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Kirnan is a historic shooting lodge set amidst some of the most beautiful countryside in West Scotland. The house, owned by the Appleyard family, has three luxurious rental cottages offering guests great comfort with roaring log fires and lovely furnishings, alongside the freedom to wander around this fascinating six hundred and thirty acre estate with salmon and trout fishing, bird watching, wonderful walking, cycling, golf, riding and sailing close by. The larger cottage, Chapel, is perfect for families or groups of friends, the two smaller cottages, Heron and Torrnaleich, ideal for couples.

	All ruin’d and wild is their roofless abode, And lonely the dark raven’s sheltering tree; And travell’d by few is the grass cover’d road, Where the hunter of deer and the warrior trode To the hills that encircle the sea. Excerpt from “On Visiting a Scene in Argyleshire” by Thomas Campbell written in the 1800’s.

The poem, by the world famous poet Thomas Campbell, a younger son of the Duke of Argyll, now buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, is written about Kirnan House. There has been a house on this site since the 13th century, and in the mid 1850’s Kirnan was rebuilt again on the lines of the old Campbell shooting lodge, originally built for the Dukes of Argyll. The house, and the grounds in which it stands, are redolent with history. Within the 630-acre estate lie the remains of a medieval village, Kirnan Beg, the old drover’s road to the sea referred to in the poem, hidden Neolithic cup and ring marks and a ruined fort. The deer, Sika, Roe and Red, still patrol the forest, and at night come down to graze close to the house. Buzzard and osprey circle overhead, and the grounds and forest are home to pine martens, red squirrels and wild cats.

The Campbells laid out a stunning formal twenty-six acre garden and then in 1897 a world-renowned botanist, Robert Heber Macaulay, an Eton and Cambridge-educated scholar, set about restoring the ancient gardens. With a team of six full time gardeners he created a garden full of rhododendrons and rare plants which was considered the second finest in the west of Scotland, second only to Poolewe. Much of this garden is visible today, and is in the process of being restored to its full glory.

The house stands in one of the most fascinating and undiscovered parts of Scotland. Remote and wild, yet only just over two hours from the centre of Glasgow. The Kilmartin Glen and Kilmichael Glassary, in which the house stands, together hold the highest concentration of Neolithic monuments in the world, and there is a current application for Kilmartin Glen to have World Heritage Status. Ancient castles, burial chambers, ruined forts, standing stones and the unique rock carvings and cup and ring marks define this area as the most significant in Scotland. The area known as Dalriada is where the first Kings of Scotland were crowned. In a loch just a mile from Kirnan stands a perfect example of a crannoch, a Neolithic stone island created in the centre of a loch. Stand and listen to the wind moving up the glen and imagine these ancient people raising their families swathed only in deer skin, sailing their dugout wooden boats across the loch. To stay at Kirnan is to step back in time and leave all the cares of the modern-day world behind.