Tour
Kenmore in beautiful Highland Perthshire
Kenmore. Lying on green knolls where the broad smooth Tay
issues from its great loch, under the long wooded hog's-back
of Drummond Hill, the white houses, white hotel and kirk
of Kenmore, all tastefully grouped around a wide 'place'
amid ancient trees, seem to speak of settled peace and serenity--by
no means the normal impression of this challenging, vehement
if beautiful land. Charm, a much misused word, is one that
might decently be applied here. The village of Kenmore might
appear to have been dropped down here as from some altogether
different, softer and non-Highland ambience.
Yet Kenmore's history and background conflicts notably with
this aura of peace. And always has done. It could hardly
be otherwise, with the principal seat of the great and turbulent
house of Campbell of Glenorchy, later Earls of Breadalbane,
close by. And long before the Campbells came, in the 5th
century, the area had been prominent. For, off the north
shore of the loch near by is the tiny wooded islet of Eilean
nan Bannoamh, the Isle of the Female Saints. Here died
Queen Sybilla, daughter of Henry I of England and wife of
Alexander I of Scotland, in ii 22. In memoriam, Alexander
founded a nunnery thereon, which became famous. Only once
a year its nuns were allowed to emerge from the isle's seclusion,
oddly enough to attend one of the six annual fairs which
kept Kenmore in a stir. One wonders who got most out of
this recurrent liberty? But sanctity did not save the Priory
at the Reformation. Campbell fortified it as another of
his many castles; it was besieged by Montrose; and later
held by General Monk.
With Taymouth Castle so near it would hardly have been thought
worth Campbell's while. This enormous blue-stone pile, now
government property and standing in its vast policies, after
being put to a number of uses, dates only from the early
9th century, succeeding a much less grandiose but authentic
16th century fortalice called the Castle of Balloch. To
consider it now is as good as a sermon on the vanity of
human ambitions This was the vaunted nerve-centre of one
of the greatest feudal empires in the land. From Taymouth,
the later Earls of Breadalbane ruled over a single estate
of 437,696 acres, as much as the three Lothians put together,
a property 00 miles long. Today all is dispersed. Presumably,
however grand, successive Earls failed to take after the
first of them, Sir John Campbell of Glenorchy (1635--1716),
the doubtful Jacobite, described as 'grave as a Spaniard,
cunning as a fox, wise as a serpent, and slippery as an
eel'. The building is at present used as a co-ed school
for the children of Americans in Europe.
It was the 3rd Earl who built the handsome bridge over Tay
in 1774, with the equivocal inscription proclaiming the
great generosity of King George who subscribed a large sum
towards the cost out of the fortified Jacobite estates.
It was the view from this bridge which inspired Robert Burns
to write his poem, in pencil, on the chimney-piece of the
Kenmore Inn, now the Hotel, part of which runs:
The
Tay meand'ring sweet in infant pride,
the
palace rising on its verdant side,
The
lawns wood-fring'd in Nature's native task,
the
hillocks dropt in Nature's careless haste,
The
arches striding o'er the newborn stream,
the
village glist'ning in the noontide beam
Some
have hailed this as the Bard's best exercise in English
heroics. I wonder?
The church on its green hillock is attractive, and dates
from 1760 --the work of the same well-doing 3rd Earl, replacing
one of 1579. The kirkyard here used to be part of the green
and market-place, the previous burial-ground being about
a mile away to the northeast, at the pre-Reformation church
site of Inchadney.
Much, much older than all this, even than the English princess's
death on the islet, is the very fine stone circle at Croftmoraig,
on the Aberfeldy road 3 miles to the east, one of the most
complete groups of standing-stones.
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