It is reputedly the oldest continually-inhabited settlement in Scotland. Certainly buildings, inhabited by the locals who provided for the needs of the soldiers when the Romans were there, and that the people who remained when the Romans went back south continued to live there, and that a population is recorded there from 650 AD onwards, until the present day. The stonemasons, architects and other tradesmen who built Melrose Abbey were lodged here. In 1905 it was the site of a discovery of a very rare Roman helmet.