Portnellan Burial Ground

The Portnellan burial ground sits on a small promontory on the north shore of Loch Katrine, a short distance east of Glengyle itself, and is one of the historic resting places of the MacGregors of Glengyle. It consists of two concentric stone enclosures - an inner one roughly 10m square holding twelve grave slabs, and an outer enclosure with another four - with the earliest stone dated 1699. A weathered lintel over the entrance bears the MacGregor of Glengyle crest, the clan motto "E'en do and spare not," and an inscription recording that Katherine MacGregor of Glengyle repaired the chapel in 1781 in memory of her husband Malcolm and their son John. The site appears to have fallen out of regular use in the early 19th century.¹

Its survival is itself a small feat of engineering. After Loch Katrine was dammed to supply Glasgow with drinking water in 1859, the loch level was raised more than once, and in 1922 Glasgow Corporation lifted the burial ground onto a T-shaped causeway with a retaining wall to keep it above the new shoreline - the gravestones were taken up and reset in their original positions at the higher level.¹

A common misconception is that Rob Roy MacGregor himself lies here; William Wordsworth made exactly that assumption when he visited in 1803,² but Rob Roy is buried at Balquhidder. By tradition Portnellan also holds his father, Donald Glas MacGregor, said to have been buried here by Rob in 1702 after never recovering from his imprisonment in Edinburgh's Tolbooth following the 1689 Jacobite rising.³ The point is not settled: the genealogies more often give Donald Glas's death as 1693,⁴ and a close reading of the inscription at the burial enclosure beside Glengyle House argues that he and his son Eoin were the men commemorated there.

Location Map

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