William Wallace Heritage Trust
His Love
Wallace was to meet the love of his life, Marion Braidfute, in the Royal Burgh of Lanark. Lanark was at that time a major market town and trading centre and was also highly valued as a strategic military location. The location of the town and it’s castle, which dominate the Clyde Valley, ensured that whoever controlled Lanark, controlled one of the three principal routes into Central Scotland, the others being via the East or West coasts. The Royal Burgh of Lanark was therefore, when Wallace lived in it, very much a garrison town!
Wallace met Marion in Lanark and was besotted by her! Marion was the daughter of a local farmer who farmed a few miles south of Lanark on the banks of the River Clyde at Lamington. With her father’s blessing, Wallace wooed her and wed her in Lanark at St. Kentigern’s Church. Wallace and Marion were blissfully happy together; certainly as happy as it was possible to be in those turbulent times in a Scotland under the military domination of the King of England.
Marion’s father owned a ‘town house’ in Lanark, for use on those occasions when he visited the local market to trade and it was here, in the centre of the Royal Burgh, that Wallace and Marion settled in marital bliss. Sadly, fate was to decree that their time together would soon be brought to an abrupt end. What little written history exists, tells us of a major incident in the heart of Lanark when Wallace and a few of his followers slew thirty to forty English soldiers, many times their own number, and fled the scene as English reinforcements arrived, via Wallace’s house in the town’s Castlegate. Local legend advises that the incident arose as Wallace reacted to a grievous slur leveled by the English about his Marion.
