Clan Gathering

25, 26 and 27 July, 2025

2025 is the 130th anniversary of the Clan Lamont Society which we will celebrate during a 3 days anniversary gathering. As soon as the council approves the proposals of our special gathering sub committee for this special gathering, we will inform you.  Be sure it will be something special!

If you have any questions or want to participate, please use below form and we will come back to you as soon as possible

Franco-Scottish Festival in Aubigny-sur-Nère

As the Olympic Games will take place in France during 2024, the next Franco-Scottish Festival in Aubigny-sur-Nère will take place in July 2025.  As soon as the dates are announced, we will inform you.

We encourage members of the Clan Lamont to participate in the Franco-Scottish Festival in Aubigny-sur-Nère which  attracts around 35.000 to 40.000 visitors each year.

Sited in the historic province of Berry, which is now in the Cher département of the Centre-Val de Loire region, Aubigny-sur-Nère is proud of its Franco-Scottish heritage as the ‘City of the Stuarts’. In 1423, in the name of the Franco-Scottish ‘Auld Alliance’, King Charles VII of France awarded Sir John Stuart of Darnley, a Constable of the Scottish army, the town and its surrounding lands, in thanks for his services against the English during the Hundred Years War.

Aubigny-sur-Nère then remained under Scottish control for two and half centuries and the Stuart dynasty left a lasting mark. John Stuart’s grandson, Bernard the 4th Lord of Aubigny, was called Béraud by the French and nicknamed the “knight beyond reproach”, as was his Gallic compatriot in battle, the Chevalier Bayard. Bernard’s cousin, Robert Stuart, who fought in the Italian Wars (1494-1559), was awarded the baton of Marshall of France. He made improvements to both Aubigny Castle and the Château de la Verrerie, which were part of his fiefdom, and when a terrible fire broke out in 1512, he helped the town’s inhabitants to rebuild with timber from his forests.

Today, many of the town’s outstanding surviving facades date from this reconstruction, including several preserved by the layers of ‘roughcast’ with which they were covered.

The very last Stuart died in 1672, without an heir, and Aubigny was returned to the French crown, but not for long. Louis XIV transferred the Duchy-Peerage to Louise de Kéroualle, the Duchess of Portsmouth and a favourite of the King of England, Charles II, with whom she had a son. The beautiful Louise had arranged England’s neutrality during the Franco-Flemish War and so it was a double irony that the ‘City of the Stuarts’ now belonged to an English family!

Louise was hated in London and adored in Aubigny. Pious and charitable, she devoted herself to the town’s inhabitants and extended the castle – the present-day Hôtel de Ville – and its park, which is currently named the Parc de la Duchesse de Portsmouth in her honour and is said to have been designed by André Le Notre. Upon her death in 1734, the Duchy was transferred to her grandson, Charles Lennox II, the Duke of Richmond.

The Richmond family was ‘more London than Berry’ and this contributed to their property being seized in 1792, during the French Revolution, although it was returned in 1803, following the signing of the Treaty of Amiens. Plagued by court battles and fraternal squabbles, the 5th Duke put everything up for sale in 1840, and the Château de la Verrerie was bought by the Vogüe family, its present owners.

Today, Aubigny’s approach to its Scottish heritage is touched by humour – a giant statue of a Scotsman who could almost be from the film Braveheart stands on the edge of the town, which boasts a traditional British red telephone box and a nursery called Kilts et Culottes. Meanwhile, The Aubigny Auld Alliance Pipe Band features the town’s notaire, local police adjutant, a chef and several young ladies, all of whom learned to play the bagpipes from Ketty, a Scottish student on a language study holiday who ended up marrying one of her pupils, a fireman named Alban.