Newstead, a village in Melrose parish, Roxburghshire, on the right bank of the Tweed, 1 mile E of Melrose town, under which it has a post office. It is thought by some antiquaries to occupy the site of the Roman town Trimontium, which Skene, however, places on Brunswark Hill; and it probably owes its present name to the erection, in its vicinity, of an ancient ecclesiastical edifice, intermediate in date and character between the Columban monastery of Old Melrose and the Cistercian Abbey of Melrose. Roman coins, a Roman altar, a stone slab with a boar in relief (the badge of the Tenth Legion), and other Roman relics have been found adjacent to it; some ancient substructions, with marks which might relegate them to the Roman times, have been discovered in its neighbourhood; and a series of ancient pits, one of them containing a Roman spear and some pieces of Roman pottery, was laid open in 1846 at the forming of an adjacent reach of the Waverley section of the North British railway. A field, called the Red Abbey Stead, was found, not many years ago, to contain hewn blocks of red sandstone; and is supposed to have been the site of the ancient ecclesiastical edifice. The viaduct of the Berwickshire railway, which crosses the Tweed ¾ mile ENE of Newstead, was erected in 1866, and. rising 133 feet above the water-level, is a most imposing structure. -Pop. of village (1831) 230, (1871) 315, (1881) 301.—Ord. Sur., sh. 25, 1865.
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