"During service on a Sunday in 1771 a panic was caused by the fall of a fragment of cement, and the church was thereafter abandoned. The ruins were partly disencumbered by the Duke of Roxburgh, 1805-16, and in 1823 the buildings were repaired by the noblemen and gentlemen of the county."[419] Referring to the modern town, Dr. Cosmo Innes says:-- "Reposing on the sunny bank of its own beautiful river, the modern town of Kelso looks a fitting rural capital for 'pleasant Teviotdale.' It has little of the air of an old monastic burgh, and still less calls up any recollection of the heaps of ruins that impeded the plans of the English engineers. There is not much knowledge or tradition of its former state, and but few memorials of its old inhabitants. Last year (1845) a worthy burgher, who had dug up in his garden under the abbey walls what seemed to him a rare coin of a Scotch king, was scarcely well pleased to learn that it was a leaden _bulla_ of Pope Alexander III., bronzed with the oxidising of seven centuries. In the midst of the modern town the abbey church stands alone, like some antique Titan predominating over the dwarfs of a later world."[420] Considering all the dangers and neglect of the centuries, it is astonishing that so many of the ruins still exist. The building has consisted of choir or chancel of considerable length, with north and south aisles, and of a transept and nave without aisles. The north and south divisions of the transept and nave form three arms of equal length round the three sides of the crossing, above which rises the massive square tower.[421] The church was originally constructed in the late Norman style of about the end of the twelfth century, passing into the transition style--the upper part of the tower having been rebuilt at a later period.[422] Of the chancel only a fragment remains--two of the south main piers with arches and two stories of arcades above, which represent the triforium and clerestory. The chancel only had aisles.