Kincardine

(Kincardine-on-Forth)
Fife

Cottages, Kincardine
©2022 Gazetteer for Scotland

Cottages, Kincardine

A village at the western extremity of Fife, Kincardine (known fully as Kincardine-on-Forth) is situated on the River Forth in Tulliallan Parish. Kincardine was founded as a burgh of barony on reclaimed marshland in 1663. It developed as a river port trading in salt and as a centre of shipbuilding and quarrying.

Its attractive old town, which has many fine 17th and 18th-century houses and a mercat cross, is largely bypassed by the A985 road which crosses the Forth over the Kincardine Bridge which was built between 1932 and 1936 to a design by Alexander Gibb & Partners. The Gothic Tulliallan Parish Church built in 1833 replaced an older parish kirk with a tower dating from 1675, and Tulliallan Castle (1817-20), designed by William Atkinson, has been the home of the Scottish Police College since 1954. Three sixteen-storey public housing blocks at the rear of the town where built in 1969; Sandeman and Kincairne Courts were demolished in 2010 while Ramsay Court was demolished three years later. The Unicorn Inn was the birthplace of the physicist and chemist Sir James Dewar (1842 - 1923) who was the inventor of the vacuum flask, the first man to liquefy hydrogen gas and co-inventor of the explosive cordite.

The Kincardine Power Station, the chimney of which was also once a notable landmark, opened in 1962 but was demolished in 2001. Longannet colliery, the last deep mine in Scotland, lay 1¼ miles (2 km) to the southeast but closed the following year. The Longannet Power Station continues to operate.

Kincardine has an 18 hole golf course (Tulliallan Golf Club), a primary school, library and community centre.


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