Linlithgow

Ale Houses and Burgh Identity

The Four Marys occupies a building on the High Street that dates to around 1500, which makes it older than most of what it pours. Eight hand pumps run along the bar — four regulars and four rotating guests — and twice a year, in May and October, the pub holds a cask festival. It has been Forth Valley CAMRA Pub of the Year eight times over. The name belongs to the four ladies-in-waiting who attended Mary, Queen of Scots — Beaton, Seton, Fleming and Livingston — and the pub stands a short walk from the palace where Mary was born. Before it served beer it was a dwelling, then a chemist's run by the Waldie family.

Down by the station, Platform 3 was the first pub in the town to earn Cask Marque accreditation and is candid about its size: "We may not be the biggest pub in Linlithgow, but what we lack in size we make up in character and service." Along West Port, the tavern that spent some 350 years as the Black Bitch was renamed the Willow Tree in 2022 by its owner, Greene King. More than 10,000 people signed petitions against the change. Townsfolk born here have called themselves Black Bitches for centuries, after the greyhound chained to an oak on the burgh's coat of arms.

Bakers, Deli and Butchers

For food, Christie the Baker on the High Street has won a Scottish Baker Award for its bread and makes World-Champion Scotch pies, alongside a cake it calls the Domino. Oliphant Bakers does macaroni pies, quiches and fresh cream cakes. Taste Deli Cafe near the station makes everything on the premises, and Mannerstons Farm Shop on the edge of town serves breakfast and lunch daily. Three butchers — Wm Holleran & Sons, Macdonald Brothers and S. Collins & Son — still trade the same streets.

Loch, Canal and Hill

The water is the point of the place. A level path runs the whole way round Linlithgow Loch through the royal park, thick with waterfowl, past the palace and St Michael's on the ridge above. The Union Canal cuts through the southern part of town, and from the basin at Manse Road the volunteer-run canal society sends boat trips out every half hour from half past one, with weekend cruises to the Avon Aqueduct, Scotland's longest. Walk further out and Cockleroi Hill rises to 903 feet, with views across the Central Belt and the Forth Valley.

Palace and Crown

The palace itself began in 1424 and produced both James V and Mary, Queen of Scots before Cromwell attacked it in 1650 and fire gutted it in 1746. It stands roofless but very nearly whole, with a carved hexagonal fountain still in the courtyard. Next to it, St Michael's wears a gold-anodised aluminium crown, added in 1964 to replace the stone one taken down in the 1820s.

Rails and a Future Engineer

Trains reach Edinburgh Waverley in about twenty minutes; the station has been doing the run since 1842. Scotty from Star Trek is, in the fiction, to be born here in the year 2222. Someone put up a plaque in 2007.