Bridge of Allan

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I once saw a sturdy sign on the door of a public house which read, 'CHILDREN & BABIES - The law now demands that a special license is required to allow the admission of children into a public house. We have no such license and, accordingly, children and babies can no longer be admitted.' It was such a wonderful sign that I fell to my knees and briefly wept with joy before taking up residence inside. There is a good reason for such signs. For I was once in a hotel bar in Bridge of Allan, enjoying a quiet thoughtful pint of ale, when a young girl of some eight years started skipping with ropes. In the bar. And she wasn't so much skipping as thundering up and down on floorboards with all the finesse of a stampeding herd of bison. It didn't seem to occur to her parents, or even the bar person, that this might be unacceptable behaviour.
Robert Louis Stevenson once said that children should speak when spoken to, and behave mannerly at table. Robert Louis Stevenson also visited Bridge of Allan. Of the town he said, 'I shall never forget some of the days spent at Bridge of Allan, they were one golden dream,' which sounds to me as if the man might have been on drugs, as he often was as a result of ill health. He visited Bridge of Allan to 'take the waters' during the town's heyday as a spa town, when tens of thousands of visitors would flock there each year, many with ailments that the water was said to cure. These days you can still take the water, but only because some sensible brewer has turned it into ale.