Yetholm and the borderlands In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the itinerant and outlawed Scots Gypsy community established itself in the small villages of Kirk and Town Yetholm, nestled in the Cheviot Hills on the Scottish side of the border.* Yetholm later became the setting for the restoration of a long-lost Gypsy royal dynasty under the sovereignty of the age-old Faa family. This association with Yetholm did not come directly from the Faas but instead from the Youngs, another Gypsy family. Tradition states that Captain William Bennett of Grubbet, laird of Kirk Yetholm, a politician and soldier who took up a position in King William II and III’s army during the Nine Years’ War, was saved by a Gypsy named Young at the crucial siege of Namur in 1695. Early in the 19th century, Blackwood’s Magazine recorded this episode by stating
Tradition affords no intelligence respecting the time when the first Gypsey colony fixed their residence at KirkYetholm [...] The tribe ofYoungs are next to the Faas [or Falls] in honour and antiquity. They have preser ved the following tradition respecting their first settlement inYetholm [...] On returning to Scotland, the laird, out of gratitude to his faithful follower, settled him and his family (who had formerly been wandering tinkers and hecklemakers) in Kirk-Yetholm, and conferred upon them and the Faas a feu of their cottages for the space of nineteen times nineteen years [that is, 361 years or until 2056] – which they still hold from the Marquis of Tweeddale, the [then] present proprietor of the estate.