The Kelso pavement horseshoe and two origin stories, James II or Charles Edward Stuart

In the Scottish town of Kelso, not far from historic Roxburgh, where in 1460 James, King of Scots, was mortally wounded by a fragment of an exploding cannon, there is a curiosity of a particular kind: a large horseshoe set into the paving stones. It is held that on this very spot, on the approach to Roxburgh, James's horse cast a shoe, which might have been taken for an ill omen, since royal horses were, as a rule, well shod and did not lose their shoes. That day the monarch died.

I read about this in the Scottish Ordnance Survey Name Books, compiled in the nineteenth century, which contain onomastic information, cartographic descriptions, addresses and other particulars. In the Name Book of Roxburghshire of 1858 to 1860, besides the details of the horseshoe embedded in the cobbles, there is a note that on the spot where James II was killed the Duke of Roxburghe planted a holly (the prickly evergreen with red berries that is woven into Christmas wreaths). The same document carries an entertaining postscript to the effect that the story may be true.

Modern sources, by contrast, write almost everywhere that the horseshoe owes its origin to a fall from his horse suffered by Bonnie Prince Charlie, or the Young Pretender. These were the nicknames of the last of the Stuarts, Charles Edward, who led the rising against the English in Scotland and for a time styled himself King Charles III. That very conspirator against the Hanoverians who escaped to the Isle of Skye dressed as a woman. And so guidebooks, and even encyclopaedias, assert that the horse of Mr Charles Edward Louis Stuart stumbled on the very spot where the stone with the horseshoe now lies, as he fled the country. A great many legends have been spun about him, and the less one feels inclined to believe them. It is said, for instance, that he died of injuries after a fall from his horse, which ran onto an anthill in a wood. Mind you, this was the eighteenth century, and such a fact would surely have been recorded in the survey I have mentioned.

In short, I am inclined to credit the version connected with James II. All the more so since the most detailed and reliable description of the locality that we possess says nothing of any other. The second story plainly belongs to folklore alone.

It is a pity that the producers of tourist and local-history literature in Scotland take no interest in my opinion 😞