Around two miles up Glen Kinglas from Butter Bridge – towards Loch Sloy there’s a ruined house called ‘Abyssinia’, rumoured to be haunted. ghe children from a Johnston family who stayed at Butter Bridge used to play in the lift of the house. It was already uninhabited and was used to store hay and animal feeds.

As they played, the children got used to hearing an old lady’s voice calling for her hens and thought nothing of it.

Early one morning there was a sudden, loud hammering at their door in Butter Bridge. It was a one-legged tramp who had just hopped all the way down the glen from Abyssinia in a mad panic. He’d bedded down for the night in the empty house – but the ghostly old lady had kept disturbing his sleep and he’d fled in a hurry.

This information comes from the Arrochar, Tarbet and Ardlui Heritage Group’s website. You can find it in our Links directory, above, under Genealogy and History. You’ll also find there the websites of other local historical societies. Such societies collect and preserve historical records, folk memories an oral histories entirely voluntarily. Without them we would know much less of the texture of the places we live in here in Argyll.

In a previous news item, we noted that Blind Eye Productions were filming much of a new Viking/Christian film, Valhalla Rising on the Glen Kinglas hills on th way up to Loch Sloy. Did they hear someone calling for hens?