Luncarty (pronounced Lung-cur-tay ) is a village in Perth and Kinross, Scotland, approximately 4 mi north of Perth. It lies between the A9 to the west, and the River Tay to the east.

Etymology

The name Luncarty, recorded in 1250 as Lumphortyn, may be of Gaelic origin. The name may involve the element longartaibh, a plural form of longphort meaning variously "harbour, palace, encampment".

History

The historian Hector Boece (1465–1536), in his History of the Scottish People, records that, in 990, Kenneth III of Scotland defeated the Danes near Luncarty. However, the Scottish historian John Hill Burton strongly suspected the battle of Luncarty to be an invention of Hector Boece. Burton was incorrect. Walter Bower, writing in his Scotichronicon around 1440, some 87 years before Boece first published his Scotorum Historia, refers to the battle briefly as follows: The present village was founded in 1752 by William Sandeman, to house workers at his bleachfields. The village formerly had a railway station, and the Perth to Inverness railway line still runs through the village. A rare example of a morthouse is located in the churchyard, built to frustrate the activities of bodysnatchers in the 19th century.

Bleachfields

William Sandeman and his partner Hector Turnbull manufactured linen in Perth and bleached it in Luncarty, for instance with an order of 12,000 to 15,000 yd of "Soldiers' shirting". In 1752 he leveled 12 acre of land in Luncarty to form bleachfields. By 1790 when William died, the Luncarty bleachfields covered 80 acre and processed 500,000 yd of cloth annually. Second only to agriculture, linen manufacture was a major Scottish industry in the late 18th century — linen then became less important with the introduction of cotton.

Sport

The village is home to the football club Luncarty F.C., who play in the.

Notable persons