Dance The Cumbrae Reel 1480

On Sunday mornings James Adams, minister of the Established Church on Great Cumbrae from 1799 to 1831, used to bow his head and lead his congregation in prayer. And as was his habit on Sundays, his most fervent petition, one which did not seem at all peculiar to the parishioners, was for the blessing of God upon “the Greater and Lesser Cumbrae, Bute and Arran, and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland”.

The Cumbraes, with Bute and Arran, form the insular county of Bute, four islands that dominate the Firth of Clyde. Lying just off the Ayrshire coast, directly before Largs and Fairlie, Great Cumbrae is only about four miles long and two miles wide while Little Cumbrae, lying a half-mile to the south across the “Tan”, measures a minute square mile.

Millport on Great Cumbrae, which profited from the ferry service to the mainland and the later advent of the Clyde steamers, is largely an old-fashioned resort town with the Scottish Marine Biological Station nearby. Little Cumbrae is the site of a lighthouse that dates from 1794 and a ruined castle. Robert II used the original castle as a royal residence in the 14th century and, after having passed in 1515 from the Hunters of Hunterston to Hugh Montgomerie, 1st Earl of Eglinton, it wsa burned by the Cromwellian troops in 1653.