Allt Na Kyle

Explorer Tom Tucked into the Braes of Glenlivet beside the Crombie Burn, Scalan looks almost too modest to have caused anyone trouble. Yet this little house trained Catholic priests when doing so required nerve, secrecy and a useful talent for spotting soldiers before they spotted you. The hills kept their counsel, mostly. A school opened here in 1717, after an earlier seminary on Loch Morar became untenable during the Jacobite rising. Its first shelter was made largely of turf. Government troops raided the place, and after Culloden in 1746 the buildings were burned; the students had been sent away and precious books and vestments hidden. Scalan recovered, and in 1767 John Geddes had the surviving house built on the other side of the burn. This is the plain, two-storey, harled building you meet today, not an untouched survivor from the first day. It served the Catholic community until 1799, when the students moved to the larger college at Aquhorties. The old seminary then became farm accommodation, before the Scalan Association restored it as a place of memory and pilgrimage. Imagine a young scholar looking at these big hills and announcing that the government would never find a school this small; even the sheep might have raised an eyebrow. That bit is my imagining, but the raids and the education are real. The old seminary is listed by Scotland's Churches Trust as open daily, though a remote hill building deserves a check before you set off, especially in rough weather. Go for the building and the setting together: the stone walls tell one part of the story, and the long approach explains why anyone thought they could teach here quietly at all.