Kirkcaldy

Kirkcaldy is a major market and manufacturing town in the Kingdom of Fife, eastern Scotland. It is known as the 'Lang Toun' in deference to its somewhat elongated morphology, strung out along a single main street, its back-side presented to the Firth of Forth with whose coast the street runs parallel.

It has been a major commercial centre since the late medieval period, with a trade in salt, coal, and wool, and, in recent centuries, whale oil and linoleum. Salt boiling and the boiling of whale blubber on the beach to extract oil must have given the town an interesting olfactory environment, so it is perhaps unfair that the linoleum industry gets the sole blame for Kirkcaldy's reputation as a malodorous town, as recorded in the poem 'The Boy on the Train' by Mary Campbell Smith, which concludes:

For A ken masel by the queer-like smell

That the neist stop's Kirkcaudy!

http://www.spl.org.uk/popular/boy-in-tra.html

Famous Lang Touners

• Adam Smith, economist and Father of Monetarism
• Sir Sandford Fleming, inventor of the International Date Line
• Robert Adam, architect
• Thurrock Hunt, poet