Coat of Arms
The town's coat of arms features a black bitch against an oak tree, and townsfolk are known as "black bitches". In his account of a tour of Scotland, published in 1679, an English gentleman, Thomas Kirk, described the arms of the town as "a black bitch tied to a tree, in a floating island. We enquired for a story about it, but could meet with none: their schoolmaster told us it proceeded from the name of the place. Linlithgow, in Erst, is thus explained: Lin signifies Lough; Lith, black; and Gow, a hound."
A more recently recorded legend relates that the bitch was a black greyhound whose master was sentenced to starve to death on an island in Linlithgow loch. She used to swim from the town every day with food for him. When this was discovered she was chained to a tree on a different island to suffer the same fate as her master. The townspeople took the animal's loyalty and bravery as symbolic of their own. The local pub named "The Black Bitch" is reputed to be one of Scotland's oldest pubs.
Read more about this topic: Linlithgow
Famous quotes containing the words coat of, coat and/or arms:
“Commit a crime and the world is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.”
—William James (18421910)
“Because just as arms have no force outside if there is no counsel within a house, study is vain and counsel useless that is not put to virtuous effect when the time calls.”
—François Rabelais (14941553)