Duncan Robertson (1718-1791) was a schoolmaster and preacher from Strathtay, in Perthshire, who led thirty-one Highland families to Belden Island in 1753 and founded the village of Aberfeldy and its church.
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KEY INFO
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🌱 Born : 11 November 1718
🪦 Died : 3 March 1791 (aged 72)
📍 Birthplace : Strathtay, Perthshire, Scotland
🪪 Nationality : Scottish, later British colonial
💼 Occupation : Schoolmaster, preacher, founder of Aberfeldy
🗝️ Associated place : Aberfeldy, Lochburn County
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TIMELINE
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RELATED FIGURES
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TO GO FURTHER
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FUN FACT
On the day of the landing, Duncan is said to have scattered a handful of Perthshire soil, carried all the way in a leather pouch, at the foot of the first post of the church, so that it would stand on both lands at once.
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Duncan Robertson was born in Strathtay, in the Perthshire Highlands, on 11 November 1718, into a family of tenant farmers. A bright boy, Duncan learned to read in Gaelic and in English and became the schoolmaster of his parish while still in his twenties.
After the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden on 16 April 1746, the Highlands were disarmed, tartan was banned and the old clan order was dismantled. Duncan had taken no part in the fighting, but he watched his neighbors lose their arms, their dress and their hold on the land they worked. Over the following years he became convinced that the families around him would do better to start afresh, far from the glens, where they could keep their psalms and their language in peace.
In 1752, Duncan gathered thirty-one families from the district of Aberfeldy and left with them for the archipelago of Lochburn. The colonial authorities granted them a stretch of steep, stony land at the south-eastern foot of Mount Lochburn, too poor for plantations and too far from Lochburn City to interest anyone else. The families landed there in the spring of 1753, and Duncan named the new village after the town they had left, because the burn that reached the sea there reminded them of the Peallaidh of home.
The first church was raised in 1754 with timber from the sawmill of Clearfog Harbor, and it served at once as a place of worship, a school and a meeting hall. Duncan was its first minister and taught the village children, in Gaelic and in English, until the end of his life. The habit of settling every important village matter inside the church goes back to him and is still followed today.
Duncan died in Aberfeldy on 3 March 1791, at the age of seventy-two. He was buried in the churchyard, on the rise above the village, facing the sea. His son Alexander took over the school, and his grandson Malcolm became minister of the church in 1805.
In the autumn of 1824, thirty-three years after his death, the church he had built hid a few crates of muskets under its floor. Whether a man who had seen the Highlands disarmed would have approved is a question the villagers still like to debate.
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