Town in Lanarkshire, Scotland

Lanark

William Wallace is said to have lit the fuse of Scotland's rebellion here, and every June the town still marks its boundaries with a procession and a crowned schoolgirl.

Key information

County: Lanarkshire
Nation: Scotland
Known for: Lanimers Day, the Wallace statue, and the nearby World Heritage mills of New Lanark
What locals are called: Lanarkians
Famous people: William Wallace (by tradition), Robert Owen, David Dale

About Lanark

The town that walks its own boundaries

Every June, Lanark marks the edges of itself. Lanimers Day is a procession with a long history, and the name points to the burgh's land marches, its boundaries, which were inspected each year to make sure nobody had quietly shifted them. The boundary walk, the Perambulation of the Marches, is led by the Lord Cornet. Alongside it comes a full-blown festival. Decorated floats, pipe bands and marching schoolchildren pass through the streets, and on the Thursday Lanimers Day celebrations a local schoolgirl is crowned Lanimer Queen. Families plan their year around it, and people who have moved away come home for the week. It is one of the clearest signs that Lanark is a royal burgh, a status dating back to the twelfth century and the reign of David I. Burghs like this guarded their rights jealously, and in Lanark that habit turned into a party.

Where Wallace is said to have struck first

Lanark has a starring role in the legend of William Wallace. Tradition says that in 1297 he killed the English sheriff, William Heselrig, here, an act often seen as the spark of his rising against Edward I's rule. Tradition also places Wallace's wife, Marion Braidfute, in the town. Whatever the exact details, Lanark has never let go of the story. A statue of Wallace, sculpted by Robert Forrest in 1817, was installed on the front of St Nicholas' Church in 1822, looking down on the High Street. The town's role in the national story goes beyond Wallace. From the 1600s Lanark was a keeper of Scotland's standard weights and measures, so merchants had a trustworthy yardstick for a fair deal.

The mills in the gorge

Just below the town, in the gorge of the River Clyde, is New Lanark. In 1785 David Dale and Richard Arkwright founded cotton mills here, powered by the river as it tumbles through the Falls of Clyde. The first mill began production in 1786. The village's real fame comes from Robert Owen, Dale's son-in-law, who ran the mills from 1800. He gave the workers decent housing, set up a shop selling goods at fair prices, and in 1816 opened the Institute for the Formation of Character, with an infant school that was among the first of its kind in Britain. Visitors came from across Europe to see how a mill could treat its people. The mills stopped spinning in 1968, but the buildings were saved and restored, and New Lanark was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. The nearby Falls of Clyde, including the thundering Corra Linn, are a Scottish Wildlife Trust reserve, and peregrine falcons once nested in the gorge.

A silver bell and a very old race

Lanark has long been linked to horse racing through the Lanark Silver Bell, a trophy said to be one of the oldest sporting prizes in Britain and traditionally tied to William the Lion in the twelfth century. The town's racecourse on Lanark Moor was once a major local occasion, with the Silver Bell as its centrepiece. The old course is gone, but the bell remains part of the town's lore. The surviving bell itself is generally dated to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, even if tradition reaches back much further. Sport in Lanark today is mostly a local affair, with clubs for rugby, golf and curling, and a loch on the edge of town that draws walkers and anglers.

Cheese, bridges and a famous novel

The Clyde Valley around Lanark is fruit and farming country, and it gives its name to Lanark Blue, a sheep's milk blue cheese that is a favourite on Scottish cheeseboards. Nearby, Thomas Telford's Cartland Bridge, finished in 1822, carries the road high over a wooded ravine, about 40 metres above the water. It is a good reminder that this was a major route long before motorways. The town also gave its name to one of Scotland's strangest novels. Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books, published in 1981, is a mix of grim realism and surreal fantasy that is now regarded as a modern classic.