Back in the mid-90s, somebody or other produced a list of the 10 most boring towns in Scotland, which was duly picked up by the papers. I don’t remember which bleak pile of bricks came first, but I do remember the perverse pride I felt upon learning that my hometown of Dunfermline had placed fifth. That seemed a more profound manifestation of dullness than landing the #1 spot would have been; to “win” would mean appearing exceptional, and thus, paradoxically, at least slightly interesting.
That feeble fifth-place ranking captured the depressing atmosphere of weary run-down rubbishness in which we who lived in the “Auld Grey Toun” were marinaded. Our local bookshop and cinema had closed down by that point, so there was not a lot in the way of culture or entertainment, although — to be fair — we did get the panto every year and I once saw Fife’s premier Frank Zappa tribute act, Frank McZappa, play in a pub. Speaking of pubs, we had no shortage of those, and we were also lucky enough to have a swimming pool, bingo hall and some ruins. You might say it was a bit like Waiting for Godot, only we’d all long since given up waiting.
Not that long ago, I would have ridiculed the very notion that Dunfermline contained any mysteries worth bothering about. My teachers did at least try to instill some civic pride: as a child I was taught that my hometown was Scotland’s “ancient capital”; that in the 11th century an important king named Malcolm Canmore built a tower there; that his wife Margaret became a famous saint; and that Robert the Bruce, the last Scottish king to defeat the English in battle, was buried in the Abbey. After that, nothing much seemed to happen for 500 years, until Andrew Carnegie was born. But he had to leave Dunfermline to become successful: a fact that was not lost upon any of us.
That’s a decent amount of history for a small town that nobody visits. And later, I learned more: Charles I, later to attain some notoriety, was born in Dunfermline’s royal palace; and Robert Henryson, a major medieval poet, had been headmaster at the high school.
And yet even to a child it was obvious that Dunfermline was centuries past its prime. Malcolm’s Tower (the “dun” in Dunfermline) was a circle of old bricks in on top of a hill frequented by nobody. The Abbey nave had fallen into disuse after a new bit was added in the 19th century, while all that remained of the royal palace was a wall — which was a great backdrop for staging mock-World War II battles, until Historic Scotland put a gate on it and started, rather too optimistically, charging for entry.
Saddest of all was Saint Margaret’s Cave, a once-sacred grotto, which was accessed through a shed in the car park behind The City Hotel, and which was closed for much of the year (the shed’s design drew heavily upon the “public toilet” school of architecture.) I was told by a guide that the city council had almost filled in the cave completely when they were putting in the car park, but a grassroots campaign had prevented that outrage. Thus even our history seemed a bit rubbish; the town was a place where people did things that were forgotten, or left to achieve greater fame elsewhere. I turned my back on Dunfermline in favour of Moscow, and then Texas, and for a long time I thought that seeing family was the only possible reason for visiting the place.
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