St Mary's Loch

St Mary’s Loch lies in the Scottish Borders, a long ribbon of water created by ancient ice. It stretches five kilometres along the A708 between Selkirk and Moffat, about seventy-two kilometres south of Edinburgh. The loch fills a hollow left by glaciers in the last ice age and reaches twenty-seven metres deep at its centre. Sheltered by steep hills, its surface often mirrors the sky so perfectly that swans and their shadows seem to float together. The Megget Water feeds the loch from the Megget Reservoir, and the outflow becomes the Yarrow Water heading east to Selkirk. Writers have long gathered here. James Hogg, the Border poet, drank at Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, an 18th-century coaching house still standing beside the bridge to Loch of the Lowes. A statue of Hogg stands where the inn once turned travellers inland, and Blackwood’s Magazine devoted seventy-one of its Noctes Ambrosianae to the inn and the loch. William Wordsworth also named the water in his poem “Yarrow Unvisited,” calling it St Mary’s Lake. Paths follow the shore for walkers on the Southern Upland Way and Sir Walter Scott Way. At the north-west corner a small hamlet called Cappercleuch overlooks the water. Sailing club premises sit at the southern end, where trout, pike, perch and eels glide beneath the surface. Nearby, the burial ground of the old St Mary’s church marks the spot where the loch got its name.