Floral Halls, Pittencrieff Park, Dunfermline, Fife

just delightful...you must have had a lovely day in Dunfermline.

We visit very often - only 20mins drive from home. The Park is now owned by Fife Council, it has gr8 childrens' playparks, lovely old tree landscaping etc., being an old private estate. Story is that the late 19thC-early 20C entrepreneur, Andrew Carnegie, having been born the son of a Dunfermline weaver, used to try to scale the walls of the estate to steal apples and other fruit. Once he became rich in the USA, he formed many libraries of learning, etc (there are Carnegie Halls in Dunfermline and NYC, of course.. He managed to buy Pittencrieff park for the people of his hometown and gifted it to them in 1903. My only objection is the wording (typical of the era, however) is when he wrote that he was buying and gifting the estate to the "toiling masses" of the town. So Edwardian! It sounds condescending (he was, after all, one of them bar a stroke or 2 of luck). Anyway, he never forgot his Fife roots.

The library in the little town near where I grew up in Ontario was funded by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation... and since you are a history buff, David...I thought you might be interested in Robert Owen...He was a Welsh worker in the cotton mills who rose to ownership and eventually became a philanthropist/industrialist in Lannark he was the first to realize/accept that the quality of life of his workers was of foremost importance to the quality of goods and hence the profitability of his industry. He was known primarily as an educator...married a Glaswegian. All this in the 1800's...check him out (if you're not already familiar with his biography) a very admirable Welshman

Hi Lori! My Goodness, you know so much about us! New Lanark is a World heritage Site. It's a fascinating place to visit, now a real working period villiage and mills, with actors in period costume. I went there because of my own family history. My Great Great Great Great Grandfather began work in similar circumstances in 1828, aged 13, in a copy of Robert Owens's purpose-built mills and village, here in Fife at Prinlaws, Leslie. The workers had their own gas-lit streets, refuse collections, shops, library, doctor, social clubs, and education was free for all the children (some 40 years before schooling became compulsory!). I have news about him, some of his children's school achievements, some of their sad demises, and his prize-winning cabbages - the gardening connection, lol - from as far back as 1851, from the local press and the Prinlaws School records which have survived. People never change, essentially, I have found, the world around them changes, and we adapt, sometimes with the help of men such as Carnegie and Owen. As far as we gardeners are concerned, where would we be without the Tradescants, David Douglases, Lewises and Clarks, Christopher Columbuses, etc. of days past?