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Kilmarnock

It was back in 1820 that a Kilmarnock grocer named Johnnie Walker began blending his own whisky at his shop on King Street. The whisky bottling business he founded grew to be the largest in the world and the town’s main employer. Then in July 2009 its current owner, the multi-national company Diageo, announced that the plant would be closed in 2011.
A vigorous campaign is at present under way to keep the company with its 700 jobs in Kilmarnock. The news broke just after council chiefs had launched a £21million
10-year town centre regeneration project.

Though it is now largely an industrial town, Kilmarnock has many Burns associations - the first edition of his poems was published in the town, at Star Inn Close (now gone) in 1786. Today, a copy from that first edition is worth many thousands of pounds but you can see one in the museum attached to the red sandstone Burns Monument in Key Park. Burns Statue, unveiled in the mid 1990s by the Princess Royal, stands at Kilmarnock Cross. It is the work of Sandy Stoddard, whose other works include the statue of David Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and the sculptured friezes in the Queen‘s Gallery in Buckingham Palace.

Kilmarnock was granted its burgh charter in 1592, so its roots go deep into Scottish history. Legend says it grew up round a church founded by St Marnock, a Celtic saint, in the 7th century. The present Laigh Kirk (now called The Laigh West High Kirk) in Bank Street dates from 1802. In the previous year, during a service, 29 people were trampled to death when plasterwork started falling off the ceiling of the previous kirk, causing a mad rush for the doors. When the church was rebuilt, it was given 13 exits in case it ever happened again. The town’s other old church is the Old High Kirk, which dates from the early 1730s.

In truth, Kilmarnock’s shopping centre, notably Kilmarnock Cross and King Street, is dull and unattractive, due to uninspired modern developments. But if you go down Cheapside towards Bank Street and the narrow streets round the Laigh and West High  Kirk, you get an idea of what the 18th century town looked like.

One place not to be missed is the Dick Institute, the town’s museum, art gallery and library. It is housed in a grand classical building, and has impressive collections featuring geology, archaeology, biology and local history. The gallery is also impressive, with paintings by Corot, Constable, Turner and Kilmarnock’s own painter, Robert Colquhoun. The area around the Dick Institute is particularly attractive, with a war memorial, Victorian houses, and the richly decorated façade of the old technical college, now being converted into flats. Across from the Dick Institute is the statue of Kilmarnock’s own Dick Whittington - James Shaw (known affectionately in the town as “Jimmy Shaw”) who became Lord Mayor of London in 1805.

To the north east of the town centre is the town’s oldest building, Dean Castle. It was the home of the Boyd family, who became Earls of Kilmarnock, and is in fact two castles within a curtain wall - the 14th century Keep and the later Palace. Both are open to the public, and house wonderful collections of tapestries, historical musical instruments, arms and armour. Surrounding the castle(s) is Dean Castle Country Park with many walks and a small children’s zoo.

Kilmarnock Academy, which stands on an eminence overlooking the town centre, is said to be one of the few schools in the world that has produced two Nobel Prize winners - Sir Alexander Fleming (1945, for Medicine) and Lord Boyd Orr (1949, for Peace).

Across from the new sheriff court building near the park is the Old Sheriff Court of 1852, an attractive building in neoclassical style. Two miles west of the town is the Gatehead Viaduct, built in 1807 to take the railway over the River Irvine. Though it no longer carries a railway line, it is still Scotland’s oldest railway bridge. The viaduct was recently renovated and is now accessible to the public.

In 1862, at Crosshouse, a mining village west of Kilmarnock, was born Andrew Fisher, who rose to become Prime Minister of Australia on three separate occasions.