The Swan and The Black Swan

About The Swan and The Black Swan

Above no. 42, is the fine stone frontage of a building with an engraving of a swan. This was the site of the hotel known both as “The Swan” and “The Black Swan”, where French officers who were prisoners of war were billeted during the Napoleonic War. The two shop fronts below are decorated in their doorways with Edwardian tiles by Duncan of Glasgow: with the initials of the Buttercup Dairy Company and then the butcher J.A. Waters, whose name is on the glass door and initials on the mosaic entrance floor to the second shop.
Further along you will pass the former offices of the Southern Reporter, Selkirk's weekly newspaper, which was first issued in 1855. Although the business outgrew this site, the stone engraving above the door remains a memorial to the paper’s founder George Lewis, who owned a grocers’ business in the town.
The building next door was the birthplace of the artist Tom Scott RSA (1854 – 1927) and is commemorated by the bronze bust high on the wall. Scott was the son of a local tailor who studied art in Edinburgh. He went on to become a water colourist whose paintings are much prized today. He is buried in his hometown at the Auld Kirk in Kirk Wynd.
Although long gone, the first factory in Selkirk stood in the High Street. Rodgers Inkle (linen tape) factory employed 28 people and one of their tasks was to take the linen to be bleached in the fields on sunny days. The work is still remembered because Selkirk has a street named Bleachfield Road.