Miller's Knowes

Explorer Tom The Borders Distillery has put whisky back to work in a handsome former electrical works in Hawick, which is a rather good second career for a building built around energy. Old brick and steel meet copper stills here, and the town’s long habit of making things continues indoors. Come ready to look up as well as into your glass. The distillery began in 2018 after the old works was restored. Hawick made its name with textiles, and this building once housed the town’s Urban Electric Company. The old glass roof and a steel hoist structure survive within the new visitor setting. A place that once helped power the town now turns local barley and water into spirit; if the walls could choose a toast, they might ask for one to useful reinvention. The distillery says it buys barley from Borders farms within about thirty miles and draws water from beneath the building. Fermentation takes around three days before the wash reaches four copper stills. A tour explains these better than a label. The restored architecture is part of the visit, too: keep an eye on the glass above and the machinery that the former works would have recognised as fellow tradespeople. The operator offers bookable tours in Hawick and publishes current options on its own website. Check the tour calendar, age rules and opening before setting out, and arrange a safe journey home if you plan to taste. You can enjoy the building and the story without pretending whisky sprang from nowhere. Hawick has been making useful things for centuries; this is one of its newer arguments that the habit is alive and well.

Explorer Tom Borders Textile Towerhouse in Hawick has a splendid double life: a sixteenth-century tower built for a troubled border country now holds the story of knitwear and tweed. I can picture a Border Reiver peering through the door and demanding to know who filled the place with jumpers. Happily, the real displays tell the story with rather better manners. Live Borders runs this restored towerhouse at Tower Knowe. Its original barrel-vaulted room explores the building's own turbulent past, while clothes, objects and photographs trace more than two hundred years of local woollen work. Hawick's textile story is one of skill and change, reaching far beyond the town. Look at the work in front of you before imagining a machine did it all; someone had to choose the thread, the pattern and the finish. The museum also has changing exhibitions on fashion, art and craft. A room devoted to Scottish Borders watercolourist Tom Scott adds another way to see the region, while a shop carries textiles and local gifts. I would like to claim I could learn knitting in five minutes and leave with a masterpiece; the nearest honest outcome would be an oddly shaped scarf. A visit is better spent asking how people kept these trades alive across generations. Entry is free, with donations welcomed. The museum lists a lift to all floors and a ground-floor accessible toilet, but check its current notice and seasonal hours before setting off: it sometimes announces short closures. This is a real old building with a new purpose, and its strongest trick is making a simple length of cloth feel like a whole town's work.