Annotation:Allowa Kirk

Composed by Joseph Lowe, who published a set of collections in the 1840's. This strathspey has become his most famous composition in Cape Breton, according to Paul Stewart Cranford (1995).

Alloway Kirk was built about the year 1516, and survived for two hundred and fifty years as a place of worship, until 1756, by which time it had fallen into disrepair. Its roof caved in soon thereafter, but the grounds were maintained. Scots poet Robert Burns knew it well as it was the burying place of his father William (whose original stone was chiped to pieces by souvenier hunters), referring to it as 'Alloway's auld haunted kirk'. It was the setting for his famous poem "Tam o' Shanter', based on local legends. Another Scots literary great, Robert Louis Stevenson, mentioned the church in his In the South Seas. He is on one of the Gilbert Islands and records:

The night was very dark. There was service in the church, and the building glimmered through all its crevices like a dim Kirk Allowa'.