Elsdon : From The 18th Century To The Present

Bacchus Pub SignThe development of the village between the 18th century and the late 20th century has been analysed in great depth by Conzen (1969) and the following account draws extensively on that work.

The Rev. Dodgson, rector of Elsdon between 1762-65, provides a succinct description of the village as it appeared when he first arrived to take up his ministry (cited in Tomlinson 1888, 306-7):

Modern Elsden is a very small village consisting of a tower which the inhabitants call a castle, an inn for refreshment of the Scotch travellers, five little farmhouses and a few wretched cottages - about ten in all, inhabited by poor people who receive the parish allowance, and superannuated shepherds. These buildings, such as they are, may be conceived to stand at very unequal distances from one another, in the circumference of an imaginary oval, the longer axis of which coincides with the meridian line and is about 200 yards long; the shorter may be perhaps 100.  In the centre stands the church, which is very small, without either a tower or a spire.

The situation of the village is such that in descending a hill called Gallawlaw, from the south, it gives a person an idea of a few scattered cottages built in a boggy island, which is almost surrounded by three little brooks; on the north by Dunshiels Burn, on the east by Elsden Burn, and on the west and south by Whiskershield Burn..…..  There is not a town in the whole parish, except Elsden itself may be called one; the farm-houses, where the principal families live, are five or six miles distant from one another, and the whole country looks like a desert.

Hodgson, writing the 1820s, was scarcely more complementary:

Elsden is a small town consisting of a circular row of houses, of different degrees of architecture, from mediocrity downwards (1827, 86).

Nevertheless, the number of buildings around the green which date to the 18th and early 19th centuries - even, in the case of the Bacchus, exhibiting a the degree of architectural pretension, suggests a degree of local prosperity at this time. Several of these 18th - early 19th century buildings were inns, e.g. the Bird in the Bush, the Crown and the Bacchus (formerly the Scotch Inn), built in the early 18th century and extended in the late 18th or early 19th C.

The existence of inns of this kind underlines the importance of Elsdon's role as a local transport hub at this time and the trade brought to these inns by Scottish carters and drovers using the developing turnpike network and the cross-border droveways was probably one of the principal reasons for the apparent relative prosperity of the village economy during this period.