Kilmacolm: a History by David Roe. Introduction
Who would have thought that a quiet and respectable
village like Kilmacolm would have had such a colourful past. It is
difficult to imagine the village and its surroundings as a setting for
battles, sieges, feuds, intrigues and civil disorders. But all this– and
more– happened in Kilmacolm during its eventful history.
From pre-historic times, long before the name of the village was even
thought of, through all the major historical periods Kilmacolm has its
story to tell. In the fields and moors around the village is the
evidence of prehistoric settlements and tombs from the Stone Ages, the
Bronze Age and the Iron Age: of Roman roads, forts and signalling towers
following the line of the Roman frontier across the parish, designed to
keep out the unruly highlanders from across the Clyde: and of Dark Age
settlements with their tools and equipment, bringing the story to the
time of recorded history.
During the eventful times when feudal lairds ruled the land, a Kilmacolm
laird, Lord Lyle of Duchal, was a ringleader in a rebellion against the
king. It was a serious challenge that brought the king and his army to
Duchal Castle, a couple of miles to the west of Kilmacolm. The villagers
watched in awe as the roads were cleared to give passage to the king's
army and his huge cannon, dragged through the village by teams of oxen.
The canon made short work of the castle, but by this time Lyle had
slipped away to the safety of the more secure fortress at Dumbarton,
leaving his unfortunate followers to their fate.
At this time loyalties and allegiances changed at a bewildering pace,
and only a few years later the king was back at Duchal, this time as the
guest of Lord Lyle who was now his loyal supporter. The king had his
sights on Lord Lyle’s cousin, Marion Boyd, who was staying at the
castle. Marion Boyd became the king’s mistress, and some time later bore
him a child at the castle.
All of the lairds spent a good deal of their time embroiled in bloody
feuds, but it was the Cunningham family of Finlaystone (then part of the
parish of Kilmacolm) whose feud with the Montgomerys of Ayrshire became
the most deadly and intractable ever known in Scotland. It lasted for
two centuries, through seven generations of the Cunningham family and
the reigns of six sovereigns. It was a major conflict during which
several of the lairds and an unknown number of their peasants met with
violent deaths, and several castles were razed to the ground.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Kilmacolm was in the
thick of the religious upheavals at the time of the Reformation. John
Knox visited the castle at Finlaystone to dispense what was possibly the
first Protestant communion in Scotland. In the aftermath of the demise
of the old religion, Kilmacolm ministers were ejected from their
churches and took to preaching in the fields. New ministers were imposed
and found themselves preaching in empty churches.
The village was not spared the horrors of the late seventeenth century
when the persecution of witchcraft was at its height. The moors above
Kilmacolm were said to be a favourite spot for witches to rendezvous
with the devil, and Kilmacolm was unfortunate to get a minister who was
zealous in seeking out witches. He claimed to find one in the parish,
but luckily for her he left the parish before she could be put to trial.
By the eighteenth century, the village was a thriving place. Upwards of
thirty muslin weavers kept a weekly carrier going to Paisley. Market
fairs were held regularly, where people congregated to meet their
friends and to trade their farming produce and cattle. Afterwards they
had a choice of half a dozen alehouses for their refreshment- a
surprising number for a village that was dry for much of the twentieth
century, and had a population only a fraction of its present size. Twice
a year people flocked to the village from all the neighbouring parishes,
walking from as far afield as Largs for the famous ‘Kilmacolm Preachings’,
sacrament days that had all the characteristics of Burn’s ‘Holy Fair’.
The neighbouring parish churches closed for the event, their ministers
coming to Kilmacolm to help. It was a marathon of preaching from morning
until night. Between the sermons, many felt the need for liquid
refreshment and kept the alehouses busy. What with the crowds, the
excitement of the occasion and the effects of alcohol, things got out of
hand. The Rev. James Murray described the event a century later, no
doubt consulting the records of his predecessors. He could only hint at
the more extreme behaviour : ‘Drunken men and women reeled homewards
shouting and singing, with profane and filthy language. It was attended
also with even grosser moral delinquencies’
Over the next few decades, Kilmacolm went into a period of decline as
the innovations of the Industrial Revolution and new methods of
transport passed the village by. As yet there was no railway, and
Kilmacolm was too far from the Clyde to be able to take advantage of the
new paddle steamers. The fairs and the Kilmacolm Preachings came to an
end. By the start of the Victorian era the village came close to
disappearing altogether from the map, until the railway came to the
rescue, making it possible for wealthy merchants to set up their
desirable residences in the unspoilt environment of Kilmacolm and
commute to their places of work in Glasgow and Paisley. The untidy
cluster of houses and barns soon gave way to the handsome villas of the
incomers, the population grew and the village began to take on its
modern character, soon shedding the image of its colourful and sometimes
disreputable past.
When in the 1890‘s James Murray, minister of the parish, started work on
his book Kilmacolm, A Parish History, he had no great expectations of
uncovering any events of great importance. As he glumly remarked in his
introduction:
‘...no event of national importance has taken place within its borders;
... few of its inhabitants have attained to eminence either in thought
or action... no poet has drawn attention to the beauty of its scenery,
or invested its hills and dales with the halo of romance’.
It was an unpromising beginning. Yet as you read Murray’s book, you
discover – somewhat buried within his restrained prose- that in earlier
times Kilmacolm was anything but a dull place. It seems that Murray
wrote his introduction before writing the body of his book and never
troubled to go back and revise it in the light of his research. His work
has long been an important source of information about Kilmacolm's
history, though it is now over a hundred years old and not easy to
obtain, being long out of print.
A few years before Murray published his history, Matthew Gemmill, a
schoolmaster in Bridge of Weir, published extensive historical notes
about the village in the Paisley and Renfrewshire Gazette, which were
issued in book form in 1892 as Kilmacolm Past and Present, a source from
which James Murray almost certainly drew. In 1856, James Slater, another
school teacher, wrote about the village in articles published in the
Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette entitled A Run through
Kilmacolm. And in 1872 Alexander S Gibb published his book Much about
Kilmacolm, A Famous Old Health-Giving Part of Scotland. More recently,
in 1975 Charles Bowser published A Short History of the Life and Times
of The Old Kirk, and in 1993 Elizabeth Main’s A Kirk without a Steeple:
A History of the Old Kirk and Parish of Kilmacolm gives us a more up to
date account dealing principally with the history of the Old Kirk. Other
histories and personal reminiscences are listed in the bibliography
Many of the early accounts focus on that period in the early nineteenth
century when Kilmacolm was viewed by the outside world as something of a
curiosity, a remote and secluded place that had been left behind by
modern developments. ‘Out of the world and into Kilmacolm’ they used to
say, even though it is only seven miles from Greenock, two or three
hours away if you were able to hitch a ride on the daily milk cart.
Alexander Gibb confidently asserted:
‘We may safely say that it is as queer and droll-looking a hamlet as any
in broad Scotland’.
Matthew Gemmill noted that Kilmacolm had been described as:
‘Territorially the largest parish in Renfrewshire, and spiritually the
most destitute, dark and neglected’
(a view that he did not share however). James Slater found the people
‘somewhat quaint in language and uncouth in appearance’, and the village
itself:
‘an irregular cluster of barns, byres and cart sheds, tagged onto the
end of ranges of low thatched houses of all shapes, and standing in all
positions, their exterior appearance giving unmistakable evidence that
they were not erected in the present century. .... No public works are
within its boundaries, no tall brick chimneys are seen blowing forth
volumes of smoke to taint the fine and salubrious air, nor is the clank
of machinery to be heard’
None of the early accounts has much to say about prehistoric or Roman
times in Kilmacolm, about which little was then known. Since then,
modern archaeological techniques have provided a great deal of
information to help complete the story of Kilmacolm from pre-historic to
modern times.
Since these early histories were written Kilmacolm has grown
considerably in size, but otherwise remains substantially unchanged from
the pattern set by the Victorian villa-dwellers, who used their
considerable influence to ensure that as Kilmacolm entered the twentieth
century they could continue to enjoy the village in its peaceful rural
setting, with:
‘no public works within its boundaries, no tall brick chimneys seen
blowing forth volumes of smoke to taint the fine and salubrious air, and
no clank of machinery to be heard’.