Katherine Drain - Local Poet

Katherine Drain was born in Burn Street Renton in 1868 where she lived as a child before moving to Campbell Street in Bonhill.

Like her contemporary, Hugh Caldwell, she wrote about local places and events around the turn of the 19th century.She was a well known poet in her day and her Book, "Loch Lomond Rhymes" was published in 1902 and dedicated to Lord Overtoun.

Wikipedia reports that this book was "well received both locally and by the monarchy from whom she received a royal seal of approval" but there are no citations for this.

Her book is available here for download. It offers a fascinating insight to the Vale of Leven at that time. Examples of this are, "The New Bridge at Bonhill", "The Dear Old Public Hall", "Ballagen Braes" and a "A Day on Loch Lomond". Sadly she died a young woman, on 30th March 1904 aged just 36.

(Note that the book download was scanned from the original using an OCR scanner, which converts textual images to print. It is not always 100% accurate so there may be some error in there. Feel free to point these out and we will correct them.)