Tomintoul

A historical perspective, drawn from the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland: A Survey of Scottish Topography, Statistical, Biographical and Historical, edited by Francis H. Groome and originally published in parts by Thomas C. Jack, Grange Publishing Works, Edinburgh between 1882 and 1885.

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Tomintoul, a village and a quoad sacra parish in Kirkmichael parish, Banffshire. The village stands, 1100 feet above sea-level, on a small plateau, with the river Avon to the W and Conglass Water to the E. It is 14½ miles S of Ballindalloch station, this being 12 miles NE of Grantown and 12 SW of Craigellachie. Consisting of a central square and a single street, running ¾ mile north-north-westward, it is described by the -Queen, under date 5 Sept. 1860, as ' the most tumble-down, poor-looking place I ever saw-a long street with three inns, miserable dirty-looking houses and people, and a sad look of wretchedness about it. Grant told me that it was the dirtiest, poorest village in the whole of the Highlands.' Tomintoul has a post office with money order, savings' bank, and telegraph departments, a public and a Roman Catholic school, cattle fairs on the Tuesday of April after Beauly, the Tuesday after the second Wednesday of May, the Tuesday after the third Wednesday of June, the Tuesday after the third Thursday of July, and the day in August, September, and October after Grantown, a market, called the Well Market, on the last Thursday of July, o. s., and hiring fairs on 26 May and 22 November if the day be a Thursday, and if not, on the Thursday before. The quoad sacra parish, constituted by the General Assembly in 1833, and reconstituted by the Court of Teinds in 1845, is in the presbytery of Abernethy and synod of Moray. The stipend is £120, with a manse and a glebe worth respectively £10 and £3 a year. The parochial church, built in 1826 with funds from Government, was renovated in 1877, and contains 336 sittings. St Michael's Roman Catholic church was built in 1837, and contains 368 sittings. Pop. of village (1839) 530, (1861) 659, (1871) 533, (1881) 478; of q. s. parish (1871) 799, (1881) 686.—Ord. Sur., sh. 75, 1876.

An accompanying 19th C. Ordnance Survey map is available, or use the map tab to the right of this page.

Note: This text has been made available using a process of scanning and optical character recognition. Despite manual checking, some typographical errors may remain. Please remember this description dates from the 1880s; names may have changed, administrative divisions will certainly be different and there are known to be occasional errors of fact in the original text, which we have not corrected because we wish to maintain its integrity. This information is provided subject to our standard disclaimer

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