Kilmacolm is a town as well as civil parish in the Inverclyde council area, and the historic region of Renfrewshire in the west main Lowlands of Scotland. It lies on the north incline of the Gryffe Valley, 7 1/2 miles (12.1 kilometres) south-east of Greenock as well as around 15 miles (24 kilometres) west of the city of Glasgow. The town has a population of around 4,000 and belongs to a larger civil parish which covers a huge rural hinterland of 15,000 hectares (150 km2; 58 sq mi) containing within it the smaller negotiation of Quarrier's Village, originally developed as a 19th-century household orphans' house. The area surrounding the town was settled in ancient times and became part of a feudal society with the parish separated between different estates for much of its background. The village itself stayed little, supplying solutions to close-by ranch communities and functioning as a spiritual hub for the parish. The name of the town stems from the Scottish Gaelic Cill MoCholuim, indicating the devotion of its church to St Columba. The parish church was stated in a papal bull of 1225 showing its subservience to Paisley Abbey, as well as it sits on the site of an old religious community dating to the 5th or sixth centuries. Once again in the 13th century, Duchal Castle was created in the church and is significant for being besieged by King James IV of Scotland in 1489, complying with the resident Lyle family's assistance of an insurrection versus him. Feuding in between the worthy households of Kilmacolm was prevalent in the Middle Ages, as well as in the 16th and 17th centuries, the parish once more pertained to the attention of the Crown for providing support to disallowed spiritual Covenanters. The character of the town altered dramatically in the Victorian age, with the arrival of the railway in Kilmacolm in 1869. A lot of Kilmacolm's modern structures were constructed in between this date and the outbreak of World War I. The development of such transport web links made it possible for the village to broaden as a wealthy dormitory town serving the nearby urban centres of Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock. The economy of the village showed this population change, moving far from its traditional reliance on agriculture to giving tertiary sector services to residents and also visitors.