Coldingham

Coldingham High Street

Coldingham lies just under a mile inland from the North Sea coast of Scotland, and just seven miles from the English Border. It sits astride the A1107 which provides a more scenic alternative to the A1 for visitors driving up through the Borders via Eyemouth.

The Anchor Inn The Mercat Cross The New Inn Old Bakery Studio

This picture postcard village has an unusually ancient history, and one that is unusually closely tied with England. This even extends to its very English-sounding name. Some have suggested that this comes from the Old English for "village of the people of Colud", presumably a reference to an early laird.

Coldingham Priory

Public Hall

War Memorial

St Vedas Hotel

An alternative view that Coldingham was actually referred to on Ptolemy's Roman map of Britain as Colania has found a following, but overlooks the distance that settlement is marked as being from the sea: alternative views that Colania became Lanark or Crawford seem more likely.

Coldingham was established at a very early date, however. A monastery was founded here in around 635, open to both monks and nuns. A few years later a Northumbrian Princess called Ebba was shipwrecked on the nearby headland now known as St Abbs. She became a nun in Coldingham and later became abbess, and still later a saint, St Ebba. In 679 a lightning strike led to a fire which largely destroyed the monastery. At the time some held this to be divine retribution for what was, perhaps euphemistically, called "disorderly behaviour" among the monks and nuns. Whatever the truth of this, the monastery was soon rebuilt.

Coldingham's story closely reflected that of the monastery here, and the priory that followed it, probably on the same site, from 1098. Th settlement was effectively wiped out in 870 by Danish raiders, but grew alongside the priory from the 1100s until the Reformation in 1560. This was despite attacks by invading English armies in 1216, 1537 and 1547, and the fire raised at the priory by its own prior, William Drax, in 1430. This was, allegedly, an attempt by him to conceal his theft of a large amount of money being carried by a messenger from the Scottish King to the English King.

Even the Reformation in 1560 and the Union of the Crowns of Scotland in 1603 did not end the priory's role as an attractor of trouble for the village. In 1650, troops opposing Cromwell were positioned in the priory to block his advance into Scotland. After a two day siege by Cromwell's artillery the village and its priory were badly in need of rebuilding. One result is the local saying that there isn't an old building in the village that doesn't contain stone removed from the ruins of the priory.

The Beach at Coldingham Bay