Spring Road Trip Drive To Visit Historic Parish Church In Madderty Strathearn Perthshire Scotland

Tour Scotland Spring travel video of a road trip drive, with Scottish bagpipes and drums music, on a single track road, with passing places, on visit to the historic parish church and graveyard in Madderty, Strathearn, Perthshire. Madderty is mentioned in a charter of about 1200, at which time there was a church dedicated to Saint Ethernan in the village. This simple harled church of 1668 was built in the stormy times of the covenanters; there is a date of 1668 on the west gable. The church was rebuilt in 1689 and the bell-cote added in 1801. The church was renovated in 1897 by architect George Turnbull Ewing who removed the gallery, added the porch and vestry and gave the building its round window in the west gable and the lancet windows in the side walls. The interior is mostly of the 1897 renovation. George Turnbull Ewing was born in 1852, the second son of Robert Ewing, farmer, tenant of Fintalich and Concraig on the Baroness Willoughby d’Eresby’s Drummond Castle estate. He was articled to Andrew Heiton in Perth between 1868 and 1873, and was probably employed in the Drummond Castle estate office at the end of his articles, remodelling Drummond Castle for the Baroness from 1878 onwards. Ewing was in independent practice in Crieff by 1881 when he received his first major new build commission, the Free Church at Comrie. He was a Free Churchman himself, later designing his own congregation’s church at Muthill in 1895. In the following year, 1882, he was appointed architect for the new parish church at Crieff, superceding James Majoribanks MacLaren. In 1884 Ewing bought Lintibert on the Drummond Castle estate having previously been its tenant. In 1899 he became factor as well as architect to the Drummond Castle estate in succession to W H Curr, moving house and office to the factor’s house at Pitkellony, Muthill. He remained factor to the estate until his death from a heart attack on 10 December 1925. Of Ewing’s four sons, Harry Ewing became an engineer and emigrated to America; George Hedley Ewing was a banker in London, England; and James Douglas Ewing went to Java an island of Indonesia. The practice was continued by Ewing’s eldest son Charles Turnbull Ewing, born in 1880 and educated at Morrison's Academy, Crieff and at the University of Glasgow. Daniel Stewart MacLagan was born on 3 June 1904 at Williamstone Farm in Madderty near Crieff the son of a farmer. He studied agricultural zoology at university and graduated in 1928. He then won a Ministry of Agriculture Scholarship enabling him to do further research at the Parasite Laboratory in the Imperial Institute of Entomology in London, England. He then spent a year doing further research at Harvard University in America. On his return to Scotland he received a prestigious Carnegie Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh and gained his first doctorate. In 1934 he began lecturing at the University of Aberdeen, and in 1936 received his second doctorate. In 1937 he moved tom Durham University. In 1944 he returned to Scotland as Head of the Zoology Department at the West of Scotland Agricultural College in Glasgow. In 1946 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He retired from academia in 1969 and returned to Madderty to run the family farm. He died on 3 February 1991 at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Edinburgh. On his death he bequeathed monies to run entomological lectures in Glasgow and money to the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen to provide scholarships to young scientists. All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

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