GARGUNNOCK’S EVOLUTION

12000 years ago ice, more than a kilometre thick, covered the area and the weight of it depressed the land below sea level.  As it melted and retreated the sea came in and covered the valley (whale bones have been found near the village)  Relieved of its over-burden the land gradually rose again, the sea retreated, forests grew and were cut down and peat accumulated up to 5 metres thick in places. Where the fertile clay was exposed people farmed in a rudimentary, subsistence fashion, living where they worked, but producing little surplus and ever vulnerable to famine, pestilence or poor weather.

Then along came new ideas in land management designed to improve profitability.  Peat removal, better drainage and improved agricultural methods, tools and eventually machinery designed to produce surpluses.  These improvements also tended to favour the creation of larger farms at the expense of smallones which displaced many people from the land into small settlements. In the early 1700s, to accommodate this the Laird of Gargunnock, Sir James Campbell, made available strips of land (feus) on either side of what is now the Main Street (or King’s Highway”) Many of these people became tradesmen or day labourers servicing the bigger farms.

So the village grew from perhaps just a cluster of houses adjacent to the Gargunnock Burn, until it contained about 90 houses at the end of the century as original feus became sub-divided and built on, mainly single storey and thatched. (See adjacent feus map)   That number of houses remained largely unchanged right through to the 1930s, by which time many of them were ruinous. Those that were not were certainly far behind modern standards of hygiene, many with dry toilets or ones connected to rudimentary septic tanks in gardens up to the mid 1950s. Piped rather than garden well water was only available from 1910.

Thereafter the laying of public sewers, the redevelopment of part of the Main Street by the local authority, the renovation of older properties with the help of generous improvement grants and an increase in new-build houses either individually or as private schemes has increased the number of dwellings to its present level of c308 in the village plus another 70 or so in the outlying parish.

Gargunnock Book

Apart from brief references to the village in various Gazetteers throughout the years there has been only one book on the village ever published, and an excellent one it is too.  Its author, Ian McCallum BEM, came here to live for a few years in Trelawney Cottage in the Square (formerly The Guest House), around the millennium.  An ex-army man he became a professional genealogist which led to him researching the history of his own house which in turn developed into a history of the village.

Copies of the Gargunnock book are still available from Amazon meantime.

Duncan McNeil’s Talk on Gargunnock Parish thro’ the Ages

The chap on the left is Duncan McNeil who spent all of his life working for Gargunnock Estate as did his father, Dugald, before him.

In 1947 Duncan gave a talk in the then newly created church hall in Station Road about Gargunnock Parish.  His talk was based on the two available Statistical Accounts for Gargunnock Parish (the third wasn’t published till 1960) supplemented by his own unique view of the current community and some of the characters in it.

I found his hand-written script in Stirling Archives and although that would normally mean that I couldn’t publish it here I also discovered that it had been serialised in the old Gargunnock Quarterly way back so was already in the public domain.

It is well worth a read in advance of a study of the three full Statistical Accounts contained elsewhere on this site.

Just click on the photo to view or download it for reading offline.