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Clackmannanshire

Welcome to Doors Open Days in Clackmannanshire, which is organised, coordinated and promoted by Clackmannanshire Heritage Trust (SC010250).

Six very interesting venues are included in this year's programme for the first time or after a gap of many years: Alloa Hub, home of the Clackmannanshire Tapestry; Alloa Mosque;  Alloa Old Kirkyard and Mar & Kellie Mausoleum; The Gate Charity in Alloa;  Clackmannan Town Hall  and artist Morag Knight is opening her Barn Studio at Alleckie Farm.  Guided tours and/or displays will be available at these new venues.

The perennially popular Alloa, Clackmannan and Sauchie Towers  and Menstrie Castle will be open again , with guided tours at two of them. Five churches in the county, three in Alloa, one in  Clackmannan  and Menstrie Parish Church, will open their doors to  visitors once more  to enable them to discover their unique stories and splendid interiors.

Alloa Fire Station, Clackmannanshire Council Archives, The Coach House Theatre in Alloa, Alva Ice House, Alva Old Kirkyard and Johnstone Mausoleum, Dollar Museum and Tullibody Heritage Centre will all be welcoming people again,  revealing fascinating operational details and intriguing stories. 

Menstrie and Tullibody Community Gardens will be showing visitors  how grow their own food, eat more healthily and enjoy the great benefits to wellbeing of spending time outdoors. 

Finally, there will be two interesting historic walks in Dollar - the first is a tour of the many historical places in the town, while the other will link with the current Dollar Shops exhibition in the Museum and take people on a tour of the town to look at its changing shopscape. 

Regional Coordinator

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Clackmannanshire

Alloa Hub

new

28 September 2024

29 September 2024

Alloa Hub is a community-owned and run facility in the centre of Alloa. It offers display retail space to the “Made in Clacks” range of locally made artisan gifts and goods for small businesses which do not have their own premises. A range of books on local and Scottish themes is also available and the facilities include What's On information for local people and visitors, a meeting/project room, public toilets and shower. Alloa Hub is also home to The Clackmannanshire Tapestry, a fascinating and colourful work stitched by local people as a response to the showing of The Great Tapestry of Scotland in the Speirs Centre in 2017. The tapestry, which is 2.5m long, depicts some of the most important industries of the county, as well as historic and cultural sites and attractions and many other features which held particular significance for the individual stitchers.

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2024 Theme

Clackmannanshire

Alloa Mosque

new

28 September 2024

Alloa Mosque (Musalla as Salaam) is a welcoming Sunni mosque established in 2003. It has been serving the spiritual needs of the local Muslim community for over two decades. It focusses on inclusivity and accommodating diverse backgrounds, welcoming people of all - and no - faiths and offers a range of services, including prayer, worship and Islamic education. It provides services in English, Arabic and Urdu and aims to cater for the needs of a multicultural community, allowing people to feel comfortable and connected during their visits. There will be guided tours; question and answer sessions; a presentation; information about and an exhibition focussing on the historic links between Scotland and the Muslim World; as well as a chance to meet members of the local Muslim community. A virtual tour of Makkah (Mecca), Islam’s holiest site, will also be available.

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Clackmannanshire

Alloa Old Kirkyard and Mar & Kellie Mausoleum

new

28 September 2024

The parish church of St Mungo was established in the 14th century. It was enlarged and the tower raised in 1680-2 by the master mason Tobias Bauchop, whose house, built in 1695, still stands in Kirkgate. Around 1700, John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, built a private aisle with a burial vault on the north side of the church. He was exiled after leading the 1715 Jacobite Uprising in Scotland; in his later years he planned his own elaborate memorial to be erected in the church. He died in 1732, his body was brought home and he was buried in the family vault, but the memorial was never built. St Mungo's later became very overcrowded and was condemned in 1816: most of it was demolished and many stones were reused to build the new parish church in Bedford Place. The Mar & Kellie Mausoleum was designed by James Gillespie Graham for John Francis Erskine and was built on the site of the Mar Aisle. Some memorial plaques for members of the Erskine family were saved from the old kirk and reused in the mausoleum, the original ceiling of which was painted brightly and decorated with flowers and Rococo panels. It was partly restored in 1994-6. The old kirkyard contains a fascinating collection of early trade gravestones and fine memorials for many of the people responsible for the development of Alloa as one of Britain’s earliest industrial towns.

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Clackmannanshire

Alloa The Gate Charity

new

28 September 2024

29 September 2024

The Gate Charity was formerly a church designed by the Alloa -based architect Thomas Frame & Son and is in neo- Gothic style. It has a semi-octagonal apse at the south end and a large rose window in its north wall. The internal roof structure and ceiling are quite elaborate. It still has a north gallery and its original pews and pulpit. There are two stained glass windows in the apse, one dating to 1921 and quite worn, the other of 1937, with figures of Christ and St Andrew. This was moved from the West Free (later Chalmers) Church in Bank Street in 1970. The building ceased to be a church and has been altered and improved to accommodate projects to meet growing community needs. The main refurbishment, completed in 2023, finally realised the vision to create the space and environment to offer a real ‘Community Hub.’ with the opportunity to offer more projects, including sustainable ones which generate additional income, ensuring that The Gate Charity can continue to support local people for years to come. The kitchen was extended to allow more food-related projects to be offered, including a Community Café with an improved menu; the capability to run cookery classes and a catering service for both internal and external meetings and events. There are also better facilities to house the Café Xtra project, which provides, for a modest cost, lunches delivered to people's homes by friendly volunteers who offer a valuable welfare check, The latest initiative was to buy a small catering van enabling the supply of hot food to serve at Larder locations (a mobile Soup Pot). There have been recent trials of cooking surplus food stocks to deliver free nutritious meals to families; the first trip supplied ‘mince and tatties’ to over twenty adults and children in Sauchie and Clackmannan. They were extremely well received. We now offer free and delicious hot food various locations across the county on a fortnightly basis. The building also has a large conference/multipurpose activity room and an interview room, well equipped and furnished, thanks to generous donations, which allows us to hold meetings, run training courses, events, and fundraising activities. There will be guided tours and the chance to take part in small taster sessions of the services that we offer to the community.
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