Lanark

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Lanark's wide main street is testimony to the fact that it has been a market town for many centuries, and the town is still well known today for the livestock markets that take place every fortnight. In 2009 a sheep (just the one) sold at this market for around £230,000. Now, it doesn't take an intelligent person to see that this must have been a very special sheep. Or perhaps a very big sheep, as in the size of two football pitches wide and able to feed three million people after being cut up into succulent juicy chunks. Or maybe it was an intelligent sheep, one that could recite poetry, work out complex mathematical formulae, or one capable of running a bank more efficiently than a human being. Whatever the reason this sheep was so expensive, it just goes to show that the livestock market at Lanark is not a spit and sawdust place with a few scrawny beasts in pens. This is a MARKET, and one of the best there is.
William Wallace used to live in Lanark. There is a statue of him on the eighteenth century church on the High Street.  It is described in my 1920s 'Blue Guide' to Scotland as 'an ungainly statue (by a self-taught artist).' One wonders if it was the same artist who carved the stone dog - the Girnin' Dog - that sits on a roof in Castlegate, a constant and utterly captivating reminder of the vagaries of human nature. It sits peering sternly at the house of a woman believed by the dog's owner to have poisoned it in the 1840s.