THE PARISH OF 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 in the form of island bogs. Where the fertile clay was exposed people farmed in a rudimentary, subsistence fashion, scattered  across the land, living where they worked, but producing little surplus and ever vulnerable to famine, pestilence or poor weather.  

Gargunnock as a village owes its existence to the agricultural reforms that took place early in the 18th century, led locally by General John Fletcher Campbell of Boquhan Estate, which resulted in amalgamation of small farms into larger ones resulting in the displacement of cottars. Cottars were a class of people who held a small amount of land by courtesy of tenants of larger farms who provided them with a small cottage, a few rigs (strips of land that could be cultivated) usually in total about an acre, and the right to graze a single cow or a few sheep; in return they provided a reserve supply of labour to the main tenant farmers when additional labour was required at, for example, ploughing or harvest time.

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.

 

The advantage to the tenant farmers was that the cottars could be laid off for much of the rest of the year. The land allocated to them tended to be poor marginal land and rough pasture but nevertheless provided the cottar with stone and wood for building, peat and turf for fuel, and grazing. Many cottars were also versatile, possessing skills as weavers, blacksmiths, wall builders and carpenters etc in an effort to make ends meet. They had no legal rights to the land and lived on it at the sole discretion of their masters, the tenant farmers.

To accommodate their displacement and prevent the depopulation of the countryside (landowners still needed day workers on their estates) from 1727 the Laird of Gargunnock, Sir James Campbell, made available strips of land (feus) on either side of the old military road from Stirling to Dumbarton, on which land the displaced cottars could build a house.

The feus were in half- and quarter-acre plots to allow the people to grow vegetables or perhaps keep a cow. Initially 29 plots were allocated, but most were rapidly sublet and subdivided to allow others to build houses until they numbered 90 by the end of the century, indeed that changed little into the 20th century. Initially they would have had 2 rooms and thatched, later pan-tiled, roofs although some became more substantial through time.

The new ideas in farm management that were designed to improve profitability did so.  Peat removal, better drainage and improved agricultural methods, tools and eventually machinery all contributed to the creation of surpluses. Things were on the up. In the village a good living could be made servicing the surrounding area as day labourers, servants, home-based weavers, tradesmen, sock-knitters, butchers etc. but it was no to last as the industrial revolution came to the fore and destroyed many of the home-based industries.  Many people left for the big cities to find work in the factories and Gargunnock became a bit of a ghost town with a fair proportion of ruinous, abandoned properties.

Those that were not were certainly far behind modern standards of hygiene, most with dry toilets or ones connected to rudimentary septic tanks in gardens up to the mid 1950s. Clean piped water rather than that drawn from garden wells was only available from 1910 due to the exceptional benificence of the local minister, Rev Robert Stevenson.

Thereafter the laying of public sewers in the 1950s, the redevelopment in the 60s of part of the Main Street by the local authority, the renovation of older properties with the help of generous improvement grants from the 1960s and an increase in new-build houses either individually or as private schemes on land essentially released by Miss Stirling of Gargunnock Estate, or on the Glebe by the Church of Scotland, increased the number of dwellings to its present level of c313 in the village plus another 70 or so in the outlying parish.  Relaxation in planning laws appears to have generated a recent boom in single dwellings or small developments throughout the carse also.

Gargunnock Book

Apart from 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.

It is to Ian that we now appreciate the history of the development of the village and the immediately surrounding area i.e. the Parish of Gargunnock, encompassing mainly the estates of Gargunnock, Leckie & Boquhan.  Before 2000 we were largely ignorant of the fact that the village had been manufactured over a relatively short period of 65 years during the 18th century.

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