In this thesis I point to the continued existence in the Scottish Borders of a small number of traditional, great landowning families who exert an enormous amount of power and influence at the level of everyday life. I attempt to show how the basis of this power has changed over time. What started out as essentially military power became, with the Agricultural Revolution, economic power. At the same time, an increasingly political basis to this power was being developed and this was sustained, more or less, until the reorganisation of Scottish local government in 1974. After reorganisation, politics as a channel of influence became blocked and for a while it seemed as if the days when the lairds ran rural society were over, ending not so much with a bang as with a whimper. In the Borders this was not the case, for many lairds had already been busy investigating new ways to make their presence felt. This was achieved by enterprising lairds like the Duke of Buccleuch and the Duke of Roxburghe being prepared to open their stately/ancestral homes to the public; laying the foundations for the birth of a Scottish 'heritage industry' as they did so. The basis of power was thus transferred from the level of politics to that of ideology and it is with this transformation that I am essentially concerned.