Newbattle Abbey

Founded in 1140 as a Cistercian house and reckoned the most important medieval monastic site in the Lothians, Newbattle was secularised by 1587 and passed to the Kerr family, later Earls of Lothian, who built a mansion into it from about 1580. William Burn remodelled it in 1836 and David Bryce again between 1856 and 1866. In 1930 the eleventh Marquess handed the abbey and 125 acres to a foundation, and in 1937 it opened as Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland's residential adult education college, which it remains. The grounds carry eighteenth-century woodland and nineteenth-century formal gardens along the River South Esk, and guided tours are offered.