Christian Maclagan

[8] Daughter of distiller and chemist George Maclagan and Janet Colville of Stirling, she was born on the family's farm at Braehead near Denny.

[9] Her father died in 1818, as did her paternal grandfather, Frederick Maclagan, parish minister at Melrose,[10][11] and her mother moved the family to Stirling around 1820.

[12]: 124  She lived in a house in Pitt Terrace, a wealthy part of the town near St Ninian's Well and the modern Stirling Council offices.

[13] Her mother died in 1858, and until that time Christian Maclagan engaged in philanthropic activities, establishing a Sunday School and subscribing towards the cost of a library.

[14] Following her mother's death, Maclagan built the house 'Ravenscroft' in the Abercromby district of Stirling, where she went to live with her companion Jessie Hunter Colvin, a fellow antiquarian.

[17] The church was commissioned in memory of her brother, and made Maclagan the first recorded female client of the architect Frederick Thomas Pilkington.

The dismissal of her views could be due to sexist attitudes of her era, or due to the anthropological comments Maclagan would make alongside her archaeological studies, which were particularly influenced by her tendency to present the Scots as conducting a noble resistance to the Romans, even when she was discussing archaeological remains of buildings from times significantly before the Roman invasion.

[28] Possibly her greatest contribution to posterity was her meticulous collection of rubbings of Celtic Christian crosses and Pictish symbol stones, made from c 1850 onwards, and donated to the British Museum in 1895.

A crowdfunding project was launched in 2016 by Stirling Council's Archaeologist Dr Murray Cook to rediscover the broch that she discovered.

[35][36] In 2018 Cook also identified using Maclagan's records, a destroyed broch on Abbey Craig under the Wallace Monument, which radiocarbon dating demonstrated may have been one of the last hillforts built in Scotland.

[44][45] In 2016, a carving by Iain Chalmers was set up by the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum to commemorate Maclagan and her work.