|
 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.
Information
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