Dance The Braes of Breadalbane 743

Ben Lawers soars nearly four thousand feet into the sky, a spire among the lesser steeples of the Braes of Breadalbane. Directly below stretches magnificent Loch Tay, with the village of Killin at one end and at the other, sixteen miles away, Kenmore, where the River Tay begins. To the northeast lie the Braes of Atholl and to the northwest, the boggy desolation of Rannoch Moor.

Admiring Nature in her wildest grace,
These northern scenes with weary feet I trace;
O’er many a winding dale and painful steep,
Th’ abodes of covey’d grouse and timid sheep,
My savage journey, curious, I pursue,
Till fam’d Breadalbane opens to my view.
The meeting cliffs each deep-sunk glen divides,
The woods, wild-scatter’d, cloth their ample sides;
Th’ outstretching lake, embosom’d ‘mong the hills,
The eye with wonder and amazement fills;
The Tay meand’ring sweet in infant pride,
The palace rising on his verdant side;
The lawns wood-fringed in Nature’s native taste,
The hillocks dropt in Nature’s careless haste;
The arches striding o’er the new-born stream;
The village glittering in the noontide beam –
* * * * *
Poetic ardors in my bosom swell,
Lone wand’ring by the hermit’s mossy cell;
The sweeping theatre of hanging woods,
Th’ incessant roar of headlong tumbling floods –
* * * * *
Here Poesy might wake her heav’n-taught lyre,
And look through Nature with creative fire;
Here, to the wrongs of Fate half reconcil’d,
Misfortune’s lighten’d steps might wander wild;
And Disappointment, in these lonely bounds,
Find balm to soothe her bitter rankling wounds;
Here heart-struck Grief might heav’nward stretch her scan,
And injur’d Worth forget and pardon man.

These lines – which should have ended with “The village glittering in the noontide beam” – were “Verses Written With A Pencil, Over The Chimney-Piece In The Parlour Of The Inn At Kenmore, Taymouth” by Robert Burns while on his Highland pilgrimage with William Nicol in 1787. His inspiration was the “Heights of Alba” as he stood on the bridge over the River Tay.

Situated at the foot of Drummond Hill, with its neat houses, shops, church and inn grouped around the village green, Kenmore has a rather planned look about it. As was the case with Inverary, by the 4th Duke of Argyll, and Grantown-on-Spey, by Sir James Grant, Kenmore was a mid-18th century “new town”, the original village having been improved and redesigned by the 3rd Earl of Breadalbane. On the edge of the town is Taymouth Castle, erected in 1801 by the 4th Earl, Lieutenant General John Campbell, on the site of Balloch Castle, built by the Earl’s ancestor, Grey Colin Campbell of Glenorchy, about 1580.

Killin (Cil Fhinn the Cell of Fingal) is the traditional seat of The MacNab, but after a series of debts, mortgages and sales that began as early as 1552, it came under the control of the Breadalbane Campbells, not to be regained until 1949 when the 22nd Chief, the late Archibald MacNab of MacNab, bought back the ancestral home and seven thousand acres of MacNab land from the Earl of Breadalbane. It was at Kinnell House that the 2nd Marquess of Breadalbane planted the famous Breadalbane Vine, a black Hamburg grape that has been producing bumper crops ever since 1832.

In its entirety, Breadalbane, a district of northern Perthshire, is a vast area of over one thousand square miles. It is bounded on the north by Atholl, on the south by Strathearn, on the east by Strathtay and on the west by Argyll and Lorn. Besides Ben Lawers and the Braes of Breadalbane, the territory also contains Ben More near Crianlarich in western Perthshire and Ben Lui near Dalmally in Argyllshire. The district is watered by the Orchy in Argyllshire and the upper Tay, the Dochart, the Lochay, the Lyon and the Almond in Perthshire.

The power of the Campbells of Breadalbane stemmed from the 15th century Black Colin of Glenorchy whose second wife, Margaret Stewart, brought him her inheritance of one-third of the lands of Lorn. Subsequent chiefs added to the family lands, in one way or another, so that they eventually reached east to west, from Aberfeldy, a few miles down the Tay from Kenmore, to Easdale, an island south of Oban, just off the coast of Argyll.