Historic Kilbride

Kilbride mattered a long time before Oban did. The name means the church of St Bride, and worship on this knoll in Lerags Glen goes back to at least the 6th century. Local tradition pushes further still, to a sacred well kept for the Celtic goddess Brigid. The first hard date turns up in 1249, when Alexander II granted the see of Argyll "the Parish Church of St Bride the Virgin in Lorn". For a good stretch of the medieval period this was the most important church on the Argyll mainland. It even kept a school, one of only a hundred-odd in Scotland at the time, after James IV brought in a law requiring the gentry to educate their eldest sons. People walked the four miles from Oban, then a small village, to sit through services here. The ruin standing today is a chapel built in 1706 on the older church's footprint. It was abandoned in the 19th century and the brambles got it.

The graveyard is what pulls people down the glen now. There are 319 known graves, the earliest from the 13th century, the newest recent, and among them a concentration of carved West Highland grave slabs that Historic Environment Scotland rates as nationally significant. The MacDougall Memorial Aisle holds the chiefs of one of Scotland's oldest clans, its keystone dated 1786 beneath the clan arms. The first two permanent residents were Iain Ciar, the chief who rose for the Jacobites in 1715, spent years on the run in Ireland, got captured and chained at Chatham Dockyard, then somehow won a pardon and went home to Dunollie as a tenant, and his wife Mary of Sleat, who'd been turned out of the castle in his absence and made to work for her keep. He died in 1737. The family plot was across Loch Etive at Ardchattan, but the weather that week was too foul to cross, so Kilbride got him instead.

The stones around the aisle keep their own stories. The O'Connachers, hereditary physicians to the MacDougalls, lie right beside the family they served. Somewhere in the long grass is Johnie of the Two Hearts, a 17th-century Campbell whose stone carries two hearts, a pistol and an angel, and nobody is entirely sure why. A short walk away stands the Lerags Cross, raised in 1516 by Archibald Campbell in thanks for coming home from Flodden alive, thrown down after the Reformation for looking too Catholic, and found broken in three bits in the kirkyard before being pieced together again.

The site owes its survival to the Friends of Kilbride, a charity formed in 2015 that has put the best part of £150,000 into stabilising the walls. Entry is free and donations keep the work going. If the trustee Liam Griffin is about when you visit, let him talk. QR codes dotted round the site carry audio for the quieter days. It's a special place, and hardly anyone knows it's there.