Cardrona is a village on the A72 and B7062, between

Peebles Peebles ( gd, Na Pùballan) is a town in the Scottish Borders, Scotland. It was historically a royal burgh and the county town of Peeblesshire. According to the 2011 census, the population was 8,376 and the estimated population in June 2018 wa ...

and

Innerleithen Innerleithen ( gd, Inbhir Leitheann) is a civil parish and a small town in the committee area of Tweeddale, in the Scottish Borders. It was formerly in the historic county of Peeblesshire or Tweeddale. Etymology The name "Innerleithen" comes ...

, in the

Scottish Borders The Scottish Borders ( sco, the Mairches, 'the Marches'; gd, Crìochan na h-Alba) is one of 32 council areas of Scotland. It borders the City of Edinburgh, Dumfries and Galloway, East Lothian, Midlothian, South Lanarkshire, West Lothi ...

area of

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

. Places nearby include

Glentress Glentress Forest is located near Peebles in the Scottish Borders, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh. Part of the Tweed Valley Forest Park along with Traquair Forest in Innerleithen, it is the home of a mountain biking centre which is one o ...

Kirkburn, Scottish Borders Kirkburn is a village on the B7062, close to Peebles and the River Tweed, in the Scottish Borders area of Scotland, at the edge of the Cardrona Forest. Other places in the vicinity are Glen Ho, Glentress, Horsburgh Castle, Innerleithen, Kail ...

, Kirkhouse,

Traquair Traquair ( gd, Cille Bhrìghde) is a small village and civil parishes in Scotland, civil parish in the Scottish Borders; Counties of Scotland, until 1975 it was in the county of Peeblesshire. The village is situated on the B709 road south of Inn ...

, and

Walkerburn Walkerburn ( gd, Allt an Fhùcadair) is a small village in the Scottish Borders area of Scotland, on the A72 about from Peebles and from Galashiels. It was founded in 1854 to house the workers for the tweed mills owned by the Ballantyne fami ...

History

In 1999 local farmer Tom Renwick spent £5m on the development of Cardrona, a small village to be created near the town of

. There was controversy towards the project because people felt that it would destroy the view of the

River Tweed The River Tweed, or Tweed Water ( gd, Abhainn Thuaidh, sco, Watter o Tweid, cy, Tuedd), is a river long that flows east across the Border region in Scotland and northern England. Tweed cloth derives its name from its association with the R ...

and the hills that surround it but the development of the village went ahead. Roughly 220 houses were built around the Cardrona area, and the last street was named "Renwick Lane" after its founder. A hotel now known as the MacDonald Hotel was built later on, along with a golf course. In the late 2000s Cardrona got a PlayPark built inside of the small patch of land near Govan's Way. In 2010 Cardrona got a Pump Track after winning a competition in the Scottish Borders. It was built in August 2010 and then got rebuilt in 2018, and shortly reopened in February 2018 after the Bikescapes team re-imagined the track after it had grown on itself over time. This was built in Cardrona mostly to supplement younger children's biking needs and to influence them to go biking at Glentress in the future.

Etymology

''Cardrona'' is etymologically a

Cumbric Cumbric was a variety of the Common Brittonic language spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the ''Hen Ogledd'' or "Old North" in what is now the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland and northern Lancashire in Northern England and the souther ...

place-name. The first element is cognate with Welsh ''caer'' 'fortification'. The second element is less clear but recent work suggests a word cognate with Welsh ''trwyn'', literally 'nose' but attested in Welsh and Cornish place-names in the sense 'promontory'. If so the name means something like 'fort of the promontories'.Bethany Fox, 'The P-Celtic Place-Names of North-East England and South-East Scotland', The Heroic Age, 10 (2007), http://www.heroicage.org/issues/10/fox.html (appendix at http://www.heroicage.org/issues/10/fox-appendix.html).

References

External links

RCAHMS record for Cardrona, Horsburgh ViaductSCRAN Image: Cardrona Viaduct, Cardrona, Peebles-shireCardrona Standing StonesGEOGRAPH image: Tweed Bridge, Cardrona
Villages in the Scottish Borders {{Borders-geo-stub

History

Etymology

See also

References

External links