Located near the English border, 7 miles (11 km) southeast of Kelso, Yetholm is adjacent to Bowmont Water and in the old county of Roxburghshire. Town Yetholm is the younger of two parts of a village which also includes Kirk Yetholm. Scottish gypsies of the Faa family used the village as their headquarters as long ago as the 16th Century when the area was referred to as Little Egypt. The last queen of the gypsies, Esther Faa Blytte, died in 1883 and her son, crowned king in 1902, died a few years later.
A Yetholm native, Jean Gordon, was the real-life Meg Merrilies in Sir Walter Scott's novel Guy Mannering; Gordon died (c.1746) a day after surviving a Carlisle mob, angered by her Jacobite sympathies.
