Homecoming

Today was spent largely in 'The Wee Coonty', Clackmannanshire. Half of my ancestry came from its then 32 square miles, many of them spending a lot of their lives under its surface, latterly sailing from Alloa as seamen, ship's joiners, a tug-boat master. Getting there was fun as I used the new rail link from Stirling [all of ten minutes but with some very good views of the Ochils on a sunny day]. After raiding the excellent local library for maps I set out to find the streets where they lived. Mill street was still there but Broad Street, leading down to the harbour, has been laid waste and nothing remains of its 19th century condition. A friendly worker at the Greenhill Cemetery showed me the mausoleum of the Earls of Mar which is usually locked. I decided against a trawl through the headstones in search of ancestral memorials: [1] they were too poor to be able to afford any, and [2] the surnames are so common in this airt that it would have been difficult to determine which were mine. In all I was around the place for a couple of hours before jumping on a bus back to Stirling and then, after a pub lunch, another one home. There's a surprising amount of good vernacular architecture left along with evidence of the mills in which various female members of the family worked. A good day for strolling at leisure with a current town map and a reproduction of the 1899 OS map in hand, and the county motto in mind: Look Aboot Ye. And the added bonus of passing a bus heading for Yetts o' Muckhart........