Historic Kilbride

Kilbride was a place of consequence a long time before Oban existed. The name means the church of St Bride, and worship on this knoll in Lerags Glen goes back to at least the 6th century, with local tradition running further still to a sacred well dedicated to the Celtic goddess Brigid. The first hard date arrives in 1249, when Alexander II granted the see of Argyll "the Parish Church of St Bride the Virgin in Lorn". For much of the medieval period this was mainland Argyll's most important church, and it kept a school, one of only around a hundred in Scotland at the time, after James IV passed a law requiring the eldest sons of the gentry to be educated. Families walked four miles from the small village of Oban for services here. The ruin standing today is a chapel built in 1706 on the older church's footprint, abandoned in the 19th century and left to the brambles.

What pulls people down the glen now is the graveyard. There are 319 known graves, running from the 13th century to the present day, including a concentration of carved West Highland medieval grave slabs that Historic Environment Scotland rates among the most significant anywhere. The MacDougall Memorial Aisle, its keystone dated 1786 beneath the clan arms, holds the chiefs of one of Scotland's oldest clans. The first two permanent residents were Iain Ciar, the chief who rose for the Jacobites in 1715, spent years as an outlaw in Ireland, was captured and chained at Chatham Dockyard, then pardoned and allowed home to Dunollie as a tenant, and his wife Mary of Sleat, who had been turned out of the castle in his absence. He died in 1737 and was meant for the family plot at Ardchattan, but the weather across Loch Etive was too foul, so Kilbride got him.

Beside the aisle lie the O'Connachers, hereditary physicians to the MacDougalls, placed to serve the family in death as in life. Hidden in the long grass is the stone of Johnie of the Two Hearts, a 17th-century Campbell, carved with two hearts, a pistol and an angel. And a short walk away stands the Lerags Cross, raised in 1516 by Archibald Campbell in thanksgiving for surviving Flodden, thrown down after the Reformation for being too Catholic, and found broken in three pieces in the kirkyard before being pieced back together.

The site was rescued from dereliction by the Friends of Kilbride, a charity formed in 2015 that has spent the best part of £150,000 stabilising the walls. Entry is free, donations keep the work going, and if the trustee Liam Griffin is about, let him talk. QR codes around the site carry audio for quieter days.