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LARBERT AND STENHOUSEMUIR
The origin of the twin villages of Larbert and Stenhousemuir lies somewhere in those dark ages when the nation of Scotland was beginning to emerge from the amalgam of Pict and Scot, Angle and Briton. We know that the crossing point of the Carron River was important to the Romans and that the road they constructed from Watling Lodge on the Antonine Wall at Camelon crossed the river by a bridge located somewhere near the present Larbert Old Parish Church. Traces of this road were still identifiable in the Torwood as late as the 18th century and the high and dry land above the road and river crossing probably housed a settlement of some kind from the earliest days.
At some stage a Christian community was established in the area with a chapel which like its counterpart in Falkirk was handed over by the Bishop of St Andrews to the Augustinian Canons as a gift in the year 1160. This time it was the priests of Cambuskenneth rather than Holyrood who received the 'chapels of Donypas and Lethbert', a present they retained for almost four hundred years! Incredible as it seems, this ancient linkage between Larbert and Dunipace survived until 1962 despite the strains of both Reformation and industrial revolution which elsewhere tore apart the religious and social fabric of the nation. And despite the mutual suspicion and open hostility between the two 'united parishes' which surfaced from time to time over the centuries!
Of the chapel itself we know only that around 1450 a new plain building appeared on the site of the present Kirkyard and that either before or in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation it fell into disrepair. Beyond that we have little information about the Larbert area before the 16th century but we can be sure that the turbulent relations between powerful feudal families which were the norm throughout lowland Scotland did not pass by the Larbert area.
The Foresters of Garden who from the 1400s were the keepers of the valuable and strategically important royal forest of Torwood, the Bruces of Airth Castle, later also Stenhouse and Kinnaird, and the neighbouring Livingstons of Callendar shared the territory between them, at times in harmonious alliance and at others through bitter feud and conflict with much blood shed on both sides.
On the slopes of the ancient wood stand the remains of Torwood Castle, the last surviving symbol of Forester power. It was built in 1566 for Sir Alexander Forester and its size and construction confirm the status of its lord and the dangerous times in which he and his family lived. The building was acquired in the 1950s by Mr Gordon Millar who spent the last forty years of his life working mostly on his own to recover and then restore the stonework of the castle.
He was his own architect and mason, labourer and joiner and under his patient hand the building has been saved from the fate which has befallen many such ruins. If some parts of the restoration seem a little unusual that is a small price to pay for the love and protection poured out on this one place by a most remarkable man. A newly formed Trust is helping to ensure that the castle survives in the future.
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