Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
t w o
the Planet in the Village:
Comrie, Scotland, 1788-1897
the village of Comrie lies just south of the Scottish Highlands, where three
rivers meet in a green and gentle valley; the name Comrie supposedly
derives from the Gaelic for “confluence.” Its population peaked at three
thousand in the 1790s. By then, according to contemporaries, the locals'
“attachment to the soil” was already wearing thin: “the people are pouring
down in numbers every season to the adjacent villages and towns in quest
of labour and of bread.”
1
the consolidation of small farms and the absence
of a “staple trade” discouraged the young from staying; a nearby woolen
mill, a prime employer, closed in 1866. By 1831 the population had fallen
to 2,622, and by 1881 it was a mere 1,871. In these conditions, the locals
had high hopes for tourism. the nearby spring had long drawn crowds for
its healing powers, having been blessed by Saint Fillan in the ninth century.
Sufferers of rheumatism were instructed to climb a hill and sit on a rock
known as “the saint's chair,” after which they were to be pulled down the
hill by their legs. Now, in the nineteenth century, locals praised Comrie's
scenery as “sublime,” as a Scottish Switzerland. By the 1880s, there were two
coach connections daily to the train station at Crieff, and a rail line finally
reached Comrie in 1893.
2
Comrie was, nonetheless, as quiet a village as one could find in central
Scotland in the nineteenth century. Its tranquility seemed guaranteed when
it became a center of the temperance movement. As one temperance League
lecturer noted in the 1880s, “No better spot could be selected for earnest
thought and consecration . . . it sleeps quietly amongst an amphitheatre of
hills. No railway train or noisy factory disturbs the stillness. Everything sug-
gests peace and repose.” A native son of the nineteenth century imagined
the village back in the 1790s as “a most primitive place . . . unprofaned not
