TWO local entrepreneurs have hailed the response they have received since reopening the only pub in the Scottish Borders village of Ettrickbridge.

Rory and Vicki Steel revived the 17th century Cross Keys Inn after locals feared it had closed for good, with the pub having lain empty for six months and showing no signs of reopening until the couple stepped in.

It represents a labour of love for the operators, who have a strong personal connection to the inn and invested “north of £400,000” to acquire the pub and bring it back to life.

Mr Steel, son of the former Liberal Democrat leader David Steel, told The Herald: “I grew up in the village of Ettrickbridge bang opposite the pub and it was a thriving hub of the community. Even though I was 18 and under in the whole time I lived there I was never out the place. Kids were made to feel very welcome, and we would get to play dominoes with the old guys. Like a lot of these village pubs, it was a thriving centre of village life.”

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In recent years the fortunes of the pub declined, but Mr Steele, who lives in the Borders again after spells away at university and working in London, said he and his wife were convinced it had the potential to thrive again.

Mr Steel said: “The place has been through many hands over the years and had been run down quite badly over the last five or six years to the point where it just was not a particularly welcoming place, a bit ramshackle, not a great menu. But there was always huge potential for it, we felt.

“There is a bit of heart ruling the head in terms of it being a passion project. I remember it very fondly from my childhood. With it being closed for six months as it was when we took it on, the village was just distraught. They could see nothing but a developer coming in and turning it into flats. They couldn’t see anybody coming in to make a go of it as a pub.

"It is well known how difficult it is in the hospitality industry at the moment. But we felt that knowing the village, knowing the valleys and the area very well, and knowing what the reputation of this place used to be, there was certainly a lot of potential of getting that back.”

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With the help of a grant from South of Scotland Enterprise, the duo acquired the freehold and carried out extensive refurbishments that began when they got the keys to the building on Christmas Eve.

Mr Steel said: “It took a sizeable investment to get it up to the standard that ultimately it needs to be to compete in what is a competitive staycation market now.

"People are desperate to come to Scotland. Tourism in Scotland is stacking up pretty well but often people are going straight through the Borders and up to the central belt and Highlands, so what can we do to get them to stop in the Borders. It is about upgrading the quality of our accommodation provision and services for the tourists that do here because they are coming here to explore the great outdoors, which the Borders has in abundance.”

The inn today offers a bar stocked with locally sourced beer and ales as well as large whisky and gin collections, and seven bedrooms ranging from doubles to a large family room. And the old pub games, from dominoes to darts, are back, alongside live music and quiz nights.

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Mrs Steel said: “The building itself has a really good soul and got the really good bones of a building.

“When we took it over, the walls were adorned with amazing black and white pictures, photographs that tell the story of the village probably for the last 250 years. Everybody that comes into the pub knows somebody in one of those pictures. When we took it over it was really important to us that we retained that character and that soul, so the pictures have gone back up. It is a still a familiar place for many of the locals because they have all been around for a very long time and have grown families here.

“We wanted to show them it was still the old Cross Keys but upgraded and taken back to what it was and how people remembered it. What was really important to us is that we did take the community with us on our journey of refurbishment, what we are doing with the menu and the bedrooms and things like that, because they become our best ambassadors really for the region.”

The Cross Keys is the third business operated by the Steels, who have owned the luxury Aikwood Tower wedding destination since 2010 and run Fringe by the Sea, an annual music, arts, comedy, literature, and food and drink festival that takes place in North Berwick in August. Mr Steel previously worked for Scotch whisky distiller William Grant & Sons and for 15 years ran the Steely Fox public relations company.

Asked how locals have responded to the reopening, Mr Steel said: “The locals are coming in on a regular basis. [We are] just trying to provide a meeting place for societies and groups – just providing an extra warm space for people to come [and] meet with their friends… being that hub for the community again.”

He added: “The response has been great we are hitting our numbers.”

Mrs Steel hopes the Cross Keys can benefit from a movement now under way to promote tourism across the south of Scotland, from Dumfries and Galloway to the Borders. Ms Steel has been actively involved in the South of Scotland Destination Alliance, which aims to pull the two regions together and “looking at that coast-to-coast strategy”.

She said it was only after the tourism representatives in the Borders began to talk to their counterparts in Dumfries & Galloway, that they realised “they have the same problem, because people don’t stop – they go straight from Carlisle up to Glasgow and then out to the islands”.