PASSAGIUM REGINAE The - Royal Dunfermline

orn here in 1757. He was the son of Robert Thomson and Anne Stirling, his
wife, and witnesses at the baptism were „Rolland Cowie,‟ wigmaker in
Dunfermline, and Andrew Reeky, preceptor to the children of Mr. Robert
Wellwood of Easter Gellet, advocate. Robert Thomson was village
schoolmaster.
For only five years George resided here, as his father removed to Banff in
1762. George Thomson, as most people know, was editor of the largest and
best edition of Scottish songs that had up to the time appeared. A descendant
of his was married to Charles Dickens. Thomson died in Edinburgh in 1851,
at the age of ninety-four. His Life and Work was compiled by Cuthbert
Hadden, and published so recently as 1898. George Thomson is not to be
confused with James Thomson who wrote The Seasons and Rule, Britannia.
Natives of Limekilns have said that the latter was born there too, which is a
mistake. So far as is known, he never even visited the old seaport.
Robert Louis Stevenson occasionally landed at Limekilns when sailing in
the Forth, and in his Kidnapped Alan Breck and David Balfour were brought
to an inn there. They were afterwards rowed across the Forth in the dead of
night by an obliging and plucky servant-maid – whether from Brucehaven or
the older harbour we are not told.
All the historians and writers of Dunfermline and other parts of Fife in the
vicinity have, of course, paid frequent visits to Limekilns. They include
Lindesay of Pitscottie; Sir Robert Sibbald; Sir John Sinclair; Dr John
Thomson. Dr Chalmers; Dr Ebenezer Henderson; Dr Barbieri; the Rev John
Fernie; Mr H. Beveridge; Dr Russell Walker; Mr William Gifford; Mr John
Geddie, the author of The Fringes of Fife; the Rev A.S. Wilson; Mr Andrew
S. Cunningham; Mr Alan Reid; and the Rev William Stephen, who has
recently brought out a very instructive book on Inverkeithing, full of fresh
matter which as by no means easily accessible.
A young man named Robert Pollok, or Pollock,. who was born in 1798 and
died in 1827, came frequently to Limekilns and was known to sit about the
shore and on the pier at Capernaum, and string off yards of what was looked
upon by many at the time, and for at least thirty years afterwards, as good
poetry. The Course of Time was the result of his labour, and Blackwood
published it in two volumes in 1827; a quarto edition as issued in 1857, and it
ran through something like twelve editions. But we never hear more than the
name now, and that only at rare intervals when some enthusiastic person
thinks he has rediscovered a great poet associated with an ancient Fife
seaport: his „course of time‟ has run its full length and will never come gain –
no twentieth-century publisher at any rate is likely to attempt a thirteenth
edition of it.
Had it not been for its natural harbours, part of which was eventually
walled off for extra protection, Limekilns would probably never have come
into being; the Dunfermline monks of pre-Reformation days would have
20