Malcolm Robertson (1776-1849) was the minister of Aberfeldy for forty-four years, grandson of the village founder, and the man under whose church floor the muskets of Dunmoor Beach are said to have been hidden.
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KEY INFO
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🌱 Born : 4 July 1776
🪦 Died : 19 January 1849 (aged 72)
📍 Birthplace : Aberfeldy, Archipelago of Lochburn
🪪 Nationality : British, colonial born, later Utopian
💼 Occupation : Minister 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
One floorboard near the front of the church is still said to be looser than the others. The villagers never lift it, out of respect for the secret.
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Malcolm Robertson was born in Aberfeldy on 4 July 1776, in the first generation of villagers born on the archipelago. He was fourteen when his grandfather Duncan died, and he grew up in the school the old man had founded, hearing in Gaelic the stories of a Perthshire he would never see.
After studying for the ministry in Edinburgh, Malcolm returned to Aberfeldy in 1805 to take the pulpit of his grandfather's church. For forty-four years he preached in Gaelic in the morning and in English in the afternoon, and he is remembered as a mild and stubborn man who never took a side in the quarrels of the village before listening to everyone.
When the news of the death of Nathaniel Bramwell in his cell reached Aberfeldy, Malcolm devoted his next sermon to the verse on just weights and fair measures. He named no one, and the whole village understood him. The fishermen of Aberfeldy had just been hit by the new tax on fishing, and many of them were sitting in the pews.
Some days after the skirmish at Dunmoor Beach, fishermen of the village came to Malcolm by night with a few crates of muskets that they had carried off from the shore. He did not ask where they had come from. He had them hidden under the floor of the church, and when a patrol searched the village the following week, he met the officer at the door and told him that the building held nothing but psalm books. The officer, unwilling to search a church, did not insist.
Malcolm lived long enough to see the independence of 1843, and he died in Aberfeldy on 19 January 1849, at the age of seventy-two. The village kept the secret of the floor for generations. The muskets themselves were never seen again.
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