Adrian Caffery follows in the footsteps of Scotland's great poet Robert Burns.
The picture-postcard Perthshire village of Kenmore has more than one claim to fame.
Tiny in size but big on history, it boasts the oldest inn in Scotland and the oldest tree in Europe and has welcomed both Queen Victoria and the poet Robert Burns.
It’s an idyllic, 18th century model village that’s almost an island, with Loch Tay to its south and west and the head of the River Tay to its north.
Kenmore’s isolated qualities can best be appreciated by taking the easy, zig-zag footpath up the forested slopes of Drummond Hill to a clearing near the top of its 300m summit.
The village has changed little in 250 years, its one street lined by pretty white cottages with an elegant church at one end and the elaborate stone gateway to Taymouth Castle at the other.
The original landowners gave the cottages to people who brought a skill to Kenmore and there is still a plaque on the wall of one of the properties dedicated to the ‘village nurse’.
The post office/shop is still called the ‘Telegraph Office’ and Kenmore Hotel – said to be Scotland’s oldest inn with origins in the 16th century – has a porch with curvaceous tree trunks for columns.
Robert ‘Rabbie’ Burns was so struck by the village’s character that in 1787, while on the pretty bridge over the river, he composed a poem extolling the area’s virtues.
He later wrote the poem in pencil on the chimney breast of the fireplace in what the Kenmore Hotel now calls its Poet’s Bar. It can still be read there today, and here’s part of it:
Th’ outstretching lake, imbosomed ‘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-fring’d 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
Kenmore’s other famous visitor was Queen Victoria, who stayed at the neo-gothic, 19th century Taymouth Castle, which contained some of the most opulent interiors of the era.
It was Victoria’s first trip to Scotland and she was so impressed by its natural beauty that she bought her own estate at Balmoral. Her journal served to popularise Kenmore and the Highlands.
Plans to restore Taymouth Castle to its former glory and turn it into the UK’s first seven-star hotel are ongoing.
But if that sounds a little pricey there’s an outstanding alternative just across Rabbie’s bridge on a 120-acre site at the foot of Drummond Hill that was formerly the castle’s home farm.
Mains of Taymouth has a stunning selection of four and five-star cottages, luxury lodges and contemporary mews-styles houses and was voted ‘Best Holiday Cottage Complex in Britain’ by the Sunday Times.
