Newbattle Abbey

Newbattle Abbey stands in the valley of the South Esk, a Cistercian monastery founded in 1140 by monks sent from Melrose under the patronage of King David I and his son Henry. Its church was dedicated in 1234, and at its height the community held up to eighty monks and seventy lay-brothers, earning a reputation for the discipline of its members. The monks were also among the earliest coal workers in Scotland: in 1526 James V allowed them to build a harbour at Morrison’s Haven, and by the 1530s the abbot was coordinating mine drainage with Dunfermline Abbey. English forces burned the buildings in 1385 and again in 1544, and after the Reformation the commendator Mark Kerr held on to the lands, pensioning off the last monks. His descendants rose to become Earls, then Marquesses, of Lothian, who kept the estate until 1937. Over the centuries the abbey’s core was folded into a mansion reshaped in turn by John Mylne, William Burn and David Bryce, retaining a vaulted undercroft, a seventeenth-century library ceiling and octagonal sundials. George IV visited in 1822. In 1937 Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, gave the house away to serve as an adult education college, a role it still fills.