The Borders

The Southern Knights trudged off the field at the Greenyards with the taste of defeat and the knowledge that this was the end, for the third time, of a professional side in the Borders. With the same old problems rearing their heads, Scotland’s rugby heartlands are once again staring into the unknown. 

Robert the Bruce’s victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 was supposed to bring an end to decades of Anglo-Scottish conflict, and yet for the next 300 years the borderlands between the Solway Firth and the River Tweed were ravaged by warfare. From Otterburn to Humbleton Hill to Yeavering, the constant invasion by the English and the scorched earth policy employed by Scottish leaders reduced the area to a wasteland. For the people of the Borders, farming was out of the question, and with a legitimacy to crossing the border established by the armies on both sides, plundering became a way of life out of necessity.

It was this context that gave birth to the notorious Border reivers in the early fourteenth century. Beginning as pragmatic raiding of livestock and crops for survival, reiving grew into a ruthless practice taken up by people from all walks of life, where raiding and marauding became the main business of life. 

Years of war meant that Borderers had little allegiance to their capitals, who had either perpetrated or failed to defend them from attack, and so reiving was carried out in the name of families or clans rather than of Scotland or England; the Armstrongs were the most dominant, but Bells, Grahams and Dacres were also among the “Devil’s Dozen”. It was an age of lawlessness and violence, and after the reivers way of life met its end with James VI of Scotland’s ascension to the throne of England, it left behind a breed of hardy, self-reliant people. Perfect qualities, one might say, for rugby. 

Almost at the same time that the last of the reivers were being eradicated, the first Ba’ games, a medieval form of mob football, were being played in the Borders at Duns and Jedburgh, where the Uppies and the Doonies still battle to get a leather ball to the top or the bottom of the town to this day. These kinds of pursuits were already in the blood of the Borderers when, in the 1870s, Yorkshire mill workers came north to learn about the thriving tweed trade, bringing with them the rugby football game. Langholm Rugby Football Club was the first Border club founded in 1871, and within a decade the neighbouring towns of Hawick, Gala, Kelso, Melrose and Duns had all set up clubs of their own, soon playing regular fixtures between one another.

The rugby culture that was growing in the Borders was immediately at odds with that of the major cities. While clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow were the preserve of old private school boys, the working-class Border towns encouraged anyone and everyone to pick up a rugby ball. The Scottish Rugby Union (the Scottish Football Union until 1924) was branded elitist in the south, and so instead the Borders advanced the game on their own terms. The first demonstration of that came in 1883, when a young Melrose butcher by the name of Ned Haigh sparked a phenomenon in the form of rugby sevens. 

But this was just the first example of Borderers blazing their own rugby trail; at a time when rugby union was staunchly amateur and competition was viewed as against the values of the game, in the Borders they saw things differently, which was why the establishment of a Border League in 1901 was simply a natural progression of the established rivalries between neighbouring towns. The Border League continues to run today and is the first and oldest of its kind in rugby union. 

Five of the Border clubs – Langholm, Hawick, Gala, Melrose and Jed-Forest – contested the first edition, before Selkirk and Kelso were added in 1908 and 1912. The league was an immediate success, the first title won by Hawick, who have gone on to be the dominant side in the Borders. They brought up a half-century of Border League titles in 2022 and claimed their 51st in 2024.

With this rich history, the Borders have long been a breeding ground for Scotland’s greatest. Producing Grand Slam winning captains and goliaths of the game, the likes of Jim Aitken and Jim Telfer are joined by so many others, including John Rutherford, Jim Renwick, John Jeffrey, Gary Armstrong, Craig Chalmers, Chris Paterson and Gregor Townsend. But not only that, rugby has evolved such a way of life in the Borders that it can quite confidently claim to be the heartlands of the sport in Scotland, where centuries-old rivalries born in the days of the reivers continue to be played out on the field. 

Rugby Journal has ventured north up the A68, over the desolate landscape of the Cheviots, past Jedburgh and St Boswells and arrived in the quaint town of Melrose, still in the early morning shadow of the Eildon Hills as we arrive on a bright August morning. We’re here to discover more about the story of Borders rugby at a club that has been one of its great pioneers, perennially punching above its weight. However, we are also here on the first day of the 2024/25 Scottish Premiership season, when Melrose welcome Heriots to their home of the Greenyards. It’s the start of yet another chapter in Borders’ rugby history following the scrapping of the semi-professional Super Series league and its Melrose-based franchise, the Southern Knights. The Knights had been the third attempt in just 22 years for professional rugby to take root in the Borders after the rise, fall, rise again and ultimate demise of the Border Reivers, but for a third time, that project has now come to an end (more of which later).

To understand how the Borders got to this point we have to look to the past, and when in Melrose, there is only one place you can start: rugby sevens.

The Melrose club was established in 1887 when a member of the neighbouring Gala club famously stole their posts, playing strips and the fixture book and moved them to Melrose to start a new club playing on the Greenyards – clearly, Border reiving wasn’t quite over. However, by 1883, the club was running out of money. 

“Two of the local butchers, Ned Haigh and Dave Sanderson came up with the idea of a competitive sports afternoon to raise money,” explains Melrose historian Ian Cooper. “There was tug of war, mile races, ball kicking competitions and all sorts of things. It was Ned Haigh who said, ‘If we’re inviting rugby clubs, we may as well play rugby, but we can’t do forty minutes each way’. That was where the sevens game started.” A seven-a-side, seven minutes each way (with a minute for half time) format was agreed upon. Melrose made it to the final of their inaugural tournament and faced Gala, their rivals up the road, for the title. At full time neither side had scored, so a second fifteen minutes was played to decide the result. Melrose scored after ten minutes, reportedly leaving the field without attempting the conversion and claimed the win. Whether or not that account is fully accurate, Melrose were the official winners of the world’s first ever sevens tournament.  “We won our first sevens, we won our third sevens, and we won the sevens again in 1889 to make a hat trick in the first ten years of the event,” continues Ian. “And then, we didn’t win it again until 1931.”

The first tournament was a great success, with spectators coming by the trainload from Hawick and Galashiels. “It wasn’t long before the sevens became the main event. Other clubs around us got onto the idea, and by the turn of the century, we had a regular end-of-season circuit in the Borders.”

Gala, Hawick, Jed-Forest and Langholm had all joined Melrose by 1908 in setting up their own tournaments, with Selkirk, Kelso, Peebles and Earlston later adding theirs, developing into a pre-season circuit. Berwick, the newest Border sevens tournament and the first in England, was founded in 1983. Today, these tournaments remain an integral part of the Borders rugby calendar, the ten most prestigious grouped into a league known as the ‘Kings of the 7s’, and the shortened version of the game has grown into a worldwide sport, now a fixture of the Olympics. 

But the story of Melrose is more than just sevens. When it comes to the Border League, Melrose are the second most successful side behind Hawick, albeit a way behind on twenty wins, but it’s an impressive haul for a town of just two and a half thousand people, about a quarter of the size of Hawick. They’ve also fared well in the Scottish Premiership era with ten titles, again second only to Hawick. “The 1950s and 60s was one of the strongest periods for Melrose,” says Ian. “Jim Telfer was a British Lion, and he was part of a Melrose side that had three other Scottish internationalists, one of them went on to be a Lion too in Frank Laidlaw. The Chisholm-Hastie partnership at scrum-half and stand-off was historic.”

David Chisholm and Alex Hastie played eleven seasons together at Melrose, the former scoring over a thousand points for the club in that time, and together they won the Border League and unofficial Scottish Championship (before it was sanctioned by the SRU) in 1962/63. However, the pair were most famous for putting together a run of ten consecutive games unbeaten when they first played together for Scotland.

Jim Telfer, a colossus of Melrose and Scottish rugby, captained the side for six seasons, but was also at the centre of things when Melrose rose to the summit again in the 1990s, this time as head coach. It was a golden side that contained stars of the past and the present, from veterans of the 1984 Scotland Grand Slam side in Keith Robertson, to the likes of Craig Chalmers, Bryan Redpath and Doddie Weir. After breaking through with a Premiership title in 1990 they began a simply unstoppable run, clinching the crown a further five times in the next seven years as well as five Border League titles. 1997 proved to be their zenith, with a Scottish Premiership and Cup double as well as the Melrose Sevens crown, their first in over twenty years. 

Along with the all-conquering Hawick side of the 1970s and 80s, who won ten of the first fourteen Scottish league titles, and the Gala team led by Peter Dods and Derek White, who halted the Hawick Green Machine in the early 1980s, the Melrose side under Jim Telfer sits among the greatest Border club sides ever formed. However, this team was perhaps the most significant, as it was also to be the last; in 1996, a new dawn was breaking as the sport turned professional and the Scottish Border Reivers were born.

Having decided that Scotland’s club sides would not have the players or resources to compete against the best in England and France, the SRU instead created four professional clubs based on the existing amateur district sides in Edinburgh, Glasgow, North and Midlands, and the South. Spearheaded by Melrose, a clutch of Scottish clubs attempted to fight against the plans, but the SRU won out, and Edinburgh, Glasgow, Caledonia Reds and Scottish Borders began life as part-time pro sides in 1996. 

It was the Borders side under Eric Paxton and Roy Laidlaw that played the very first European match involving a Scottish team on 12 October 1996, travelling to face Pau at the Stade Municipal du Hameau. The team had been picked ten days before, and even a strong side including the likes of Bryan Redpath and Craig Chalmers couldn’t prevent the Borders from an 85-28 thrashing. A gutsy performance against Llanelli four days later saw them pull off a 24-16 win in Hawick, but it was only a brief reprieve, with losses against Leicester Tigers and Leinster following.  

The next season, full-time professionalism finally kicked in. The side was re-branded as the Scottish Border Reivers, with a squad featuring players from all over the Borders: Tony Stanger from Hawick; Craig Chalmers from Melrose; Michael Dods from Gala; Adam Roxburgh from Kelso. For over a century, the Border clubs had battled tooth and nail against one another, but now they were to come together under one Borders club.

As Border rugby entered its new and unknown chapter, the man charged with leading the side as head coach was Melrose’s Rob Moffat. Now back at his home club as director of rugby, Rob had been Jim Telfer’s assistant at Melrose for three years in the early 1990s, moving into the head coach role in 1995 before joining the Reivers two years later.

Having grown up in Darnick, a small village with a population of 500-odd a mile outside of Melrose, Rob was well aware of the task that lay before him, not just in starting a team from scratch, but also in finding a way to unify the many strong Border identities behind one side. 

“It’s probably difficult to explain if you’re not from here,” says Rob, as we chat before the game. “When it comes to rugby, a good way to explain it is that the strength of the Borders can sometimes be its weakness.

“In the summer, from June to August, each town in the Borders has a week where they have their Common Riding and festivals. They are all about celebrating and protecting your boundaries, and that is the one time in the year that the towns really support each other. Rugby wise, we could probably learn from that and support each other better. It’s good to have rivalry, but sometimes it works against us. Whoever is the best team, the rest don’t like them. It’s pure jealousy, but that’s the way it is.”

The problems posed by parochialism have been brought into sharp focus following rugby’s professionalisation; the difficulties of getting the hard-nosed Welshmen of Ebbw Vale and Newport to both cheer for the Dragons, or uncompromising Yorkshire towns to unite behind a self-appointed saviour in Yorkshire Carnegie, have been laid bare. But in regard to the Borders, the case is even more extreme.

“When you look at the size of the Borders, and if you look at the number of rugby clubs in this area, in a population of maybe 100,000 you’ve got seven clubs playing in the top two divisions in Scotland,” says Rob. “Trying to unite them …” he pauses to laugh, “that’s pretty hard. 

“With the Reivers, it was even something silly like where we would play,” he continues. “When the team started, we played in different venues to try and please everybody, but that’s pretty hard for a pro team to keep moving around without a home. We trained at Gala, but people couldn’t understand why we trained there.”

A square peg in a round hole, naturally there were teething problems, but the first season brought signs of promise. “In the first year in Europe we had Pontypridd, Bath and Brive in the European pool – Bath and Brive went on to play in the final [Bath won 19-18]. It was a strong pool, we played one game at Gala, one game at Kelso, one game at Hawick, and we had big crowds, we’re talking five thousand, big for the Borders, and there was a bit of a buzz. But then, it was gone by the end of the season.”

With the SRU coffers in poor health, the Scottish Border Reivers were merged with Edinburgh – de facto disbanded – at the conclusion of the season, the Caledonia Reds suffering the same fate with Glasgow. “It was purely down to money,” says Rob. “[Then SRU director of rugby] Jim Telfer’s model was four districts but the financial model of the SRU couldn’t sustain that. That was not good for the Borders; they joined up with Edinburgh, and the Border people don’t like that. It was the death knell of the Reivers really.”

The Reivers would make a comeback in 2002, with former All Black coach Tony Gilbert in the hot seat and Border natives including Gregor Townsend, Doddie Weir and Gary Armstrong in the playing squad, but its promise more than outweighed the reality. A mid-table finish in the 2005/06 Celtic League was not enough to convince the union that the Borders deserved to stay, and so they were disbanded for the second time in 2007, this time merging with Glasgow. The Reivers project concluded in a drab fashion, with just 1,800 turning up to see them lose 24-16 at home to Ospreys. 

In hindsight, there has been acknowledgement that the decision had merits given the financial situation of the SRU at the time [£23 million in debt], and the success of Glasgow Warriors in the following years, claiming two league titles in 2015 and 2024, has further driven this point home. But there’s no escaping the fact that it left Border rugby as a dustbowl. Thriving club sides, such as the 90s Melrose team, had been torn apart as players left to take up professional contracts, and now that professional rugby was gone from the Borders, it all seemed in vain. 

Seventeen years on from the end of the Border Reivers, and there is still a black hole left by their disappearance. The gap between the club game and the pro game looms large in the Borders, leaving players a chasm to vault in order to have a chance of progressing into professional rugby, let alone into the national side.

It was this exact gap that the Southern Knights, the Super Series side based in Melrose, was designed to fill. Beginning in 2019 as the Super 6, the league was the flagship policy of former SRU chief executive Mark Dodson. Six franchise sides were set up to compete, and Melrose was chosen as the only team from the Borders to establish a franchise. As such, the vision for the Southern Knights was to have a squad combining Melrose players with others from clubs and towns across the Borders, in many ways a de facto third rebirth of the Border Reivers.

It was a story of highs and lows for the Southern Knights in their short existence. After covid disruption, the first full season in 2021/22 saw the Knights finish top of the championship table, but they lost 26-16 to the Ayrshire Bulls in the inaugural final. The season after, they dropped to a fifth-place championship finish with just two wins from ten, and came rock bottom in the Super Series Sprint (a shortened competition running later in the season) after finishing winless. Last season, fifth place in the championship and sixth in the Sprint brought things to a close. Their 47-24 loss to Boroughmuir Bears on the final day had the honour of bringing down the curtain on the Super Series project.

“In hindsight, we had the same problems as the Reivers had,” says Ian, picking up the story. “We couldn’t sell it to other Border clubs as part of the pathway, and it took individuals to come along and try what we had.

“The first season of the Super 6 was essentially the championship-winning Melrose side of the previous year [Melrose had won the Scottish Premiership title in 2018, defeating Ayr 16-13 in the Grand Final]. The following season, we were looking to draft in new players, and just didn’t get the support that we could have got from other border clubs.

“In the time that Super 6 ran, Hawick won the Scottish Championship twice, which seems really odd that we can win the club championship twice, but we can’t supply young men to take the next step with the Southern Knights. It was disappointing that they didn’t see the Southern Knights as the step up that Borderers needed.”

The failure of the Southern Knights to make an impact in the south was largely down to a competition that was incongruous with the reality of rugby in Scotland, more at home on a whiteboard in an SRU office than on the ground. However, it’s also evidence that if a pathway for players from the Borders to reach professional rugby is to work, there has to be a new solution. At Melrose, the last international to advance through their system was Kelly Brown, who made his debut two decades ago. While Hawick has continued to steadily produce talent, notably Stuart Hogg, Darcy Graham and Rory Sutherland, the story is not the same for the other Border clubs.

“Melrose, Gala, Kelso, Jed, we are all going back sort of fifteen to twenty years to our last internationalists,” says Rob. “There is talent, but for some reason it’s not coming through. It would be great if we had one or two internationalists, it would make a big difference to the kids if they could see a role model on TV. It’s not the be-all and end-all for us, but it needs to be an aim for us.”

The end of the Super Series came as part of plans for a new male player performance pathway in Scotland, including plans to reinstate Scotland A fixtures, a move to professional A team games and expanded academies. In charge of that process will be David Nucifora, the former high performance director at the IRFU, who has officially been appointed in an advisory capacity, but will reportedly be the de facto leader of their pathway development plans.

It is also all-change in the Scottish Premiership, with the league receiving a boost in standard with semi-professional players from the Super Series coming back to pull on their club shirts. It’s especially exciting for Melrose who, under the Super Series agreement, had their club side dropped to National One. Interestingly, today’s game against Heriot’s is their first in the division since they won the title in 2018.

Despite a depleted squad, Melrose put in a solid performance against one of the favourites for the league but fall to a 22-35 loss, just missing out on two late bonus points when Roly Brett’s interception is ruled offside. 

“It’s always nice to win your home games, but you’ve got to be realistic,” says head coach Scott Wight after the game, “Heriot’s are one of the Super Series teams moving down, they had close to ten players stepping down from the semi-professional environment, so we knew this was going to be one of the more difficult games.”

How does the end of the Southern Knights change things for the Borders and for Melrose? “Even if you look commercially at everything in the branding of the club, you know, it makes it a lot easier because now there’s only one team playing out of the club. So, from a commercial and a support point of view, it’s obviously much better: everybody can get behind, I dare say, the black and yellow again when it comes to Melrose. 

“What does it look like player wise? We’re hoping that the standard in the Premiership gets better, and then that can really become essentially a performance programme in Scotland.”

The future for the Borders remains uncertain, both short term and long term. This season alone the clubs have a fight on their hands to retain Premiership status, with three teams set to be relegated at the end of the season to take the league back to a ten-team set up. More concerning is finding a solution for the future. Professionalism in various forms has now failed in the Borders on three occasions, and while there are age-group internationals, academies and A teams, there is no replacement for playing the game day in, day out. But for now, the Borders can rest on the virtues they’ve always had, namely a natural-born passion for rugby. “I’m not being parochial here, I would say it’s the same in all the clubs in the Borders: there is still a strong identity and a strong feeling about playing for your town,” assures Rob. “We are still trying to be that same community club that we’ve always been.”

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Sarah Hewitt

This extract was taken from issue 27 of Rugby.
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