From The Kilmahew Estate
Tanglewood Talks
'Tanglewood Talks' offers a programme of guest lectures, public speaking engagements and guided experiences led by the CEO of The Kilmahew Estate. Drawing on first-hand stewardship of one of Scotland’s most iconic modernist landscapes. Through talks that weave together architecture, conservation, design thinking, land stewardship, innovation, and cultural regeneration, each event provides rare insight into the challenges and opportunities of managing a globally significant site. Set against the dramatic setting of Kilmahew and the legacy of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, Tanglewood Talks invites audiences to explore how place, vision, and responsibility intersect in shaping meaningful futures.
Mission
Stuart Cotton shares his experiences of managing The Kilmahew Estate and planning for its UNESCO World Heritage designation, Film Location and Creative Industries Enterprise Ecosystem.
From guided tours of the Kilmahew Estate to Public speaking or guest lectures to corporate events, Tanglewood Talks offers a wide array of public engagements on this iconic location and also Stuart's remarkable past as a Complex Financial Investigator and Covert Human Intelligence Source Handler within HMRC's
National Intelligence Unit.
St. Peter's Seminary
This guided tour and talk offers an in-depth exploration of St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross, one of the most powerful and influential works of post-war modernist architecture in Europe. Led by the CEO of The Kilmahew Education Trust, the experience traces the vision of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and the radical ideas that shaped the Seminary’s dramatic form, materiality, and relationship with the surrounding landscape. Visitors are invited to understand the building not as a ruin, but as an architectural narrative. One of ambition, experimentation, faith, abandonment, and renewal. Through carefully framed viewpoints, historical context, and on-site interpretation, the tour reveals how light, structure, and landscape were orchestrated to create a building that continues to provoke, inspire, and challenge how architecture is experienced today.
It then goes on to describe its proposed future.
