When the great land holdings of
Abbotskerse were broken up after the Reformation the area we know today as Polmont,
Brightons, Redding and much of the Braes area came into the hands of the Earls, later the
Dukes of Hamilton. Indeed the present Duke and his predecessors have Lord Polmont as a
subsidiary title. The pasturage and mineral wealth of the area was exploited in the
Hamilton interest for nearly two centuries before the local residents were strong and
numerous enough to persuade the church authorities to separate them from Falkirk in 1724
and create a new parish of Polmont. At the time, and for decades thereafter, the village
was little more than a collection of cottages on the southern slope of the escarpment
which sweeps down to the carselands of the River Forth. Here a new church was built and
probably a school of some kind, close by the mills and smiddy which served the farmers of
the parish.
During the 19th century, long before the
bridges at Queensferry and Kincardine spanned the Forth, all traffic from east to west and
north passed along a road just to the south of Polmont village. The Laird of Whyteside who
was the feudal superior of the land agreed to allow building to take place along the line
of the road provided the new settlement was called Bennetstown-the family name! It soon
became the commercial heart of the village with small workshops, houses, schools, stores
and inns. A mile to the south, the settlement of Brightons had grown up around a famous
sandstone quarry which was in operation as early as the 17th century. From here stone was
carried by the Union canal to help build Edinburgh's new town in the 1830s and Falkirk's
fine new public buildings twenty years later. The canal encouraged the development of
industry and this was given further impetus by the arrival of the Edinburgh to Glasgow
railway in 1842. The halt near Brightons was given the name Polmont Station and slowly but
surely the original village, by then known as Old Poimont, Bennetstown, Brightons and
Polmont Station began to merge into one coherent settlement.
The wealth generated by industrial success
brought to Polmont the usual crop of fine mansion houses and elegant estates. There was
MilIfield built by John Millar, secretary of the North British Railway Company and later
the home of the Stein family whose fortune came from the manufacture of refractory bricks
for the expanding iron industry of the Falkirk district. And there were Polmont Park and
Polmont House, mansions dating back to the late 18th century, and Polmont Bank which
served as a nursing home and a hotel. All four were demolished to make way for the
post-war housing and commercial developments which have so changed the character of the
old village. Others like Parkhill the home of the Gray-Buchanan family survived though
today it lies empty if not quite abandoned!
The growth of the village was such that by
1844 the original church was too small, 'damp, ill arranged and most inadequate' according
to the Minister, and the present twin-spired building was erected in its place. The old
church, now a picturesque ruin covered in ivy, stands in the kirkyard which like that of
Larbert is a wonderful place to escape, for a little while, from the bustle of our modern
world and find the peace and quiet of the past centuries. What a pity that the ancient
graves of Falkirk Old Parish Church were cleared away in the 1960s as part of a misguided
attempt to tidy up the town centre! Many of the early stones that once recorded the names
of deceased parishioners now lie forgotten under the roadway to the crematorium. In loving
memory indeed!
What provision was made for education in the
early years of the new parish of Polmont is uncertain but by 1789 a building was provided
by the heritors along with a new master, Thomas Girdwood, who remained in post for well
over half a century and served as clerk to the heritors for an incredible sixty-two years!
Towards the end of his time, in the 1850s, a new school was erected at a cost of £365 but
by that time there were several other establishments offering education of one kind or
another. The community centre on the main street was originally a school for ladies,
financed by the proprietors of Polmont Park, and there were other girls' schools at
Ivybank, and in the Back Row where Miss McPherson taught sewing! Perhaps the most famous
educational establishment in the parish was Blairlodge Academy opened in 1843 by Robert
Cunningham, a Church of Scotland minister, who also played a significant part in the Free
Church breakaway in Polmont in the same year. The new school was for boy boarders and
flourished under an innovative and dynamic headmaster J Cooke-Gray who took over in 1874.
Modelled on the English public school system it attracted the sons of some of Scotland's
wealthiest families, and inevitably, cricket and rugby were the principal sporting
activities of the three hundred pupils. But there was an admirable practical strain to the
curriculum and an emphasis on science which was unusual for the period. At the turn of the
century Blairlodge was the largest school of its kind in Scotland and was the first to use
electric lighting on such a large scale - it had nearly nine hundred bulbs at the same
time as the people of Falkirk were being shown electric light as a novelty in a church
bazaar! The pupils who left Blairlodge entered the privileged world of the Colonial
Service, Oxford or Cambridge or into the upper echelons of the commercial world. After the
death of Cooke-Gray in 1902 the school experienced financial difficulties and when it was
forced to close in 1908 by an outbreak of an infectious disease, possibly measles, it
never reopened. The buildings were purchased by the Prison Commissioners in 1911 and
shortly afterwards opened as Scotland's first Borstal. It is now of course Polmont Young
Offenders Institution.
Polmont today is a dormitory village with
many new houses standing in what were once the grounds of the lost mansions. The people
travel to the petrochemical complex at Grangemouth or commute daily to Glasgow and
Edinburgh to work, and village life and community spirit is difficult to generate and
sustain. But then Polmont is no different in this regard than many other parts of a
district much changed by the demands of a very different and sometimes difficult world
where a job across the road from home is now very rare and a job for life almost
non-existent. |
