Crook Inn
The Crook Inn is more than 400 years old and is considered the oldest fully licensed pub in Scotland . It is located north of the small town of Tweedsmuir in the Tweed Valley in the Scottish Borders region , about 45 kilometers south of Edinburgh .
The inn was founded in 1604 and was then a stagecoach station on one of the main routes between Edinburgh and Moffat (today's road: A701), or between Scotland and England. During the Catholic Uprising in the late 17th century, the Crook Inn became a meeting place and hiding place for Presbyterians . In the inn's original kitchen with the original stone floor, the bar is now in the style of the early 17th century. Otherwise, the Crook Inn was modernized in the Art Deco style in 1936 .
Scottish poet Robert Burns visited the Crook Inn regularly and wrote his poem "Willie Wastles Wife" here . Sir Walter Scott and John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir , born a few kilometers away, were also inspired in their works by the landscape around Crook Inn .
In the 1890s it was a meeting place for workers who built a railway line for the new construction of the Loch Talla dam . The Edinburgh Water Authority had chosen the lake in the mountains near Tweedsmuir as the location for a new water reservoir to supply the citizens of Edinburgh. The material for the dam had to be brought to the end of the line with the help of a rope hoist . One of the funders of the rail project, John Best, was also a co-owner of the Crook Inn . Every Friday workers (many of them from Ireland ) flocked to the inn to spend their wages they had just received - allowing their employer to get most of his expenses back right away.
Web links
- Official website (English)
- History of Talla Railway (English)
Coordinates: 55 ° 31'25 " N , 3 ° 24'34.5" W.