Pittencrieff Park

A Vow Fulfilled

At the west end of Bridge Street are the handsome gates of another of Dunfermline's Carnegie treasures-the 60 acres of lovely Pittencrieff Park. The gates, built by the Trust a few years ago, make a magnificently formal terminus for the steep street so that we step down through the heart of the busy town to this spacious circle of the gateway and in a few moments are walking amid the quiet of lawns and flowers. The story is told that when he was a boy Andrew Carnegie and his playmates were denied admittance to what was then the private park of Pittencrieff House. The young Andrew vowed that one day he would own that place. He did. It was in the nature of the man to fulfil the vows he made. Just like the promise he made to his mother. One day, he said, she would ride round the town in her own carriage; a boast of the child Andrew which the grown man Carnegie-although by then a man of such great wealth that a whole fleet of carriages could not symbolise it-put into effect, perhaps with humour but certainly with warm and affectionate pride, when he brought her back to Dunfermline and drove her through the streets as the mother of a millionaire. His vow to own Pittencrieff Park has resulted in the people of Dunfermline owning a gracious and lovely garden in the centre of their burgh. It is quite unexpectedly spacious and open. From its lawns we can look south across a vista of thirty uninterrupted miles, see across the Forth-with its mighty bridge hanging fragile as old lace-to Arthur's Seat, the Castle and spires of Edinburgh and the rolling Pentland Hills.

The "Stolen" Loom

The 17th-century mansion of Pittencrieff is now a museum. It was once the home of that Colonel Forbes who gave to a French post he had conquered the name of Fort Pitt. And later this Fort Pitt became the Pittsburgh in which so much of the Carnegie wealth was forged. In the museum we see a loom which is said to be the one set up in the abbey by James Blaikie, the Dunfermline weaver who spied out the secrets of the looms at Drumsheugh and brought them to his native town. If this is the loom, then it can be looked upon as the very root of the burgh around us, for it was from weaving-its famous damask-weaving-that the burgh nourished to wealth and prosperity. Among the museum's exhibits is a cast of the skull of Bruce-with four front teeth missing-a fragment of his coffin and a shred of the cloth of gold in which his corpse was wrapped. There are impressions of the royal seal of 1322, and the preaching notes-in a peculiar shorthand-of Ralph Erskine.

The Park's music pavilion is a modern imaginatively constructed building with a back-to-back stage which can be used for band performances or concerts to audiences sitting either in the open air or in the concert hall. Along the terraces peacocks parade, and on the bridge in Pittencrieff Glen wild birds flutter down to the outstretched hands of those who walk regularly there to feed them.

Another and older entrance to the park is in St Catherine's Wynd, opposite the west door of the Abbey. The path from this entrance crosses the burn by the double bridge in the heart of Pittencrieff Glen. Here, on a steep and rocky peninsula, formed by a bend in the stream, are the foundations of Malcolm's Tower. This is the tower from which the name of Dunfermline comes-"fort of the crooked linn". And it was to this Tower that there came the Saxon Princess who was to be the bride of Scotland's King. Here it is that Queen Margaret enters our story. And here indeed it might be said that the story of the Scotland we know really begins.

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