Qualla: Kilwinning https://qualla.com/kilwinning en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:16 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Kilwinning https://qualla.com/kilwinning Kilwinning: Introduction https://qualla.com/kilwinning/ Every first Saturday in June, a wooden bird is hoisted up the clock tower of Kilwinning Abbey, and archers gather in the kirkyard below to try to shoot its wings off. This is the papingo shoot, a contest the Ancient Society of Kilwinning Archers traces back to 1483, and it tells you something essential about this North Ayrshire town: history here is not a museum piece. It is something you still do, on a Saturday in June, with longbows and a willing crowd. About twenty-one miles southwest of Glasgow, set on the banks of the River Garnock and known locally as the Crossroads of Ayrshire, Kilwinning is a working town of around seventeen thousand people whose ordinariness conceals a remarkable thickness of story.

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]]> Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/u/s/kilwinning-wp/gcus-kilwinning-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Kilwinning: The Saint Whose Name Nobody Can Agree On https://qualla.com/kilwinning/ The town carries the memory of a saint nobody can quite identify. Scholars have argued the case for centuries. Some place him as Saint Finnian of Moville, the late sixth-century Irish missionary. Others insist he was a Welshman called Vynnyn. The Aberdeen Breviary of 1507 claims ...

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]]> Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/u/s/kilwinning-wp/gcus-kilwinning-the-saint-whose-name-nobody-can-agree-on.mp3 0:06 2 full Kilwinning: The Mother Lodge https://qualla.com/kilwinning/ Kilwinning's most peculiar distinction is masonic. When the Lodges of Scotland were renumbered, Kilwinning was kept as Lodge Number Zero, the Mother Lodge of Scotland. The Schaw Statutes of 1598 and 1599 already named it the heid and secund ludge of Scotland, and the lodge's own ...

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]]> Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/u/s/kilwinning-wp/gcus-kilwinning-the-mother-lodge.mp3 0:06 3 full Kilwinning: Eglinton's Magnificent Mistake https://qualla.com/kilwinning/ Just south of town stand the ruins of Eglinton Castle, built between 1797 and 1802 in extravagant Gothic castellated style: a hundred-foot central keep flanked by four seventy-foot towers, second only to Culzean in grandeur. The foundation stone was laid by Alexander Hamilton of ...

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]]> Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/u/s/kilwinning-wp/gcus-kilwinning-eglintons-magnificent-mistake.mp3 0:06 4 full Kilwinning: Iron, Knitwear, and What Came After https://qualla.com/kilwinning/ Kilwinning was a noted centre of archery in medieval times, then a place of coal, quarrying, iron-founding and textiles. The Pringle knitwear company began here. Older residents still call the Blacklands area the Ironworks, after the Eglinton Iron Works whose enormous slag hill t...

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]]> Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/u/s/kilwinning-wp/gcus-kilwinning-iron-knitwear-and-what-came-after.mp3 0:06 5 full Kilwinning: The People Who Left and the People Who Stayed https://qualla.com/kilwinning/ Kilwinning has sent talent into the wider world. James Service, born here in 1827, became Premier of Victoria in Australia. The Yukon poet Robert William Service, of 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew' fame, spent part of his childhood with his grandfather here. Colin Hay, frontman of M...

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]]> Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/u/s/kilwinning-wp/gcus-kilwinning-the-people-who-left-and-the-people-who-stayed.mp3 0:06 6 full