Monday, June 30th Dollar - Kinross - Edrom - Dunning (and sundry points in between)

Robyn writes: Today we were back on the track of my Scottish ancestors once more - sooo many of them come from Clackmannanshire and Perthshire that I had quite a long list of localities to get through. If you are bored by family history; my apologies and you may as well skip to tomorrow straight away! We had a lovely breakfast as usual in the hotel then organised ourselves to head out. The day dawned with bright sunshine and dazzingly blue sky but even before we got down to breakfast, we could see cloud banks coming in from the north.

Our first port of call was the nearby Crook of Devon. This is the site of some of the most infamous witch trials of the 1600s and of great interest to me because not only did some of my ancestors sit in judgement on the poor witches (who were strangled and burnt), but the names of some of the witches occur on my family tree as well! We couldn't find any sign to the recent memorial to the witches, though, until we asked at the Post Office, where they told us that it's at the nearby castle. Unfortunately when we went there, it's closed on a Monday, so maybe we'll get back later in the week. The man at the Post Office was very helpful in showing us a map (which I photographed) to try and find Easter Balado, another of my ancestral homes. We were heading in that direction when Lex spotted a sign for Tillyochie, another ancestral hotspot, so we swung in to investigate. My ancestors the Dempsters lived at Wester Tillyochie, and we couldn't find any sign of a house called that. A young woman was riding her horse along so we stopped and spoke to her, and she told us that she lived at Tillyochie House, where her parents run "The Tack Room". We went and spoke to her mum, who told us that their (very nice) house was Georgian/Victorian. In the end, we couldn't find anything definite in the area - it's very, very frustrating this week not being able to get onto the internet and research things - I feel like I'm going in blind to a lot of these places. It seems fairly conclusive that the house is gone, though.

Easter Balado, home of Agnes Burt in the late 1600s

At least we had a massive stroke of luck with Easter Balado, though - there is now a fishery business there and the house is original! Very old, and I'm sure is the house where Agnes Burt, my many times great grandmother grew up in the 1670s. The man there was very obliging and happy for me to take photos of the outside of the house and yard.

From there we went on to Kinross, and found the (new-looking) church. A quick look inside confirmed that it was Victorian, so I spoke to the lovely ladies there who gave me directions to the old kirkyard and cemetery down beside Loch Leven. Here we struck family gold! Two Dempster family graves dating back to the 1600s. When I have better internet access, I'll do a special page for Thompson family members with all that I've found out. We spent ages scraping lichen etc off but finally managed to decipher most of the inscriptions on both graves, which let me say is nothing short of amazing after all these centuries. The cemetery is in the most beautiful locality - it's by the shores of Loch Leven, overlooking Castle Leven (the site where Mary, Queen of Scots made her daring escape, eventually throwing herself on the mercy of Elizabeth 1 of England - and look how well that worked out!) We looked but couldn't find any more family graves.

 Me meeting the ancestors! Lovely scenery to spend eternity in....

 

 Leven Castle across Loch Leven. Mary Queen of Scots didn't like it though, and escaped. And look what happened to her!

Dempster grave

Lunch was at the Loch Bistro overlooking the loch and castle - I had a fairly indifferent soup with stale bread, and Lex had crumbed Haggis balls with redcurrant sauce. He reported that the redcurrant was good; it sort of disguised the taste of the haggis!

Crumbed haggis balls, yum!

After Kinross, we headed for Perth. This is quite a large city with lots of grey granite buildings and a fairly dour looking city centre. I was chasing information on my Thompson ancestors but had no luck here, so while in the district we went on to Errol. This is a little town in Perthshire close to the shores of the Firth of Tay, where my Forrester ancestors came from. The church there was also suspiciously new and Victorian without a grave in sight, so I asked at the Post Office, where I was directed around the corner to the old kirk (now a workshop) and the graveyard behind it. Sadly, not a Forrester or Hill in sight, though as usual many of the stones are so weathered that they are unreadable. It began to rain so we said goodbye to Errol and headed for our last port of call for the day, the little town of Dunning.

This is the town where my great-great-great-great grandfather, John Thomson, was the schoolmaster for many years (circa 1790s-1800s). It has a wonderful old church, St Serf's, right in the middle of the town. The church and one house were the only buildings in town which escaped being burned to the ground by Jacobite troops in 1716. Lucky they left it alone, it is a lovely building over 800 years old so is where my family would have worshipped, and several of their children were baptised. It also contains a magnificent Celtic cross, the Dupplin Cross, which dates back to AD 800. This used to stand outside town but was brought inside the church a few years ago to protect it. The church is cared for by Historic Scotland, and the bloke there was most helpful - he checked the list of graves and there are none of my Thompsons buried there. He gave us an old map and we went to see if we could find where the original schoolhouse might have been, but the area around the school has changed too much and although we saw some very old houses, there was nothing definite. The street itself where the first school stood seems to have disappeared over the centuries. The Scottish weather started raining on us again so we decided to head for home at that stage! (It was nearly 5 o'clock.) It only took about half an hour to get back here through "Yetts o' Muckhart", which I think is the most wonderful village name we've come across so far. Nowhere is very far away here in Perthshire!

 Errol - St Serf's church

Once home, we relaxed for a while (Lex watched Wimbledon, I read) then went out in search of tea. The kitchen in our hotel is closed for two nights for renovation, and the pub next door has no food all this week, so there was nowhere in town we could get a sit-down meal (we were ignoring the possibility of a return to "Mo's Plaice" from the other night!) The girl in the bar was most obliging, though, and said if we got a takeaway she'd get us plates etc, so that's what we did. We had a HUGE Indian takeaway (very tasty) comfortably in the bar with a nice glass of wine / beer, so it was a very civilised way to have a takeaway! Tomorrow we'll probably do Chinese...