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FALKIRK - the early centuries
The first Falkirk dwellers of whom we have any concrete information were the Romans who built the Antonine Wall with its system of roads and forts. One of these was located in the area of the town now called the Pleasance and its occupiers, and the civilians in the settlement or vicus attached to it, may together have made up Falkirk?s first population. With the departure of the Romans for the last time in the 3rd century AD it is reasonable to suppose that the local people remained to use what the Romans left by way of houses and other buildings. The next link in the fragmentary story comes with the arrival of Christian missionaries which might have been in the early 5th century after the arrival of St Ninian from Whithorn or in the 7th, following St Columba?s great mission from Iona. Whatever, by the time the written record appears some three or four hundred years later Falkirk has a church, probably located where the present Old Parish Church stands, and a name EGGLESBRETH or EGGLESBRECH which, over subsequent years, was translated into Scots as FAWKIRK, meaning the speckled or broken church.
Presumably a new settlement began to emerge in the vicinity of the church with a few houses and shops set in narrow closes and wynds. It must have been important enough by 1298 because, following the disastrous first Battle of Falkirk, the principal Scottish casualties were buried in the graveyard. In the medieval period the settlement was part of a barony called Abbotskerse, in the ownership of Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh which also owned the revenues from the lands within the huge parish centred on the church. Much of the rest of the land currently occupied by the modern town was in a neighbouring barony, that of Callendar.
The Blaeu Map of 1624 (suveyed by Timothy Pont c1590)
The house, lands and families of Callendar have played a central part in Falkirk's long and stormy history. Three families held sway for the best part of a thousand years. The first and most difficult to pin down were the Callendars or Calentyres who probably built a house in the grounds now used by the business park. They were succeeded in 1345 by the Livingstons and for nearly 400 years they were at the very heart of Scotland's story. The original Callendar House was built in the 1500s and the following century, when both baronies fell into Livingston hands, the town began to expand with a number of new stone buildings appearing along what is now the High Street; in 1600 the town was raised to the status of a burgh of barony. One of the new buildings was a tolbooth and the wide area at the front of the steeple was known as the cross of Falkirk. It was here that the Mercat Cross stood from 1600 as a mark of Falkirk's new status and here the weekly markets were held until the early years of the 19th century. It was also here that public hangings and floggings took place and where the general business of the town was conducted. A first steeple was built in the late 1500s and replaced in 1697. The present one, designed by David Hamilton of Glasgow was erected in 1814. Like the previous ones it was a lock-up and there are still two jail cells inside. The first cross well was erected in 1682 with a water supply from the Callendar estates to the south. The old well-head was replaced by the present round sandstone well in 1817.
 
The Wellhead of 1682 The Tolbooth and Steeple of 1697
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