Niel Gow - Little Dunkeld, Perth & KInross, Scotland - Musician Statues on Waymarking.com

Niel Gow was born in 1727 at Strathbraan in Perthshire, Scotland, the son of John Gow and Catherine McEwan. The family moved to the hamlet of Inver near the small towns of Dunkeld & Birnam on the banks of the River Tay when he was an infant. At the age of 13 he started taking lessons on the fiddle from John Cameron. At age eighteen he had started work as a weaver but entered a musical competition judged by blind musician McCraw which he won. The Duke of Atholl then became his patron and ensured that he found work at many dances and ceilidhs. He would also go on to become a composer and would compose 87 dance tunes until his death at the age of 80 on March 1st 1807.

In 2004 a fiddle festival bearing his name was set up in Dunkeld and an appeal was sent out to fund a statue in his honour. David Annand produced a life-size bronze which was unveiled in 2020 on the south side of the river at Little Dunkeld, close to his home at Inver. A plaque on the ground reads as follows:

The statue stands on an area of open grassland adjacent to the A923 road south of Dunkeld Bridge.