Official Website -- www.stconanskirk.org.uk/
Overview www.crowsnest.co.uk/west/conan...
A beautiful Location for Weddings.
St Conan's Kirk is located in the village of Loch Awe near Dalmally in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. In a 2016 Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland public poll it was voted one of the Top 10 buildings in Scotland of the last 100 years. It was established as a chapel of ease by the Campbells of Innis Chonan. The church is protected as a category A listed building.
It was designed by the architect Walter Douglas Campbell, a younger brother of Archibald Campbell, 1st Baron Blythswood. It was built in 1881-6; and substantially extended from 1906 to 1914, the year of his death. Campbell also designed in similar style the family mansion nearby on Innis Chonain for himself, his artist sister Helen and mother, the elderly Mrs Caroline Campbell of Blythswood, formerly resident in Blythswood House downriver from Glasgow. The heavy oak beams in the cloister are believed to have come from the (then) recently broken up wooden battleships, HMS Caledonia and HMS Duke of Wellington.[10] An eclectic blend of church styles, from ancient Roman to Norman, it is built of local stone. It consists of a nave and chancel, with the chancel-stalls being canopied. Large, unsmoothed boulders of granite from nearby Ben Cruachan, form the piers which carry the chancel arch, and the transepts make the Sacred Cross. There is also a tower and spire. Walter was unmarried and left no heirs. His sister Helen Douglas Campbell ensured that final work was in progress by 1927, the year of her death. The Kirk was consecrated in 1930.
Fittings included a small organ. One ancient window from South Leith Parish Church was re-used at St Conan's. It also houses a fragment of bone that is said to have come from Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland.
Chapels
There are also three chapels within St Conan's Kirk. The Bruce Chapel contains a carved wood and alabaster effigy of Robert the Bruce. The St Brides Chapel contains a carved effigy of Walter Douglas Campbell. The St Conval's Chapel is dedicated to the 4th Lord Blythswood. The metalwork gates on the St Brides and St Conval's Chapel were made by Thomas Hadden.
Although St. Conan's Kirk has already acquired a certain air of antiquity and a considerable reputation as one of the "show places" of Argyll, it is in fact quite modern, so modern that in its present form it was dedicated for worship as recently as 1930.
Nevertheless the story of how it came to. be built is not without interest. Up till the '70s of the last century, although the road from Stirling to Oban passed along the north shores of Loch Awe, there were practically no human habitations between Dalmally and Taynuilt. But the arrival of the railway made the loch less inaccessible. The Hotel was built, and a certain Walter Douglas Campbell, younger brother of the First Lord Blythswood, bought from the Marquis of Breadalbane the Island of Innischonam, on which he built for himself a stately mansion-house. Here he settled with his sister Helen and his mother. Local tradition has it that the elder Mrs. Campbell found the long drive to the parish church in Dalmally too much for her, and that her son accordingly decided to build her a church nearby.
Walter Campbell was a man of many talents, all of which he devoted to the kirk. He was a most capable if somewhat unorthodox architect, a collector of objets d'art and a skilled woodcarver.
The original church, which was begun in 1881 and finished about 1886, was a comparatively small and simple building, although adequate to the needs of the small congregation. It occupied what is now the nave, and a part of the choir of the present kirk. But Walter Campbell was not satisfied with this. He began to dream of a far nobler building.
He started work on this in 1907, and devoted the rest of his life to its execution. He died in 1914, and work had to be suspended during the First World War; but as soon as it was possible, his sister Helen carried out the plans which he had left. She in her turn died in 1927, and the project was finally completed by their Trustees. Work was necessarily slow, for not only was no labour brought in from outside, but the stone of which the kirk was built was not quarried, but consisted of boulders lying on the slopes of the hill above, which were rolled down, split and shaped on the spot.
Walter Campbell was his own architect. He did not allow himself to be trammelled by convention or orthodoxy. Although most of the kirk is in a Norman or Romanesque style, he included not only early and late types of this but other and totally different styles. He was more anxious to achieve beauty than consistency. Rumour even has it that he deliberately tried to include examples of every type of ecclesiastical architecture found in Scotland, and this is perhaps borne out by the circle of Standing Stones at the entrance gate.