Have just re-checked my notes - it was "The Carterhead" noted twice. The reference to Carter Bar put me off! I can find no reference to a Marriage House there. Gen in NBL England > I - and, I think, the original query - referred to "The Carterhead", not "The Carterbarn". While I cannot off-hand point to any single example, I just "know", from having read it in several different places, that what we call Carter Bar (NOT "Barn") was originally called The Carterhead. Its status as the head of a valley is most obvious from the English side; possibly less so from the Scottish side, though it does stand at the head of a (smaller) valley on that side also. Perhaps one of those valleys is or was known locally as the Carter Valley, but if so I have never heard of it; on the English side it is Redesdale, or a tributary of it, and on the Scottish side it is Jedforest, the valley of the Jed Water, or a tributary of it. I also take it as granted that the original "Bar" was not a place selling drinks, but a Toll Bar in the days when what is now the A68 was a turnpike road. > > There is another name, now long disused, which has also applied to the Carter Bar district, and that is "Redeswire", a Border Battle having been fought there several centuries ago. > > Geoff Nicholson