Yarrow, Scottish Borders
Scottish parish in Scottish Borders, Scotland, UK
Yarrow is a place and parish in the Scottish Borders area of Scotland and in the former county of Selkirkshire.The name "Yarrow" may derive from the Celtic word garw meaning "rough" or possibly share a derivation with the English name "Jarrow".
The parish mainly corresponds with the river valley of Yarrow Water from its source in the west at St. Mary's Loch until its passes into the parish of Selkirk between Yarrowford and Broadmeadows, just upstream from Foulshiels. It has an area of 48,851 acres.
It is bordered on the west and north by the parishes of Tweedsmuir, Peebles, Traquair and Innerleithen in Peeblesshire. On the east by Caddonfoot and Selkirk and on the south by Kirkhope and Ettrick in Selkirkshire.
St Mary's Loch is the principal loch of southern Scotland, being 3½ miles long and in some places thirty fathoms deep.
The parish includes the settlements of Yarrow Feus and Yarrowford, as well as Yarrow itself, which is the site of the Kirk, Manse and former school. The Kirk has a central location in the parish and is about 10 miles distant from the furthermost boundaries.
Yarrow parish now comes within the area of Ettrick and Yarrow Community Council
The ecclesiastical parish (Church of Scotland) is now Ettrick and Yarrow parish, which includes the parishes of Yarrow, Kirkhope and Ettrick, all of whose churches are still used for services
History of the parish
In the foundation charter of Selkirk Abbey, granted by King David in the twelfth century, the native name is translated as Garua in Latin, which in later documents mutated into Zarof, Yharrow and Yara, before assuming its present form of Yarrow.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Yarrow, Scottish Borders” as scottish parish in Scottish Borders, Scotland, UK. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23463599. VIAF identifies the subject as 127050348. Authority coordinates are 55.516, -3.156. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yarrow, Scottish Borders” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.