Balquhidder and Kirkton Glen

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Balquhidder and Kirkton Glen comprise a scattered (but very friendly) community and real Highland settlement, along with the side glen (I mean Kirkton Glen), which runs north and at right angles to the main Balquhidder Glen. There is a lot of heritage here - not just Rob Roy's grave - though it's also quite close to all the resources of the Lowlands of central Scotland.

Because of the setting amid the hills, Balquhidder and Kirkton Glen are well worth a visit. Many visitors stop off because of the Clan Gregor connections. Fewer though put on their hiking boots and head along the path, behind the church, that leads up into Kirkton Glen itself. Here are my notes from a trip there a little while back.

(Blog entry) It is more than twenty years since I last visited the final resting place of that famous old rogue and folk hero Rob Roy Macgregor. He lies by the old kirk (church) in Balquhidder Glen, north of Callander, off an important road that eventually leads west to Oban or Fort William. When we visited, on the Highlander's grave there was a large sprig of Scots pine, laid there by the Clan Gregor Society on his birthday. But there was also some miscellaneous bric-a-brac and a large amount of coins. I don't remember that from the old days, when I passed this way a lot. Nice to see he's still popular. (And locally based Scottish tour guide Charles Hunter tells me the money goes to charity on a regular basis.)

Talking of remembering, we (one son and two dogs) visited the grave because we had just been walking in Balquhidder and Kirkton Glen, taking a there-and-back-again trip to the watershed to the north of Balquhidder. The path up by Balquhidder and Kirkton Glen starts behind the church with the Macgregor grave. (Hence the name - the glen with the 'kirk-toun' or church-township, obviously.) I had a memory of most of the track being in dense woodland. 'The lower slopes of the glen are completely muffled by mature plantations' was how I put it in the solemn and creaky style I used in a walking guidebook published years before. So, not only was I walking with three individuals who weren't even around the last time I had passed that way (in 1986), but the glen itself was completely different from my recollection. The glen's conifer plantations had been felled around the mid 1980s and the subsequent replanting was also complete.

View back down Kirkton Glen towards Balquhidder from the watershed and the base of the Meall an Fhiodhain crags. Please note the dog is a real dog. See text below.

Today, the head of the glen is visible for much of the way up. I could recall from the first trip all those years ago that I didn't much like it, to be quite honest - and I only put the walk into the guidebook because there was some good views and interesting botany at the top of the glen. But it is much more open now and we plodded on cheerily enough, leaving the young woods behind for the grassy rises that lead towards the head of the pass and the base of the craggy face with its ancient rock fall below Meall an Fhiodhain (Anyone offering a translation here? I note 'fiodh' as timber, but 'fiodhan' as a cheese-vat. Maybe this is a reference to herds pastured here in summer, but I could be bluffing. Or I need a bigger Gaelic dictionary. Or the Ordnance Survey made a spelling error. Surely not!) .

In the old days, these high passes, such as the one leading up from Balquhidder and Kirkton Glen, were commonly traversed by the local native folk. Now they are lonely places, except for walkers or hardy anglers trying their luck with the wild trout in Lochan an Eireannaich (the little loch of the Irish - no, I don't know why). This lonely stretch of water lies near the head of the pass. From the nearby slope we could see north and downwards to Glen Dochart with its busy main road connection eventually leading through to the western seaboard. But, below a grey sky and with the chilling wind rising in this exposed spot, we probably felt the same discomfort and urge to drop back into the summery glens that many a Highlander of old must have felt, with only coarse plaid for protection. It just seemed a forlorn spot, with the gloomy weather adding to the ambience.

Lochan nan Eireannaich. Spooky kind of place. Or maybe it was just me.

To make matters slightly more unsettling, this is the setting for the Kirkton Glen ghost! This is a tale still current in Balquhidder and it also has appeared in print. Apparently, more than one group of walkers have seen the figure of a Highlander in 18th century garb wandering about the nearby rocks, with a large lurcher dog by his side. He sometimes appears below the onlookers but never re-appears from behind the rocks or dips in the slope. Oh, well, if you're going to see the local Balquhidder ghost or things that belong to another time, then the top of Kirkton Glen is certainly a place where the imagination can get to work!

Near here was seen the ghostly figure of a Highlander and his dog. But not in this pic. That's my son fooling around.

So we finished our sandwiches and made our way down. Yes, you could say the place had atmosphere!

Read more on Rob Roy Macgregor and his association with Balquhidder and Kirkton Glen. - or return to the Scotlandinaweek home page.