Biggar

Ice cream and the High Street

Cones & Candies stands at 176 High Street, the retail end of Taylors of Biggar, who have been making ice cream in the town since Stewart and Nita Taylor bought the business from the Italian Ricci family in 1968. They now supply cafés, delis and farm shops across the southern half of Scotland, but you can still walk in off the street and buy a cone.

The High Street is the town, more or less. It runs long and broad and gently uphill, a market place widened for trading that has kept its shape since Biggar became a burgh in 1451. Everything you need sits along it.

Coaching inns and local suppliers

The Crown Inn is at 109–111, a 17th-century coaching inn with six cask ales always on and, for those counting, 68 varieties of gin. The kitchen runs from pub classics through tapas, burgers, pizza and fish and chips, with a Sunday carvery from noon to three. Food goes on until half past eight, the beer garden opens at eleven, and dogs are welcome. It was CAMRA's Lanarkshire Pub of the Year in 2016.

A little further up at 145 is the Elphinstone Hotel, run by Robert and Janette Allen, its specials changing week to week. Much of what appears on the plate comes from the same street or close to it: William Ovens the butcher, The Orchard for fruit, veg and fish, and Taylors again for the ice cream. The hotel takes its name from the family who acquired the Fleming lands here in 1735.

Hills, kirk and industry

Behind the town rise the hills. Bizzyberry Hill is the local walk, signposted from the east end, an easy stretch through fields that turns steep for the finish up the front; the Iron Age people who lived on top left remains going back nearly two thousand years. Tinto Hill, four miles southwest near Symington, is the harder day out — 2,333 feet, a Druidic circle and a Bronze Age cairn at the summit, and views that go a long way. For something longer there is an eight-mile circular over Biggar Common and Huntfield Hill.

Biggar Kirk, at the top of the town, was rebuilt between 1545 and 1547 as a collegiate church for Malcolm, 3rd Lord Fleming — the last church built in Scotland before the Reformation. Inside the vestibule, in a glass case, sits the stool of repentance, carved "16.B.K.94." The jougs, an iron collar for public punishment, were still recorded on a buttress by the door in 1860.

Motors, gasworks and the road west

The town produced more than its size suggests. In 1899 two local farmers founded Albion Motors, which grew into the largest truck company in the British Empire. The gasworks, which ran from 1836 to 1973, is now the only preserved gas works in Scotland, and the Purves family run the country's only permanent puppet theatre from here.

There is no railway now; the line closed in the 1950s, and the nearest stations are at Lanark and Carstairs, a short drive west. The A702 through the town follows a Roman road.

The Hogmanay bonfire

On New Year's Eve a bonfire is built in the town centre and lit at half past nine, the torch carried up the High Street and handed to the oldest resident in Biggar to set it going.