What happened
The Crook stands alone on the Edinburgh road where it crosses the upper Tweed, and it is usually introduced as one of Scotland’s oldest inns, licensed in 1604. Nothing has been produced for that date; Wikipedia carries it unsourced, and CAMRA describes the building as an early nineteenth-century coaching inn that claims 1580. What the Crook really has is a different kind of age. It was refurbished in 1936 in the Art Deco of the moment and kept almost all of it: Willie Wastle’s Bar still has its lapped wood door and counter, its gantry of shelves and a stone fireplace with a circular hearth under a copper hood, and the lavatories keep their period mirrors, plumbing and vitreous wall panels. CAMRA lists the interior at one star, of special national historic interest, and the building is category C listed. Burns is said to have written Willie Wastle’s Wife here, which is where the bar’s name comes from and which is also unsourced. It stopped trading in 2006. In 2013, after a proposal to turn it into housing met local resistance, the Tweedsmuir Community Company bought the freehold for £160,000.
What is there now
Owned by the village and still shut. The Tweedsmuir Community Company holds the freehold; the Wee Crook, a café in one outbuilding, opens seasonally and serves no alcohol, and levelling-up money has turned another into a bunkhouse. The hotel itself goes on deteriorating on the Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland while the money for it is sought, and a 1936 interior of national importance is what is waiting.
Sources
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