History of The Braes
When the great land holdings of Abbotskerse were broken up after the Reformation the area we know today as Polmont, Brightons, Redding and much of the Braes area came into the hands of the Earls, later the Dukes of Hamilton. The present Duke like his predecessors has Lord Polmont as a subsidiary title. The pasturage and mineral wealth of the area was exploited in the Hamilton interest for nearly two centuries before the local residents were strong and numerous enough to persuade the church authorities to separate them from Falkirk in 1724 and create a new parish of Polmont. At the time, and for decades thereafter, the village was little more than a collection of cottages on the southern slope of the escarpment which sweeps down to the carselands of the River Forth. Here a new church was built and probably a school of some kind, close by the mills and smiddy which served the farmers of the parish.
The Hamiltons were also responsible for the emergence in the early 18th century of the first Falkirk trysts, great cattle fairs which took place on three autumn dates; and which by the mid century had surpassed the great sales at Crieff. They were held on Reddingmuir and tens of thousands of black highland cattle, driven south along the drove roads, changed hands. After 1770 the trysts moved across to the Roughcastle area south west of Falkirk and eventually to Stenhousemuir.
During the 19th century, long before the bridges spanned the Forth, all traffic from east to west and north passed along a road just to the south of Polmont village. The feudal superior, a laird called Bennet, agreed to allow building to take place along the line of the road provided the new settlement was called Bennets-town! It soon became the commercial heart of the village with small workshops, houses, schools, stores and inns. A mile to the south, the settlement of Brightons had grown up around a famous sandstone quarry which was in operation as early as the 17th century. From here stone was carried by the Union canal to help build Edinburgh's new town in the 1830s and Falkirk's fine new public buildings twenty years later. The canal encouraged the development of industry and this was given further impetus by the arrival of the Edinburgh to Glasgow railway in 1842. The halt near Brightons was given the name Polmont Station and slowly but surely the original village, by then known as Old Polmont, Bennetstown, Brightons and Polmont
Station began to merge into one coherent settlement.
Further south small agricultural settlements became coal mining villages to answer the demands from the hungry furnaces of Carron Company. Redding, Maddiston, Rumford, Standburn, Blackbraes, California and Shieldhill expanded rapidly as the market for coal continued to grow, while some like Avonbridge and Slamannan remained more rural and agricultural. Westquarter once a great estate belonging to the Livingstone family was bought by the local authority in the 1930s and turned into a model village to rehouse the families of Standburn.
The wealth generated by industrial success brought to the area the usual crop of fine mansion houses and elegant estates. There was Millfield built by John Millar, secretary of the North British Railway Company and later the home of the Stein family whose fortune came from the manufacture of refractory bricks for the expanding iron industry. And there were Polmont Park and Polmont House, mansions dating back to the late 18th century, and Polmont Bank which served as a nursing home and a hotel. All four were demolished to make way for the post-war housing and commercial developments which have so changed the character of the old village. Coal mining came to an end decades ago and the villages have suffered considerable hardship with few new employment opportunities. Polmont today is a dormitory village with many new houses standing in what were once the grounds of the lost mansions.
Content provided by Ian Scott ©
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