Black Bitch .

It was a lovely day for a cycle ride and our route took us through Linlithgow where I noticed this inn for the first time even though we travel this road regularly.

I guessed that there was a story behind the black bitch thinking that, perhaps, the original was a racing greyhound. The real story is a little different: the black bitch features, chained to an oak tree on an island, on the town's coat of arms and the town's folk are called "black bitches" - even the men.

The story goes that the town's name derives from the Gaelic for, "loch with the black hound" but it seems more likely that it is from the Brythonic for, "pool in a valley."

A recent legend (can there be such a thing?) relates that the hound belonged to a man sentenced to starve to death on an island in Linlithgow Loch; when the hound was discoverd on its nightly journey into town to forage for her master, she was sentenced, to be chained to a tree on another island, to suffer the same fate and the town's folk took the animal's loyalty as symbolic of their own. And, if you believe that - as the saying goes . . . .

The inn is reputed to be one of Scotland's oldest, a strange claim bearing in mind that it is not accompanied by a date.