After Walter Scott’s novel St Ronan’s Well came out in the 1820s, Innerleithen became a summer resort for well-off Edinburgh folk, and its mineral spring, once the Doo Well, is now St Ronan’s Wells, with a visitor centre in the old spa building. In the town, Robert Smail’s Printing Works, a letterpress printer founded in 1866 and now run by the National Trust for Scotland, still has its water wheel and Victorian presses, and you can try setting metal type by hand. Mountain bikers come for the forest trails, including four double-black downhill tracks. Just across the Tweed is Traquair House, whose brewery was revived in 1965, and Peebles is a few miles upriver.
