The Houses · H-03
Fell House
Scottish Borders · Established 1981 · Limited public program
Fell House stands at the end of a farm track with fourteen acres of hill pasture behind it and a bindery in what used to be the dairy.
- Region
- Europe
- Residential places
- 18
- Residential periods
- Eighteen places. Residential periods of five to twelve days.
- Public gathering
- Open Table, quarterly. Write first; the track is impassable to low cars after rain.
- Arrival
- Nearest station is fifty minutes away by road. Collection can be arranged for the afternoon train.
- Access
- The ground floor and bindery are step-free. The bedrooms are upstairs; a ground-floor bed can be made up with notice.
- Correspondence
- Write to the steward at Fell House.
The house
The house was established in 1981 in a farmhouse that had stood empty for six years. Its founding predates the archival consolidation of 1982 to 1986, and most of its surviving public records were reconciled afterwards; the house's own account of its first five years therefore rests largely on the household books, which were kept by hand and were not part of the consolidation.
The bindery was set up in 1994 by a conservator who had retired to the village and disliked retirement. It repairs books for four regional library services and charges nothing, on the argument that a charge would require an invoice and an invoice would require an office.
Land restoration began as fence repair and grew, over twenty years, into a serious programme of scrub clearance and native planting run with the local trust.
The work
- Land restoration: hedge laying, scrub clearance, and a planting programme now in its nineteenth season.
- Book repair for regional library services, at no charge, at a rate of about three hundred volumes a year.
- Rural isolation support: a driving rota, a weekly telephone round, and a standing arrangement with the district nurses for households a long way from a bus.
Observance kept here
The boundary walk
The property boundary is walked in full at the start of each season, by whoever is in the house, in whatever weather is offered.
The shared forms, here
- The Repair Table
- Books and bindings, worked on the long table in the reading room during the winter reading period.
- The Boundary Walk
- The established walk: the property boundary in full, by whoever is in the house, in whatever weather is offered. The hill road and the culvert are inspected with it.
Kept in use
The kitchen bell
Timekeeping. It is rung for the meal, and at most houses to mark the end of the twelve minutes.
The white cups
Tea, at the table and at the bench. They recur in house photographs from the late seventies onward, which is an accident of ordering and not a design.
Local participation
- The boundary walk, weekly, in pairs.
- Opening the reading room on Saturday mornings.
- Separation
- Notice may be given to any steward or convener, including at a circle. It reaches the house book the same week.
- Succession
- When the reading-room key changes hands the outgoing holder sits one Saturday with the incoming one. This is the whole of the handover. The work is reassigned; the person is not replaced.
The steward
Iona Reid
Book conservator · steward since 2014
Trained in Edinburgh; twenty-two years with a university library before the bindery. Also drives the Tuesday round.
Records
Other houses
- Karst House — Upper Carniola
- Briar House — Albemarle County, Virginia
Entry H-03 · reviewed 9 January 2026