Rediscovered book logs illicit weddings at Gretna Green

A marriage register detailing some of the most famous elopements to Gretna Green, the Scottish village synonymous with teenage runaways, has been rediscovered after nearly 150 years.

The 436-page book, kept by the innkeeper whose entrepreneurial spirit turned Gretna into a magnet for young lovers, records 1,134 marriages between 1825 and 1854. They include the notorious wedding on 8 March 1826 of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an impoverished widower, to Ellen Turner, a 16-year-old Cheshire heiress whom he had lured from her school. Such was the outrage over the union that Wakefield was arrested in France and the marriage annulled by Parliament.

The register, which has been in a private collection, is to be auctioned at Christie's in London next month. It is expected to fetch up to £3,000.

Experts believe it served as an unofficial copy of the main register kept by John Linton, the former valet who owned Gretna Hall, the house where marriages were conducted.

Among other elopements recorded in the book is that of Carlo Ferdinando Borbone, son of the King of Naples, who married Penelope Smyth for the third time in as many months.