What happened
Isabella Shiel was born in Ettrick in 1783, worked on Borders sheep farms as a girl, and married a molecatcher called Robert Richardson in 1806. They moved to St Mary's Cottage at the south end of St Mary's Loch in 1823, on Lord Napier's land, and he died the year after. She took in travellers to support six children, which worked because the cottage stood on the old coach road from Selkirk to Moffat in one of the most beautiful places in southern Scotland. The inn that grew out of that served ale and food and kept thirteen guest bedrooms, and it was known by her name rather than her husband's: everybody called her Tibbie Shiel. She had worked on the farm of James Hogg's father and knew the poet all her life, and her verdict on him is the best thing anybody has written about a friend — "he wrote a deal of trash but was a sensible man". She died at the inn in 1878, aged 95. It kept her name for another hundred and thirty-nine years and closed to the public on 1 January 2017.
What is there now
A campsite with self-catering accommodation. OpenStreetMap, surveyed on 18 July 2026, records the building as a former pub and the campsite beside it as current.
Location recorded from OpenStreetMap node 686550220, Tibbie Shiels, tagged disused:amenity=pub and surveyed 18 July 2026 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/686550220).
Sources
- CAMRAcamra.org.uk
- Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- openstreetmap.org
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