Imagine starting a Catholic seminary on a Hebridean island where almost everyone is Presbyterian. That is what Bishop John Chisholm did in 1803 when he bought Kilcheran House on Lismore for five thousand pounds and moved the seminary of the Vicariate Apostolic of the Highland District onto an island where the existing inhabitants regarded Rome as a kind of foreign infection. Nobody knows exactly how the Vicariate found the money. Nobody quite knows what the islanders said the day they realised their new neighbours were training priests. The seminary lasted just twenty-five years - 1803 to 1828 - and even that was a long run for an institution that had spent the previous century being burned down, evicted, and chased into the heather.
The seminary that finally landed on Lismore had been on the move since the early 1700s, a kind of itinerant theological college trying to outpace the Penal Laws. It first opened on Eilean Ban, a tiny island in Loch Morar that had been used as a secret chapel - students arrived, settled in, and were sent home after the Jacobite rising of 1715 made the whole operation politically impossible. It reopened twenty-six years later and outgrew the island. The next site was Guidal on the mainland, which lasted until students and staff fled in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising; government soldiers burned the buildings down behind them. Two risings, two endings - and the seminary that had to be perpetually mobile to exist at all.
Next came Glenfinnan, where the seminary occupied two rooms in what is now the Glenfinnan Hotel - then a new 1754 inn at the head of Loch Shiel. The rector, John Macdonald, soon wrote that the inn was too noisy for serious study. Trainee priests trying to learn liturgy and theology with travellers, drovers, and very probably whisky in the next room - one can imagine. The seminary moved on to Buorblach, then to Samalaman House on Loch Ailort, where it stayed from 1783 to 1803. Samalaman had its own problems: cramped quarters, a leaking roof, walls that were not what walls should be. The number of students was rising. By 1798 Bishop Chisholm had started looking for somewhere bigger, and somewhere that did not have water dripping onto the altar.
Lismore must have surprised everyone involved. The island was Presbyterian, the seminary was Catholic, and Kilcheran House came with substantial grounds and a lime kiln - which the seminarians used and which still stands today inside the estate, both the house and the kiln now Category B listed buildings. The seminary served the entire Highland District: the whole north-west of Scotland, the Hebrides, Catholic communities scattered along sea lochs that had quietly kept the faith through generations of persecution. It was the only Catholic seminary in the west of Scotland for the duration of its existence. What the staunchly Presbyterian neighbours said about all this is not recorded, but the relationship cannot have been entirely hostile - the seminary operated openly for a quarter of a century without serious incident, in an age when that was no small thing.
The seminary closed in 1828, the students moved on, and Kilcheran House passed back into private hands. The building still stands above the south-west tip of Lismore, looking out over the water. The Catholic Church in Scotland was emerging into open daylight by then - Catholic Emancipation came in 1829, just a year after the seminary shut its doors. The training that Lismore provided helped staff the parishes that would soon be able to worship without hiding. There is a quiet historical irony in the fact that the seminary closed exactly when its existence stopped needing to be improbable. The lime kilns survive too, beside the seminary buildings: a kind of industrial archaeology of an institution that needed to build everything from scratch, every time it found a new place to land.
Lismore Seminary sits at Kilcheran in the south-west of Lismore island, at 56.4908 N, 5.5354 W. Kilcheran is on the south side of the island looking out over the southern reaches of the Lynn of Lorn. From cruising altitude the south-west tip of Lismore makes a useful reference point on approaches from the Atlantic to Oban or Inverness. Oban Airport (EGEO) lies 6 nm south-east at Connel. Inverness (EGPE) is 72 nm north-east. The B8045 island road runs past Kilcheran on its way along the spine of the island. The site itself, including the surviving lime kiln, is a Category B listed monument and stands close to the limekiln pier at Port Kilcheran on the south shore.