The village of Cairndow lies at the head of Loch Fyne in Argyll. The Gazetteer of Cairndow is a study to map land ownership and land use of a West Highland village Cairndow, over the 20th century, with emphasis at three key points in time. Ie. 1905, when the Nobles bought all of the parish as a sporting estate and cleared the sheep for stalking; via 1950 with its post war changes but farming practices relatively traditional (and clearly remembered by older people here today); to the end of the century with multiple land owners and the changing and diverse economy.
We didn’t envisage how time consuming this would be. Creating a data base by Design is Central that would do what we wanted to do, and delineating the changing land ownership in itself took many months.
So we then decided to take just a section - Glen Fyne – to create a detailed website, this has now been extended to cover the whole of Cairndow, the parish of Kilmorich, creating a Gazetteer of Cairndow. What you see here - is largely thanks to the inventiveness of Sam Coley of Samteq and the hard work of Dot Chalmers of Here We Are. However none of this would be possible without the knowledge of the land and the memory bank of many local people who have lived in Cairndow all their lives, in particular Alistair McCallum, Ernie MacPherson and Alice Beattie .
Archaeological detail was added to the website by Tom Addyman and Tanja Romankiewicz from Addyman Archaeology, who surveyed and recorded ’Benvalagan’, an old settlement at the Head of Glen Fyne, Cairndow. In 2024 the population of Cairndow was 139.
This website will be continuously added too. If you have any information on Cairndow which we could add please get in touch. Thank you.
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