St. Fillans

[jsburbidge]

I have known for a while that my great-great grandfather Peter Anderson came from the village of St. Fillans in Perthshire, Scotland and emigrated to Canada in 1852, settling in the area of Renfrew which had been settled by the McNab setttlement ("chain migration": both he and his brother came over at different times and presumably knew settlers from Perthshire who were already in Canada:  Note that the "Laird" Archibald McNab who started the Ottawa Valley settlement was connected tightly to the Trossachs area at Callendar, where his predecessor had resided and where the local hotel sitll memorializes connections with the old rogue, and before that to the Abbey associated with St. Fillan.)

I also knew that Peter's father's grave was at St.Fillans, and actually had some photographs from the 1950's and 1970's (taken, respectively, by a first cousin twice removed and by my grandmother) of the gravestones, but with no context.

So when my family went over to celebrate my brother's fiftieth birthday in the Trossachs this summer, some of us decided to go on a visit to St. Fillans.

It was interesting because it pointed to a set of information which had been, as it were, in front of the people who had previously visited St. Fillans, but were far more interesting that just "here is the grave site", but had not ben passed on.

First. St. Fillans is a relatively new town founded at/near the Port of Lochearn around 1800. The people who lived there had mainly come from the clachan of Morell as part of the Highland Clearances.

Secondly, the gravestones are in a (now ruinous: photos show it having been much better kept up in the mid-50s) churchyard for the old church associated with St. Fillan himself, which stands a little ways to the south of the town (now across the local golf course and in the middle of a meadow, fenced off from the cattle).  This chapel saw active burials into the 20th century, but had been replaced for "normal" use by a church in the village itself sometime during the Victorian period.  It itself dates back to the late mediaeval period, and could go back (at least as a site with a chapel and possibly, in the pre-Reformation period, with local pilgrimages) to the sixth century.

("[St. Fillan] is said to have sat in a rocky seat on the top of Dunfillan, near Comrie. [The hill is close by the chapel in question, and is the site of an iron age fort]. The stone received the name of St Fillan's Chair, and till the end of last century [i.e. the 18th century] was associated with a superstitious remedy for rheumatism in the back. The person to be cured sat in the chair, and was then dragged down the hill by the legs, the saint's influence guaranteeing recovery.": from "Traces of the Cultus of St Fillan at Killallan, Renfrewshire",  by J. M. MacKinlay, Proceedings of the Archaeological Society, April 8, 1895)

Together, these items have a number of implications:

1) It would be incorrect to view St. Fillan's as any sort of "ancestral home": it housed about two (partial, in both cases) generations for a bit (my g-g-g-grandfather after he resettled in the valley, and my g-g-grandfather until he left Scotland period).

2) Any previous background on the family would be at best by luck.  Because John Anderson married a Drummond, and because she was descended from some documented Carmichaels who go back a little further, there is some older information on part of the family in the Glentarkan area, but the trail of the Andersons (who would seem to have originally been crofters) peters out amid the ruins of Morell.

3) We (or at least, my recent relatives) tended to see the settlement patterns through the wrong end of the telescope.  From my ancestors' perspective, moving out to the colonies was probably not the major break with the past: that break would have been the disruption of the way of life which accompanied the clearances, and the moving out to Canada -- where there was more farmland, no worse than what was available in Scotland -- would have been more of a sequel than the major shift itself.

I did not visit Morell, but there are some notes with pictures on the web: all that is left of Morell is some low ruins of old walls.

I have other Scots ancestors who were also from Perthshire via the Ottawa Valley, but they seem to have come from other areas than that near St. Fillans.