High above the valley of the River Tilt, within the policies of Blair Castle, sits this beautifully designed and situated eye-catcher. A walk through woodland brings one to the folly and, turning, a wonderful panorama is revealed.

The Whim as it looks today was built by Lord John Murray (1729-1774), who was already managing the Blair Castle (aka Blair Atholl) estate before he succeeded his uncle as the 3rd Duke of Atholl in 1764. He was said to have ‘with great judgement’ laid out walks that ‘cannot fail to attract the admiration of every traveller of taste.’

The idea for a hilltop folly originated in his uncle’s lifetime, and a drawing in the Blair archives, dated 1747 and tentatively attributed to William Adam, shows the arched screen.

It is not clear if this structure was built at that date, or put on hold. But in 1760 a new design, which also included two pavilions in front of the screen, was proposed and drawings and a model were made. The building work was completed in 1762: no architect is recorded and the folly as built has been attributed to the Duke himself. An estate map of 1780, surveyed by the Blair estate factor James Scobie, shows the screen and pavilions, and is annotated ‘The Wheem’. A few years later Scobie included the Whim on another of his maps:

The two little square pavilions are just big enough to shelter in, but the arched central screen is flat, and built only to catch the eye and ornament the landscape.

A visitor in 1799 wasn’t quite sure what to call the assemblage, and settled for a ‘kind of summerhouse’.

John Murray had also been unsure what to name his hillside folly. The story (recounted a century later) is that upon completion of the building, he asked the minister of Blair Atholl, Mr Stewart, what it might be called. Mr Stewart, after considering a little, remarked that it was only a whim. “Well, Whim let it be”, replied His Grace.

This area of Perthshire was popular with 18th century tourists, and there was much to pack into their itinerary, so only the more intrepid seem to have made their way up to the ‘singular building’. As well as functioning as an eye-catcher within the landscape, the Whim was also what was then termed a ‘station’ – a place from which the most perfect views could be obtained. From the Whim there were vistas across the Blair Castle designed landscape with the river and extensive plantations, and a wider view of the ‘whole course of the valley’.

The Whim, listed by Historic Scotland at grade B, is beautifully maintained and will delight visitors for many years to come. Atholl Estates are also to be applauded for the series of way-marked trails that can be explored. The Banvie Burn Walk includes The Whim and, with a short diversion, the Balvenie Pillar, another fascinating landscape feature. It was quite magical on a bright November day last year with the fallen leaves fissling underfoot.

The autumnal equinox fell on Friday, 23 September 2022, so summer is officially over, and we can look forward once more to the gorgeously gaudy hues of autumn.

The walks can be found here https://d1ssu070pg2v9i.cloudfront.net/pex/athollestates/2021/06/21085312/Walks-from-Blair-Atholl-1.pdf

For more on visiting Blair Castle see https://atholl-estates.co.uk/blair-castle/

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In September 1842 the 2nd Marquis of Breadalbane and his family welcomed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Taymouth Castle. They were greeted, with great ceremony, by pipers and by crowds of well-wishers in full highland costume, and a gun salute was fired. The Queen was charmed. During their brief stay Albert went hunting and shooting, returning with a bumper bag each evening, whilst the young monarch spent the days walking and riding in the park.

One day the royal party walked to the Dairy. Queen Victoria wasn’t sure quite how to describe the building, but settled for ‘a sort of Swiss Cottage, built of quartz’. As well as its practical purpose, the Dairy was also a belvedere, with the upper room and balcony giving a magnificent view of the River Tay flowing into Loch Tay, the pretty village of Kenmore, and up the loch to the hills and distant mountains.

Catherine Sinclair, visiting a couple of years earlier, had a more fanciful description: ‘nothing enchanted me more than the fancy dairy, built some years ago of transparent spar, like rough blocks of ice […] It looks as if an ice-berg had been stranded here and excavated for the occasion’.

The Queen’s own journal entry about the visit to the dairy is short, but by ‘her Majesty’s command’ Sir Thomas Dick Lauder wrote a detailed account of her visit to Scotland, published as Memorial of the Royal Progress in Scotland in 1843. He describes how the Queen walked in by the kitchen door, much to the surprise of the ‘damsels of the Dairy’ who were ‘astonished to see so fine a lady, though they could hardly have guessed that it was the fair Sovereign of these mighty kingdoms’. (This seems highly unlikely, as the workers on the estate had been preparing for the royal visit for weeks, but we must allow Sir Thomas his hyperbole.)

The dairymaids escorted the Queen around the Dairy, where she tried her hand at making butter before asking to try oaten cake. This caught her hosts unawares: they had nothing so rustic, but instead only a plate of ‘delicate’ cakes sent from the castle. The Queen did however enjoy a glass of ‘fine cold milk’ before continuing her walk. She was so impressed with the building that she revisited with Prince Albert on her final morning at Taymouth; the weather was clear and bright and she took her consort up onto the balcony to admire the view, where the Prince ‘entered fully into her Majesty’s admiration of it’.

Her visit was also celebrated in a poem by Samuel Fergusson. Be prepared – it’s very much of it’s time…

And then with steps of love descends
To learn some dairy lore;
And churning with her snow-white hands
Looks lovlier than before.

Tommore (or Tom-more), the hill on which the Dairy stands, was formerly home to a little 18th century pavilion, the Temple of Venus, which like its replacement had been so placed to take in the marvellous view of the lake and mountains.

The Temple of Venus was maintained until 1814, but demolished only a few years later to make way for the Dairy. Erected in 1830-31 to the design of William Atkinson (c.1774-1839), a pupil of James Wyatt, the ‘elegant and costly dairy’ rapidly became a highlight of a tour of the ‘celebrated pleasure grounds at Taymouth’. Its builder, John Campbell, created Marquis of Breadlabane in 1831, died in 1834, and it was his son the 2nd Marquis, who welcomed his sovereign to Taymouth Castle in 1842.

Sadly, as the photographs here show, the grade A listed Dairy is surrounded by scaffolding which has been in place now for a decade, and the structure lingers on the Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland. Trees now surround the building, and the famed views can no longer be appreciated. Taymouth Castle became a hotel, and its grounds a golf course, in the 1920s, but after various uses the mansion has sat empty since the 1980s. It is currently being renovated as a hotel, and hopefully the Dairy too will be brought back to life in the not too distant future.

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In the 18th century the Campbell family, Earls of Breadalbane, embellished the park around the family seat at Taymouth with temples and mock forts, complementing the natural beauties of the surrounding hills and the River Tay that flows through the estate. Just a couple of miles away, on the shores of Loch Tay, was a more dramatic feature, a rustic shelter and a roaring cascade, which added a sublime element to the beautiful policies of Taymouth.

An exact date for the construction of The Hermitage is not known, but it was extant in 1769 when the traveller and naturalist Thomas Pennant admired the ‘hermitage, the great cataracts adjacent, and the darksome chasm beneath’. Contemporary accounts suggest that the building was the creation of John Campbell (1738-1771), son of the 3rd Earl of Breadalbane, and his wife Wilhelmina (1741-1786), who were styled Lord and Lady Glenorchy. They married in 1761, so the Hermitage was most likely built soon after that date, and was quite new when Pennant saw it.

Most visitors arrived by carriage, but the more intrepid could hire a boat and sail down Loch Tay to a jetty close to the falls. A guide met visitors and led them along a wooded walk and then into a dark, rugged passage.

Senses suitably excited by the gloomy tunnel, the visitor could then gasp in awe as they entered the chamber and found a bow window framing the waterfall ‘in all its splendour’.

The Hermitage, as it has always been known, was built to appear as a cave hewn out of solid rock, although it is actually a carefully constructed sham, with thatch and moss originally disguising the mode of construction.

The earliest 18th century accounts give little mention of the interior, but by 1786 the Hermitage was decorated in a whimsical style as home to an (imaginary) hermit. The seats and bed were dressed with the pelts of wild animals, and the walls were covered in moss and ‘ornament’d with shellwork and plaister in imitation of fruit – which is supposed to be the Hermit’s food’. There was also a shelf of books, which the fictional solitary occupant could apparently peruse to enrich his mind. But this artifice was unconvincing, and in 1803 Dorothy Wordsworth was not fooled, noting that the volumes were wood wrapped with old leather covers. She did however admire the ‘quaint apartment’ and the ‘beautiful prospect’ from the window which took in not only the waterfall, but also the handsome village of Kenmore and Loch Tay (now blocked by trees, but visible from the paths up and down from the Hermitage).

Not everyone shared the general consensus that the building was ‘rural and romantic’. The Reverend James Plumptre was conducted to the Hermitage in 1799 and found the place ‘much too modern and magnificent’ to house a hermit retiring from the world, although he conceded that a ‘London Hermit’ might be quite at home. William Gilpin, the great exponent of the picturesque, was less critical, but felt the Hermitage unnecessary as the waterfall was perfectly capable of enchanting without it.

Many more visitors recorded their visit in poetry and prose, including the famed Robert Burns. On a tour of Scotland in 1787 he visited the Falls of Acharn and composed the poem originally called ‘Written in the Hermitage at Taymouth’, featuring the lines:

Poetic ardours in my bosom swell,
Lone wandering by the hermit’s mossy cell…

This poem was later published as ‘Verses written with a pencil over the chimney-piece, in the parlour of the inn at Kenmore, Taymouth’.

In the middle of the 19th century these lines could still be seen by guests at the inn (as indeed they can today), but for added drama visitors to the Hermitage could hear them recited by the guide, who whilst they were distracted by a first sight of the falls, had slipped into a mask and a costume and ‘came forth personifying an eremite’. Wearing a ‘dress of shaggy goatskin’ and a ‘long and venerable beard of lichens’ the guide appeared ‘to the amusement, and sometimes the alarm, of his visitors’.

The Marquis of Breadalbane was later reported to have wanted to instal a permanent hermit, but ‘no-one could be found bold enough to act out the part’, and anyway candidates would have known that it was much more lucrative to be a loquacious guide and extract tips from the many English visitors: in 1857 it was written that ‘Milk and honey flow abundantly from the lips of the genuine Celtic cicerone; and hard-hearted must the Sassenach be who does not feel the effects of the soft sawder in the most sensitive part of his person, his breeches pocket’.

In 1842 it was reported that the Hermitage had ‘undergone a scrubbing’ in preparation for a visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Sadly this work appears to have been in vain, for whilst the young queen recorded her pleasure at being rowed up Loch Tay with ‘the pipes playing, & boatmen singing old Gaelic songs’, she makes no mention of a visit to see the cascade.

The modern visitor approaches just as the early tourist did. A walk up a ‘steep and rugged path’, followed by a pause to get one’s breath back, and then a moment to gaze ‘with wonder and amazement at the ‘magnificent landscape’ before entering the Hermitage to view the cascade. Sadly, the Hermitage was damaged in a storm in the 1950s: the roof is long gone, and the shellwork interior lost, but this remains an enchanting spot.

Taymouth Castle is currently being renovated as an hotel, but visitors are free to walk in the park. There’s a delightful circular walk to the falls from the hamlet of Acharn.

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