Inchmahome Priory

A motor boat from the pier at Port of Menteith is the only way onto Inchmahome, the largest of the three islands in the Lake of Menteith, and the roofless walls waiting among its trees have stood there since 1238. In that year Walter Comyn, Earl of Menteith, founded a house on the island for a small community of Augustinian canons — clergy who lived together under a shared monastic rule, and who were known from their habits as the Black Canons. It was a priory rather than an abbey — a monastery headed by a prior, usually smaller than an abbey, one rank below the houses that answer to an abbot. There is some evidence that a church already stood on the island before Comyn’s foundation.

The name is older than the buildings. Inchmahome comes from the Gaelic Innis MoCholmaig, ‘island of St Colmaig’ — innis, island, joined to a saint’s name, which is how the small monastic islands of medieval Scotland were generally named.

The Comyns were among the most powerful families in thirteenth-century Scotland, and their patronage explains both the choice of island and the calibre of the visitors who followed. Their own country house stood on Inch Talla, another island in the same loch, so the canons were established within sight of their patron’s hall.

For a house of this size the guest list is remarkable. Robert the Bruce came three times, in 1306, 1308 and 1310 — visits generally read as political rather than devotional, since the first prior had sworn allegiance to Edward I of England. The future Robert II stayed in 1358. In 1547, after the Scots army was broken at Pinkie in the war later called the Rough Wooing, the four-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots was hidden on the island for a few weeks.

That same year began the end of the community. The office passed to John, Lord Erskine, one of the local landowners then being appointed to monastic headships without sharing the aims of the houses they governed; Erskine went on to hold Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh as well. After the Scottish Reformation no new priests were ordained here, and land and buildings drifted into secular hands — to the Erskine family in 1606, later to the Marquess of Montrose, until the 6th Duke of Montrose gave the island into State care in 1926.

Much of the original thirteenth-century structure survives, roofless but standing, and the island is now a scheduled monument looked after by Historic Environment Scotland. In the ruined chancel, the east end of the church where the altar stood, lie the author and politician Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham and his wife Gabriela, with a stone nearby commemorating his nephew and heir, Admiral A.E.M.B. Cunninghame Graham. Earlier burials recorded on the island include Walter Bailloch and Mary I, Countess of Menteith.

The crossing itself is short — a little under a kilometre of open water from the pier by the boat shed — but it is seasonal, and the boat is run by Historic Environment Scotland between March and September. There is no other way across.