Allandale, the village built on top of the Antonine Wall, bordered in the north by the Forth and Clyde Canal and on the south by the former London, Midland, Scottish Railway looks as if it could stand for ever.

Viewing Allandale from the B816 which runs through the centre of the village, there doesn’t seem to have been many changes made in the last 60 years. The two rows of red Dumfries sandstone houses look as they did circa 1940 when I grew up there. There have been changes made, some of the houses on the south side of the road have been altered by making 40 houses into 22 and each house on that side now has its own garden. The houses on the north side have had another room added upstairs. The street lighting is a lot more efficient and there is much more traffic on the road. In the late fifties, the council built twelve more houses at the west end on each side of the post office. There were also another 12 cottages at Dundas to the west of Allandale where the office staff and management were housed.

The village and the adjacent brickworks were all owned by the same company, John G. Stein & Co., so, the recollections will contain parts from both areas.

Although I grew up in the village from 1934 until 1960, this narrative is not about me but about the village and the folk who lived there plus a record of the environment between those 26 years.

There are few reference books with which to verify all the facts and quite a few of my contemporaries are no longer with us so I have had to rely on the memories of myself and a few other Allandale folk for most of the facts. I thank them for their time and for the photographs.

As of late June 2025 we finished moving the book into this this website. We are still adding the photographs with artificial intelligence to convert them into a higher quality and into colour. They all should be online soon.

James  Jamieson