Gretna Green thousands of weddings. Today there are several wedding venues in and around Gretna Green, from former churches to purpose-built chapels. The services at all the venues are always performed over an iconic blacksmith's anvil. Gretna Green endures as one of the world's most popular wedding venues, and thousands of couples from around the world come to be married 'over the anvil' in Gretna Green. In common law, a "Gretna Green marriage" came to mean, in general, a marriage transacted in a jurisdiction that was not the residence of the parties being married, to avoid restrictions or procedures imposed by the
Alexander Colquhoun-Stirling-Murray-Dunlop legal points introduced important practical amendments of the laws, the most interesting, perhaps, being that which put a stop to Gretna Green marriages. Some of his measures bore on social improvement, one of them being an act to facilitate the erection of dwelling-houses for the working classes, and another an act to render reformatories and industrial schools more available for vagrant and destitute children, well known as Dunlop's Act. The most chivalrous of his parliamentary services was an attack (19 March 1861) on the government of Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, which he had usually supported, in connection with