needed a new school and schoolhouse and also a new church.
By the 1840s, many of the parishioners had joined the Free church and a majority of them, together with many from Yarrow, built a new church at Cappercleuch.
Wemyss estates, the main landowner in the district, refused a site for a new church in the valley but was willing to improve the existing church.
In his series of books on the parishes of Peeblesshire, Dr Gunn published the book of The Church of Lyne and Megget A.D. 11651911.
The book featured extracts of the Kirk Session minutes and also included photographs of the old school and the new tin Kirk, opened in 1905 for the Church of Scotland congregation. A new school was built near Craigierig.
The survival of school records can be a great bonus for the family historian and the Megget records are held at the Scottish Borders Archive, Hawick.
The school log book covers the years from 1929 until its closure in the summer of 1967.
The Admission Register runs from 1889 until the 1967 closure and has been indexed up to 1919 by Borders Family History Society.
Ninety-nine pupils were admitted during the first 30-year period with the surnames Hogg, Anderson, Mitchell, Scott and Laidlaw appearing most often.
Another source of information for the valley is the Peeblesshire Ordnance Survey Name books, dated 1856 – 1858 (available online at www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk) where contributions were made by the schoolmaster, shepherds and farmers. More recently, film was used to record the valley and some of its residents.
Just before the reservoir was completed, a film, “Different Valley”, was completed and may be viewed at https://movingimage.nls. uk/film/5780. Have our accents changed that much?