From The Lothians by Ian Finlay 1960
p154
The Bathgate Hills, the highest point of which is The Knock, rather higher than Cairnpapple, shelter Bathgate from the nor’ easters. They also perform the service of concealing it from wanderers on those attractive heights. Bathgate is a prosperous town – of its size the most prosperous in Scotland, I have been told – but it is not a town which is easy to love at first sight. Nearly a century ago Thomas Gillespie wrote that it had scarcely a house with any pretension to architectural beauty, and the old town he described as ‘deplorably cramped and filthy.’ This last is not true anymore, but the sum of architectural beauty has not increased in ratio to the prosperity. It is one of those featureless places so numerous in the industrial ‘waist’ of Scotland to which the twentieth century seems to have added no amenities except the usual cinemas and garages and chip shops, but at least the Edinburgh – Glasgow trunkroad has now by-passed it and saved its streets from the added compression of the traffic of Scotland’s most soulless highway. The town’s earlier prosperity was founded on the weaving industry, and until a century ago the weavers’ wives would work at tambouring. The principal article manufactured evidently was something called pullicats. The came ‘Paraffin Young’ and the jingle of the shuttles passed, to be replaced by new sounds and smells. Coal and iron deposits in the surrounding country were rapidly developed, however, and today the iron foundries are the main manufactures both of Bathgate and of its neighbour, Armadale. The only link with the textile trades of the past is some production of hosiery.
I do not wish to imply that Bathgate is either Philistine or traditionless. For example, one retains an impression of massed schools, lofty and imposing, which leaves one a little amazed at the amount of education which seems to be available to the people of the town, and one of the schools at least, the Academy, is widely reputed. It is a classical structure wth colonnaded wings, which might be taken for the capitol of the community. The endowment came from one John Newlands, a Bathgate carpenter who made a fortune as a planter in Jamaica, but the will seems to have been disputed by the executors in Jamaica, reducing the money available to about one quarter of what it should have been. The Academy dates from 1833. The only building more ancient is the ruin of the parish church, east of the town. It contains a tomb-effigy of a priest in his vestments, worn, mutilated and quite featureless, but still dignified after seven centuries. The figure must have been carved and placed here just a few years before Robert the Bruce presented the lands of Bathgate to Walter Stewart as the dowry of his daughter Marjorie. In those days the curious name of the town was rather different: Bathket or Batket, or even Bathcat. This – if it should be necessary! – seems to go far to dispose of Milne’s quaint Gaelic derivation of the name as ‘windy cow-house!’
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Bathgate Old Times 