Alloa House, situated in
the immediate neighbourhood of the town, in the midst of a fine park,
the seat of the Earl of Mar, and the subject of a fine Scottish song, is
a place worthy of visit. The principal part of the building was
destroyed some years ago by fire, and with it the only certain original
portrait of Queen Mary existing in the kingdom. The original tower, a
building of the thirteenth century, the walls of which are eleven feet
thick, and ninety feet high, alone remains. In it James the Sixth and
his eldest son, Henry, were successively educated under the care of the
Mar family. The cradle of the former, and his little nursery-chair,
besides Prince Henry's golfs, were preserved in the tower till a recent
period, when they fell into the possession of Lady Frances Erskine,
daughter of the late venerable Earl of Mar, who, we understand, now
preserves them, with the care and veneration due to such valuable
heirlooms, in her house in Edinburgh. The country in every direction
round Alloa is extremely level and beautiful, interspersed with numerous
fine seats, and abounding in delightful little old-established
bower-like villages. Among the latter we would particularize one called
the Bridge of Allan as everything which a village ought to be--soft,
sunny, and warm--a confusion of straw-roofed cottages, and rich massy
trees; possessed of a bridge and a mill, together with kail-yards,
bee-skeps, colleys, callants, old inns with entertainment for man and
horse, carts with their poles pointing up to the sky, venerable dames in
drugget knitting their stockings in the sun, and young ones in gingham
and dimity tripping along with milk-pails on their heads.

"Besides all these characteristics as a village, the Bridge of Allan
boasts of a row of neat little villas for the temporary accommodation of
a number of fashionables who flock to it in the summer, on account of a
neighbouring mineral well."--_Chambers's Picture of Scotland._

[20] Wood's Peerage.

[21] Somerville's Queen Anne, p. 167.

[22] Somerville, p. 177. Memoirs of Scotland, London, 1714. Defoe's
History of the Union, p. 64.

[23] Lockhart Papers, vol. i. p. 114.

[24] Lockhart.

[25] Lockhart, p. 116.

[26] Daniel De Foe on the Union, p. 64.

[27] De Foe, p. 322.

[28] Lockhart. Letter to one English Lord concerning the Treaty, 1702,
vol. i. p. 272.

[29] Memoirs, p. 74. De Foe, p. 321.

[30] Memoirs, p. 74. De Foe, p. 371.

[31] Introduction