Spottiswoode, a mansion in Westruther parish, Berwickshire, 5 ½ miles ENE of Lauder. It is partly an old edifice, renovated, altered, and worked into harmony with a fine Elizabethan structure of about the year 1834. A terrace 300 feet long runs round the building, whose central tower rises high above the surrounding trees. The Spottiswoodes of that ilk can be traced back to the latter half of the 13th century, and have included John Spottiswood (1510-85), the superintendent of Lothian in the early period of Presbyterianism; John Spottiswood (1565-1639), Archbishop of St Andrews, who crowned Charles I. at Holyrood, became Lord High Chancellor of Scotland, and wrote the well-known History of the Church of Scotland; Sir Robert Spottiswood (1596-1646), Lord President of the Court of Session and Secretary of State, who was beheaded at St Andrews; and John Spottiswood, the first law professor in Edinburgh University, and the author of several works on jurisprudence, who in 1700 repurchased the lands and barony of Spottiswoode, which his grandfather, the Archbishop, had sold to the Bells in 1620. The present proprietor, Alicia Ann Spottiswoode, who succeeded her mother in 1870, and who in 1836 married Lord John Douglas-Montagu-Scott (1809-60), youngest son of the third Duke of Buccleuch, holds 11, 412 acres in the shire, valued at £5426 per annum. She has composed the music of Annie Laurie and other popular songs.—Ord. Sur., sh. 25, 1865.

(F.H. Groome, Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1882-4); © 2004 Gazetteer for Scotland)