Dollar, Scotland

Dollar, a town in old Clackmannanshire, is beautifully situated, and contains several handsome stone villas occupied by families attracted to the town by its educational facilities. The academy, housed in a fine mass of buildings of the Grecian order (opened about 1819), was foundedby CaptainJohn McNab (1732-1802), a native who began life as a herd boy, and afterwards became a rich shipowner.

From the burn of Dollar, which runs through the ravine of Dollar Glen, the town drew its old water supply. On an isolated hill above the junction of the parent streams, named Sorrow and Care, stands the ruin of Castle Campbell, known also as Gloom Castle, an old stronghold of the Argyll family. The castle was burned by the Macleans in 1644, in the interest of the marquess of Montrose, and not again restored. Although a ruin it is carefully preserved.

The Rev. Dr James Aitken Wylie (1808-1890), the historian of Protestantism, was a minister in Dollar for several years. Patrick Gibson, the etcher and landscape-painter, was drawing-master at the academy from 1824 to 1829, and William Tennant, the author of Anster Fair, was a teacher of classics from 1819 till 1834, when he was appointed to the chair of Hebrew in St Andrews University. Harviestoun Castle, about midway between Dollar and Tillicoultry, once belonged to the Tait family, and here Archibald Campbell Tait, archbishop of Canterbury, spent some of his boyhood.

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