Visiting Meigle

In June 2022 Scott and I visited Perthshire and saw where the Clarks and Wedderburns lived. We stayed at the Kinloch House Hotel (east of Blairgowrie) which is only half an hour away from Meigle. My goal was to see the places where the families lived and worked and to see the graves of family members buried at Meigle Parish Church.

I had previously looked at maps and knew where the farms were but it was great to be there in person and drive along the roads that they would have travelled on. We discovered that what I had thought was the Wedderburn farmhouse was actually farm buildings and that the actual house was tucked behind at the end of a lovely allee of beech trees.

Entrance to Camno farmhouse, home of the Wedderburns

The house that lies at the end of this avenue was being worked on when we were there and the workers thought it was probably at least 150 years old.

The house was likely built by Robert Wedderburn Sr. for his growing family between 1851 and 1861. Robert’s father John, who came to Meigle as young man of 19 and leased the farm, died in 1822.

The 1851 Census shows Robert Wedderburn living at “Camno Mains” with his wife Barbara and four youngest children along with several farm workers. “Mains” is a Scottish term for agricultural buildings - the cluster of barns, stalls, and cottages at the heart of a farm.

By 1861 Robert Sr. had passed and his son Robert Neil Wedderburn was running the farm and living in a farmhouse with 11 windows, which seems to be the large home that we saw at the end of the avenue.

The main architectural feature of the farm is the horse engine barn - a beautiful round stone structure with a conical slate roof. The farm buildings are now restored as individual homes and the horse engine barn is a windowed solarium with big puffy sofas and a great view across the Isla valley.

On the Canmore website there is a photo of this very structure as it used to be:

The Wedderburns owned 6 horses and one of them was the engine. The horse walked in a circular path around a central pole connected to a threshing machine.

Here is the barn now, courtesy of a real estate brochure I found online.

Camno Mains c 2020 (Farmhouse on the right)

Canmore shows a historic map of all the farm buildings - most of them are still standing.

Here is the 1861 Census showing who lived on the farm:

This is packed with information. At the bottom is Robert (Neil) Wedderburn age 29 “farmer of 211 acres”. He lives with his younger sister Margaret and niece Sara Ann Brodie, who was the same age as my great great grandmother Catherine Clark.

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