Falkirk, Scotland: The Town Where I Was Born

Seven decades later, it’s time I went back!

“I remember, I remember, the house where I was born”, wrote Thomas Hood in the early 19th century. I can remember neither the house nor the Scottish town in which that house still stands, having left both at a very early age in order to grow up in another town hundreds of miles away.

I was born, as Derek Alexander Clayton, at 136 Merchiston Avenue, Falkirk, at five minutes to midnight on 11th August 1952. Number 136 is the upper floor of the house on the right in the picture. Merchiston Avenue is to the north-west of the town centre, squeezed between the A9 and the Forth and Clyde Canal. I do not know how long I stayed there before being whisked away to the south of England, firstly to a children’s home in Gosport and then, at 13 months old, to Poole where I was given a new home and family, as well as a new name.

But what of Falkirk? The Romans arrived here about 1,800 years before I did. Emperor Antoninus had the idea that he would go one better than his predecessor and extend the limit of the Empire by 100 miles to the north of Hadrian’s Wall. The new wall, linking the estuaries of the Forth and Clyde rivers, was much less substantial than Hadrian’s, took twelve years to build and was only defended for a further eight years before being…