Hermitage Park

Hermitage Park is a public park in Helensburgh, featuring an A-listed war memorial.

The earliest information about the land that now forms Hermitage Park is reference in a charter of 1351. Milligs Mill is shown in the Blaeu Atlas of Scotland of 1654. Hermitage House was built by Robert Fulton Alexander, a Glasgow merchant, in 1838.

In 1876 the Cramb family, from Crieff, bought the house and estate, and subsequently donated the land for the Victoria Halls and Hermitage School to the town. When the last of the Cramb family died in 1911, the estate was bought by the town to form Hermitage Park. The house itself was used for several different purposes (as a hospital in the First World War and later as an annex to Hermitage School) but ran out of use in 1963 and was demolished.

On October 8 1919 Sir Iain Colquhoun of Luss gifted the mill, dam and pond to the Town Council, and the mill was demolished around 1922.

The war memorial, designed by noted local architect A.N. Paterson, was erected in the walled garden of the house and opened in 1922, and is the focus for a major ceremony each year on Remembrance Sunday.

Gates of the Hermitage Park War Memorial. CC-BY-SA/2.0 - © Lairich Rig -geograph.org.uk/photo/6244743 — Gates of the Hermitage Park War Memorial. Credit: Lairich Rig

The Park has recently completed a major renovation project since 2014 when the Friends of Hermitage Park in partnership with Argyll and Bute Council were awarded £2.33 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Parks for People, and funding raised elsewhere has provided a total budget of £3.7 million.

The project includes a pavilion which is now open with The Park Pavilion Café, toilets, and community room available for hire, a children’s playpark and community kitchen garden, disabled access throughout the park, a car park, and a year round programme of events.

The sponsors of the project are listed below.