Bathgate, United Kingdom

In 1315, the daughter of King Robert I of Scotland (Robert The Bruce), Marjorie (alternatively spelt Margery) Bruce, married Walter Stewart (or Steward) (1293–1326), the 6th Lord High Steward of Scotland. The dowry to her husband included the lands and castle of Bathgate. Walter died at the castle on 9 April 1326. This marriage is still celebrated in an annual pageant forming part of the Bathgate Procession & John Newland Festival, colloquially known as the Bathgate Procession.

In the 1846 book A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland, Samuel Lewis writes:

Of this ancient castle, some slight traces of the foundations only are discernible, in a morass about a quarter of a mile [400 m] from the town, in which, though it has been drained and brought into cultivation, kitchen utensils of brass, and coffins rudely formed of flat stones, have been discovered by the plough.

Another antiquarian, W. Jardin, in the Statistical Account of Scotland Vol I (1793), and referring to Walter Stewart, states:

Some traces of his mansion may be seen in the middle of a bog or loch about 1⁄4 mile [400 m] from the town. Hewn stones have frequently been dug from the foundations, and some kitchen-utensils of copper or brass have been found.

Dating from around the same time the remains of Bathgate's former parish church still stand at Kirkton. The original 12th-century construction was absorbed by a later build in 1739 when a new church was erected on the same site. The walls of the church were consolidated in 1846. This simple whitewashed edifice served the community until its last service on 9 April 1882. King Malcolm IV makes reference to the original church in a charter, granting it to the monks of Holyrood Abbey. Records show that Holyrood Abbey gave the church to the abbot and monks of Newbattle Abbey in 1327.

In 1606 silver ore was found at nearby Hilderston, in the shadow of Cairnpapple Hill, by a prospecting collier, Sandy Maund. This accidental discovery began a short-lived crown "project" in the area. Advisers to King James VI of Scotland became aware of the discovery, and in April 1608 repossessed the land for the crown. The prospector Bevis Bulmer and Thomas Foulis opened a mine called "God's Blessing". A sample of the ore was shipped to London, and assayed in the Tower of London by Andrew Palmer. By December 1608 it was clear that the ore in the mine was of varying quality and by March 1613 all efforts to extract silver from the area were abandoned.

Bathgate remained a very small rural community until the middle of the 19th century with only a foray by Covenanters in the 17th century to unrest the populace. Francis Groome, in the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1882–84) writes:

Some of the inhabitants suffered hardship and loss in the times of the persecution; and the insurgent army of the Covenanters, when on their march from the W to Rullion Green, spent a disastrous night at Bathgate.

Robert Louis Stevenson, in the book Lay Morals, Part 2: The Pentland Rising. A Page of History further elucidates upon this night in November 1666:

A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to Bathgate, where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army stopped. But at twelve o’clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet, of 'Horse! horse!’ and 'Mount the prisoner!’ resounded through the night-shrouded town.

His depiction goes on to describe how the half the army perished in the freezing weather as they headed towards the Pentland Hills.

Established around 1800, the Glenmavis Distillery in Bathgate was purchased in 1831 by John McNab, who produced the eponymous MacNab's Celebrated Glenmavis Dew from the site until the distillery's closure in 1910. In 1885, the distillery was producing 80,000 gallons of single malt a year which was transported to Scotland, England and the colonies.

In 1831 Bathgate Academy was built. Designed by the Edinburgh architects R & R Dickson this is Bathgate's only large public building of historic merit. It was endowed by a Jamaican plantation owner John Newlands. The building later became part of Balbardie Primary School, and later still was changed into private housing.

By the opening of Edinburgh and Bathgate Railway in 1849, local mines and quarries were extracting coal, lime, and ironstone.

James Young's discovery of cannel coal in the Boghead area of Bathgate, and the subsequent opening of the Bathgate Chemical Works in 1852, the world's first commercial oil-works, manufacturing paraffin oil and paraffin wax, signalled an end to the rural community of previous centuries. When the cannel coal resources dwindled around 1866, Young started distilling paraffin from much more readily available shale. The landscape of the Lothians is still dotted with the orange spoil heaps (called bings) from this era. Collieries and quarries and the associated industries (brickworks, steelworks) were the main employers in Bathgate as the 19th century drew to a close.