Place:Shiskine, Bute, Scotland

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Shiskine (Gaelic: An t-Seasgann) is a small village on the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland. Sitting further up the "Shiskine Valley" from the village of Blackwaterfoot, the village takes its name from a corruption of the Gaelic for "marshy place". Much of the area was essentially a swamp years ago, but now comprises farm land.

The village has its own primary school and local church and the Balmichael Visitor Centre is just to the north of the village. There is also an ancient stone circle close by to the village, purportedly of Pictish origin. Shiskine is close to the peaks of Ben Nuis and Ben Bharrain.

Research Tips

• "Buteshire Resource and Information Links" on the Scotland GenWeb site has some very useful onward references.

• GENUKI's introduction to the County of Bute or Buteshire, and the annotated list of Bute's parishes are, for the most part, quotes from 19th century gazetteers, but nonetheless valuable for all that.

• Transcriptions of all the 19th century censuses are available on FreeCen.

• ScotlandsPeople holds indexes and images for all civil births, marriages and deaths, censuses 1841-1911, and for all Old Parish Registers throughout Scotland. It is a pay-per-view site. ScotlandsPeople also holds records of Wills and Testaments and Coats of Arms. Access to this latter part of their website is free.

• From the National Library of Scotland Website is John Arrowsmith's 1875 map of Scotland which can be digitally expanded to a very large scale. This brings up Arran and Bute and the surrounding mainland beautifully. This is one of a very large series of maps on this site which can keep a map-mad genealogist entertained for hours.

• Vision of Britain provides both the topographical Ordnance Survey of Scotland First Series (1856-1887) in black and white, and the Ordnance Survey of Scotland Popular Edition (1928-1945) in colour at a scale of 1:63360, as well as other series of maps covering the whole of the United Kingdom. These maps are wonderful for finding places that have diminished in size over the past 150 years.