Towns > Helensburgh > 1875 - Battrum's guide and directory to Helensburgh and neighbourhood

TO ROW. 45
here by William Kidston, Esq., J. P. Others will probably
soon follow. A finer position for sea-coast villas than the
range of fields adjacent to the shore presents, can scarcely be
Well conceived. The amenity of the castle and its immediate
policies would not be injured, nor their seclusion encroached
upon to any perceptable extent were this strip of land laid
out in houses and gardens. The policies are now guarded
against all public intrusion by watchers, dogs and placards.
The bosky dells and sylvan beauties, once accessible to the
tourist need not be described, for caveat viator is inscribed at
every pass, and echoed in English and Gaelic, by the surly
tongue of a gamekeeper and gillie to any stranger who has
the hardihood to enter the road leading through it.
A little beyond the castle, the road separates a point of
land, known as Cairndow and "Neddy's Point," from the
policies. This point is understood to be still in possession
of the Argyll family. Here, from time immemorial, a ferry
to the opposite castle of Roseneath has existed, and of very
recent date an obnoxious toll-bar has been erected, the ad-
vantages of which are not nearly so apparent as those of the
ferry. The Cairndow Point embraces about half an acre of
land rising to a considerable height above the level of the
loch, and clad in some twenty straggling beech trees, whose
shade in summer affords an agreeable lounge for travellers.
Barring the toll-bar there are no houses now on the Point,
though traces of foundations of one or two may still be dis-
cerned among the grassy inequalities of the surface. One or
two cottages existed here within the memory of the present
generation, the principal of these occupied by the Neddy,
whose surviving name has since distinguished the locality.
He was ferryman and fisherman to the Duke, and seems to
have been somewhat of an original, if the traditions pre-