Camelon, a village and a quoad sacra parish in Falkirk parish, Stirlingshire. The village stands on the northern bank of the Forth and Clyde Canal, 1¼ mile W by N of the town of Falkirk, near the site of a Roman town. It long presented a squalid, woe-begone appearance, but began about 1866 to undergo material improvement; and it now has a post office under Falkirk, with money order and savings' bank departments, a local savings' bank (1867), 2 nail factories, 3 iron foundries, a church (1840; 660 sittings), the Falkirk cemetery, and a public school (1876). The ancient Roman town stood on the river Carron, which winds ½ mile to the N; figures generally in modern notices of it as Old Camelon; is identified by some antiquaries with the Roman Ad Vallum; and, having this peculiarity that it lay just outside Antoninus' Wall, was connected therewith by an iter leading onward to the country N of the Forth. It appears, on good evidence, to have been a seaport, under circumstances when not only the river Carron was navigable beyond its site, but the Firth of Forth covered great part of what is now the Carse of Falkirk; and, between the retiring of the Romans and the 9th century, it is said to have been continuously occupied as a town by the Picts. An anchor was exhumed at it in 1707; two stones bearing unmistakable marks of the Roman chisel were discovered early in this century, built up in the front of one of the houses of the present village; and twelve gates of brass are fabled to have pierced the walls of the ancient city. In 1851, too, the cutting of the Polmont Junction railway exposed a sewer, which, being excavated about 1868 by the late Sir Jas. Simpson and Dr Hill Burton, yielded fragments of glass and of pottery, partly of Samian ware. The quoad sacra parish is in the presbytery of Linlithgow and synod of Lothian and Tweeddale; its minister's stipend is £120. Pop. of village (1841) 1340, (1861) 1308, (1871) 1838, (1881) 1550; of q. s. parish (1871) 3286, (1881) 2724.—Ord. Sur., sh. 31,1867. See Roy's Military Antiquities (1793); pp. 61,107, of Glennie's Arthurian -Localities (1869); and Nimmo's Stirlingshire (3d ed. 1880).
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