Sacred Tree (destroyed): OS Grid Reference – NN 5708 3249
- St Fillan’s Ash
Archaeology & History
Long since gone, this great olde ash tree could once be found on the south side of Killin’s Mill building, close to the bridge at the Falls of Dochart. It was deemed to be ‘sacred’ by local people – just as all trees were, once upon a long time ago.
In John Shearer’s (1883) wonderful book on the ancient ways of the Perthshire people, he described the tree as being adjacent to the earthfast rock known as St. Fillan’s Seat:
“At the side of it grows a large ash tree which is held sacred by the natives as no person will burn any of the branches although fallen to the ground nor destroy them in any manner. However, there was one who had the hardihood to take one of the branches for a caber to repair his house. Strange to tell the first fire that was kindled burned it to the ground as a punishment for this impious sacrilege. Of course no person since has troubled it or taken any of the wood. The branches that fall lie till they rot.”
The brilliant Killin historian, W.G. Gillies (1938) reported that the tree was still standing until it was “blown down by a gale in 1893″—but it didn’t quite kill it off for good; for in September 1911, C.G. Cash visited Killin and this was one of the many places he looked for and, despite local folk telling him about the more famous St Fillan Stones (still in existence and found at the Mill), he saw the last remnants of this great Ash, telling simply that,
“the mere dead stump of St Fillan’s Ash-tree still stands against the south post of the mill gate. And quite near it is a young ash, said to be its descendant. This younger tree has an out-curving branch that was said to have been the gallows-branch in olden days; but it is obviously too young and too weak.”
In Norse myth, the ash tree Yggdrasil was the tree of Odin and was one of the primal ingredients in their Creation myths. It stood at the centre of the cosmos: an axis mundi no less, linking the many worlds and was the abode of the gods. Its mythologies are extensive. In Scotland, the myths of the ash are not so well known, but there’s little doubt that it possessed a sanctity and certainly has many traditions of it own, which are unfortunately outside the remit of this site profile.
- Cash, C.G., “Archaeological Gleanings from Killin,” in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, volume 46, 1912.
- Elders, E A., “Saintly stones in a Perthshire village,” in Country Life, December 1962.
- Gillies, William A., In Famed Breadalbane, Munro Press: Perth 1938.
- Shearer, John, Antiquities of Strathearn, D. Phillips: Crieff 1883.
© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian