From Twixt Forth and Clyde
by A.G.Williamson 1942
p163
For the last mile-and- a-half or so the train curved into Bathgate, and just where we joined the line from Motherwell I had a fine view of the town. It sat on the side of a hill, like the one at Corstorphine, a jumbled collection of black and red roof-tops and grey spires, dominated by a long, rambling, grey building with a clock tower in the centre, which, I learned later, was the Academy. On the right there were a couple of big, three-storey buildings, obviously schools, and in the centre of the town a dull-red bell tower crowned by a little bright-green helmet – St. David’s Church in George Street… the obliging porter relieved me of my ticket, and I left the platform. I went out, walked up the carriage-way to the street, and turned to the right into what appeared to be the main square of the town, an open space dotted with trees known as George Place. I soon found my bearings. I had come to see the home of the Stewarts before they ascended the throne of Scotland.
Drawn up in front of a baker’s shop in the Square was a haycart filled to the top with yellow hay, drawn by an old horse and driven by a little thin man with a face the colour of copper and a beard a yard long. I stood up to watch him; and he, incidentally, turned round on his seat to watch me, looking me up and down, and down and up again as no man or woman has ever looked at me since the day my maths teacher told me I was ‘hopeless’. Just as I was beginning to feel a trifle uncomfortable he came to life. The cause of the change was the appearance in the door of the baker’s shop of another copper-faced man, a regular Falstaff with side whiskers, carrying in his arms a dozen loaves topped by a number of white pokes filled with biscuits and buns. There was no doubt but that he was a farmer. The thin copper-faced man took the loaves and pokes from the fat copper-faced man, placed them tenderly in the straw, and gathering up the reins drove down the street to a butcher’s shop, into which the fat man disappeared, all the time mopping his row with a red handkerchief. I walked on.
To get out to what had been Bathgate Castle I left the Square by the main Edinburgh road, which runs parallel to the railway behind a running shed. It was not inappropriately named King Street; but after two or three minutes quick walking it changed to Stuart Crescent, [Terrace]where there was a new housing scheme consisting of those grey rough-cast, monotonously alike, two-storey houses you can find almost any where in the Black Country. About half-a-mile along this road I came to the first of the big buildings I had seen from the train. It was the Lindsay High School. The second was St. Mary’s Secondary School; and between them, but on the other side of the road, was a bridge [Rennie’s Brig] over the railway line.
I crossed this bridge to find that it led into a field. On my right where ‘three stunted fir trees’ used to mark the site of the Castle in the morass belonging to Walter Stewart, the High Steward of Scotland who married the Princess Marjorie Bruce, was a golf course. The mound used as a bunker is, I believe, the exact site of the Castle.
The three stunted fir trees have disappeared, although it is still possible to trace the outline of what may have been the road leading up to the Castle, the fosse, or one of the Castle walls. It is in another unromantic site…
Walter Stewart, at the early age of twenty-one, was in command of the left division [with James Douglas] of the Scottish army at the Battle of Bannockburn. He was a grandson of that Alexander Stewart who was killed at Largs and was a descendant of Alan [Fitzalan] Steward of Dol in Brittany, the leader of the first Crusade in 1097.He had been knighted by King Robert the Bruce on the morning of the battle, for services rendered worthy of his ancestry, and in the following year he married the Princess Marjorie Bruce, receiving as a wedding present the Castle in the morass at Bathgate. He had his principal seat at Renfrew, given to his ancestor, the first High Steward, by King David the First; but Bathgate remained his favourite residence, and it was here he died in 1328 at the age of thirty-five.
On a windy morning late in the month of February 1316, the Princess Marjorie left Bathgate for Renfrew to await the birth of her son. On the morning of 2nd March, she came in sight of Renfrew, but while crossing the ford there her horse stumbled and she broke her neck. Her son, afterwards King Robert the Second, was thus born of a mother who was already dead.
After the death of his wife Walter withdrew with his infant son to the Castle on the morass at Bathgate. Nothing mattered now but the winning for the motherless babe a recognition of his claim to the crown of Scotland; for his uncle, David II, was still unborn, and after the great Bruce, he was the nearest heir. Ten years passed, and then, in 1326, a great company of earls, barons and clergy met at Cambuskenneth Abbey, and in the presence of old King Robert and his son-in-law, the High Steward, swore fealty to the infant Prince David and the ten-year-old Robert Stewart. Walter died in 1328 and Bruce the following year. David reigned forty-two years of which eleven were spent in captivity. When he died Robert ascended the throne as Robert the Second.
And what manner of man was the second King Robert? And what manner of king was he? To begin with, he was known as King Bleary from a peculiar inflammation of the eyes due, it is believed, to the tragic circumstances of his birth. This caused him to spend a good deal of time in retirement. He was twice married. His first wife was a commoner – Miss Elizabeth Mure, a daughter of Sir Adam Mure of Rowallan, near Kilmarnock; while his second was Lady Euphemia, daughter of the Earl of Ross. They bore him fifteen children He reigned eleven years. Robert died in the old square castle of Dundonald, near Troon, where he met his first wife, in 1390.
Although the morass on which Bathgate Castle stood no longer exists it may be gathered that it was of considerable extent from the survival of such place-names as Boghall, the Bog Burn, Boghead House, Little Boghead, Inchcross, Mosside Farm, Easter Inch, and South Inch.
Because of its connection with the royal family, the town of Bathgate and the lands lying around it anciently formed a sheriffdom in themselves, a distinction enjoyed by few towns of its size in Scotland. The Bathgate sheriffdom was afterwards attached to the Sheriffdom of Linlithgow or West Lothian under the hereditary jurisdiction of the Hopes of Hopetoun, the ancestors of the Earls of Hopetoun and the Marquis of Linlithgow; and, when this was abolished after the ’45 Earl John claimed £2000 for the Sheriffdom of Bathgate.
Bathgate Castle and Bathgate Church stood within sight of each other on the right-hand side of the road to Edinburgh. The Castle has disappeared, but when I walked along the road to the church I found that what remained of it was as good as ever. It was repaired and the churchyard wall was restored by public subscription in 1846.
In his book, The Martyr Graves of Scotland, the Rev. J. H. Thomson tells us that when he came here to see the grave of Jamie Davie, the Covenanter, he ‘got the keys from an old man of eighty, who lived hard by in a house that looks as if it had been the manse.’
The old church, long, narrow, and roofless with the top of its uneven gables moulded with plaster, stood in the centre surrounded by grey tombstones. There were uprights, slabs, and table stones, and underneath the little pointed window on the north wall the recumbent figure of a young lady wearing what may have been a nun’s wimple. There was also a flat stone bearing what appeared to be a rough representation of a spade marking te grave of a working man. Davie’s grave was at te top of the slope near the south-west corner. He was shot at Blackdub Farm.
The boy-king, Malcolm IV, granted to the monks of Holyrood the Church of Bathgate and a portion of land. It was subsequently transferred by the Abbot to the monks of Newbattle, and this was confirmed by Bishop Landels in 1327, the year before the death of Walter Stewart.
Bathgate Old Times 