Peebles

Peebles offers a genuinely wide spread of places to stay for a town of its size, from country-house hotels set in their own grounds to a boutique conversion in the town centre and simple, well-run inns above a bar. At the top end, Cringletie House and Peebles Hydro represent two very different versions of Borders luxury: the former an intimate 15-room estate with acclaimed dining and walled gardens just outside town, the latter a large Victorian hydropathic hotel with a pool, spa and 132 rooms built for a whole extended family to spread out in. A few miles north at Eddleston, Barony Castle adds a third upmarket option, its 16th-century core wrapped in a modern leisure spa and 82 bedrooms set in 25 acres of woodland.

In the middle of the market, the Tontine and The Park sit right in the town centre and are built around walkable convenience as much as facilities. The Tontine has occupied its spot on the High Street since 1808 and pairs Tweed views with straightforward, comfortable rooms, while The Park has reinvented a former mill building as a quirky boutique stay with its own restaurant and bar, popular with couples on a weekend away. Both put every shop, café and pub in Peebles within a few minutes' walk, which matters in a town where a car isn't strictly necessary once you've arrived.

For a simpler, more personal stay, Peebles and its immediate surroundings have a handful of long-standing inns and a countryside B&B worth seeking out. The Cross Keys, dating to 1693, keeps rooms above a working town-centre pub, while the Traquair Arms in nearby Innerleithen does much the same a few miles down the valley, with the bonus of six self-catering cottages for longer stays. Glenternie House, a Victorian mansion in a hidden valley four miles out, offers a quieter, more traditional bed-and-breakfast experience with home-cooked dinners available on request. Between these eight properties, most budgets and most reasons for visiting Peebles, whether biking, fishing, a wedding, or simply a change of scene, are well catered for.

Peebles rewards a slow visit, and these are the places most worth making time for.

• Glentress Forest the flagship 7stanes mountain biking centre, with graded trails for beginners through to experts, a bike hire shop and a well-regarded cafe at the trailhead.
• Neidpath Castle a medieval L-plan tower house perched dramatically above a gorge on the Tweed, a mile or so west of the town along the river path.
• Tweeddale Museum and Gallery housed in the old Chambers Institution on the High Street, with changing exhibitions and a permanent collection tracing the area's history.
• Dawyck Botanic Garden part of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, around eight miles from town, known for its towering conifers, spring snowdrops and autumn colour.
• Kailzie Gardens a walled garden and woodland estate just outside Peebles with a duck pond, osprey webcam and a popular tearoom.
• John Buchan Story a small museum dedicated to the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, who grew up in Peebles and set much of his fiction in the surrounding hills.
• The Great Polish Map of Scotland a huge concrete terrain relief model in the grounds of Barony Castle at Eddleston, built by a Polish exile in the 1970s and recently restored.
• Tweed Valley Railway Path a former railway line converted to a walking and cycling route, following the river towards Innerleithen and beyond.

Peebles punches well above its weight for food, with the Sutherland Restaurant at Cringletie holding AA Rosettes and several High Street restaurants built around game, Tweed salmon and Borders beef and lamb. The town has a longstanding baking tradition, look out for Border tart, a spiced dried-fruit pastry sold in bakeries across the Borders, and a regular farmers' market that brings together local cheese, meat and preserve producers. Several pubs, including the Cross Keys, serve solid seasonal menus alongside cask ales, and the 1881 Gin distillery, based just outside town, runs tastings and tours for visitors keen to try a Borders-made spirit. Coffee shops along the High Street and by the Tweed make good stopping points after a walk or ride, and the market adds an extra reason to time a visit for a weekend morning.

Camping around Peebles trades heavily on the town's position at the edge of Glentress Forest and along the banks of the Tweed, and the three sites here reflect that in different ways. Closest to the action for mountain bikers, Glentress Forest Lodges sits at the foot of the trail network itself, with grass and hardstanding pitches, bell tents and heated wooden pods aimed squarely at riders who want to be on the singletrack within minutes of waking up. It's a working, no-frills setup rather than a resort, with shared shower blocks and a communal kitchen, but the location is hard to beat for anyone visiting specifically for the 7stanes trails.

Closer to the town centre, Rosetta Holiday Park is a short walk from the High Street and offers over a hundred touring pitches for tents, caravans and motorhomes with electric hook-up, set beneath the Venlaw Hills. It suits visitors who want the convenience of walking into Peebles for dinner or shopping without giving up the option of a proper pitch with hook-up and hot showers, and its scale means it rarely feels crowded even in peak season. A little further afield, Tweedside Caravan Park in Innerleithen offers a smaller, family-run riverside alternative six miles down the valley, with touring and camping pitches, pods and static hire alongside its own seasonal pub, making it a good base for those splitting time between Peebles, Traquair House and the lower Tweed Valley.

All three sites are within easy striking distance of Peebles itself, and none require anything more than a short drive, or in Rosetta's case a walk, to reach the town's shops, restaurants and river paths. Between them they cover most camping preferences, from bike-focused simplicity to a fuller-facility touring park and a quieter riverside pitch, so the choice largely comes down to whether the priority is trail access, town-centre convenience, or a slower pace a few miles out.