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Balmaclellan (Scottish Gaelic: Baile Mac-a-ghille-dhiolan, meaning town of the MacLellans) is a small hillside village of stone houses with slate roofs in a fold of the Galloway hills in south-west Scotland. To the west, across the Ken River, the larger and more prosperous New Galloway lies below the Rhinns of Kells.
In 1887, John Bartholomew's "Gazetteer of the British Isles" Described the inhabitants as "... of a mixed Gaels and Germanic peoples origin, and speak Scots language, a Northumbrian dialect of English. Those that profess a religion are generally but by no means entirely Calvinist Christians, adhering to the Church of Scotland or the Wee Frees". In 2009, of those who profess a religion in Balmaclellan most are adhering to the Church of Scotland.
The population was 554 in 1801, 634 in 1901, and 550 in 1951.
The upper village has a 12th-century Motte-and-bailey: the "Bal" of Balmaclellan. Barscobe Castle is just over a mile to the northeast, built in 1648 by William Maclellan, a fine example of the last phase of tower house building in Scotland.
Balmaclellan Parish Church was built in 1753, rebuilt in 1772 and added to in 1833 by local architect William McCandlish.[1]
Balmaclellan was once a centre of the Covenanter religious movement. The village has a statue to Robert Paterson, Sir Walter Scott's 'Old Mortality'. His wife Elizabeth Gray established a school in the village, which can still be seen. She died in 1785 and is buried in the churchyard. Amongst other gravestones is that of another Covenanter, Robert Grierson, who was killed for his faith in 1685 (not to be confused with Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, notorious persecutor of the Galloway Covenanters).
The churchyard also contains what is probably the earliest civic war memorial in Scotland. It commemorates five men from Balmaclellan who died in the Crimean War.
They are:
A sixth man John Henry Upton Spalding Lt. RN., an officer who died at Sebastopol, is commemorated on his family's tombstone but not on the memorial itself.
Near the edge of the Balmaclellan churchyard there is a rough uninscribed whinstone pillar that looks like an ancient monument, and is locally said to mark the grave of a witch. Possibly the grave is that of Elspeth McEwen from nearby Dalry, who was found guilty of being a witch on her own confession and on the evidence of witnesses, and burned to death at Kirkcudbright in 1698. She was one of the last " witches" to be executed in Scotland.
To the south of the village, on the north bank of the Shimmers Burn, lies Ironmacannie Mill, a Category A listed watermill, which has been converted into a holiday cottage.
William Le Queux's novels The Czar's Spy (1905) and The Place of Dragons (1916) have scenes set in the area.
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