Ballachulish Part 3 - the 19th century

In Part 2, I narrated how, having begun at Easdale in the 1630s, slate quarrying remained something of a niche industry until demand increased dramatically in the second half of the 18th century with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the massive growth in towns. And how John Stewart, the 5th laird of Ballachulish, opened a second slate quarry on his estate around 1780, at Brecklet Farm, to take advantage of the new demand.

Roof tops in Edinburgh's New Town - new demand for slate in the later 18th century. Picture credit Urban Marcen

First, let's clear up names and places. The original quarry opened in the 1690s was on Laroch Farm on the west side of the River Laroch which flowed down Gleann an Fhiodh ("Glen an EE-yuh"). Latterly, at least, these were, in fact, two small quarries side by side. I'm going to call them the West Quarries although they're sometimes referred to as West Laroch Quarry or the West and Middle Quarries. The new quarry, opened around 1780, was on the east side of the river. It was on Brecklet Farm but is rather confusingly known as East Laroch Quarry. I'm going to call it the East Quarry. It was much larger and when it opened, the West Quarries closed although they were re-opened in the 1860s. Finally, there were another two much smaller quarries: Brecklet which lay immediately to the south of the East Quarry and Khartoum (don't know the explanation for that name!) which was about half a mile further south up Gleann an Fhiodh. References to simply "the quarry" can be assumed to be references to the biggest, the East Quarry.

OS 6 inch map. Go to this link and use the "Change transparency of overlay" slider on the left to reveal geo-located modern mapping or satellite imagery under the old map.

       
Resuming the narrative, then, Ballachulish and Easdale both possessed an advantage over other slate quarries: they were beside the sea. In the days before road or rail transport, when the biggest load was as much as could be put over the back of a horse, that meant their product could be more conveniently exported by sea. The transport advantages at Ballachulish were highlighted in the First Statistical Account (scroll to page 499) for the parish of Lismore and Appin written in 1791. After recording that there were "74 families in the quarry, containing 322 souls", it notes:-

"... a great quantity of slates are sent yearly to the north and east countries, to Leith, Clyde, England, Ireland, and even to America. Vessels of any burden can load most commodiously in [i.e. by beached on] fine smooth sand, so near the shore, that they may be loaded by throwing a few planks between the vessels and the shore; and there is little or no swell in the road [i.e. loch]. The quality of slates is thought very good."       

Rock blasted out of the quarries was moved in wagons on tramways to the shore of the loch where it was worked into slates. However, only 15% of the rock ended up as the finished article: the remaining 85% was waste which was tipped into the sea. This gradually formed peninsulas out into Loch Leven along the edges of which were constructed wharves to make the loading of ships carrying the slates away even easier.

The peninsulas formed by dumping spoil into Loch Leven are clearly visible spreading out from the East Quarry. There's a higher resolution version of this photo here.

Around 1840, the output from Ballachulish exceeded that from Easdale for the first time and there's a very full description of the operations in the Second Statistical Account (scroll to page 247) written in 1841. It describes how the quarry was worked in three levels called "galleries". These are clearly visible in the photo below which includes a fourth gallery opened later:-

Levels at the East Quarry. Picture credit John Winkler

To remove the rock from the upper galleries, an inclined plane (ramp) was built down which wagons of rock could be lowered. This is still standing and every time I see it, I can't help thinking what a reliable brake the machinery must have had (a flywheel, apparently, however that works) to prevent runaway wagons crashing spectacularly to sea level:-

The arch was to carry the road to Glen Coe but it has now been bypassed. Picture credit: Martin Briscoe

The Statistical Account also describes the working practices. The quarry was worked by crews of four men, two of whom blasted out the rock while the other two split that rock up and cut it into slates in a sort of production line: if kept supplied by the first two men, the splitter and cutter could turn out up to 2,000 slates a day! The trade passed down from father to son amongst the locals with very few outsiders joining the workforce. This was because the skills needed to be learnt from a very early age.

At work in the East Quarry. Picture credit National Galleries of Scotland

If I've understood the contractual arrangements with the workers described in the 1841 Statistical Account correctly, each crew paid "the master" (which might be the laird of Ballachulish Estate himself or a third party tenant to whom the Estate had rented the quarrying rights) for access to the quarry. The crew paid for the tools and gun powder to blast the rock in the quarry and the master kept up the tramways and wagons to take the rock to the shore to be worked into slates. The master then bought the finished slates from the crews and the net result was that members of the best crews could earn up to £1 a week. That's about £100 in today's money and if it doesn't sound like very much, it was higher than average at the time. According to this paper (page 7), in 1867, twenty six years after the Statistical Account, 70% of unskilled Scottish labourers earned less £30/year while skilled labourers (which the members of the crews were) might expect to earn £47-50/year. As well as the crews, there were various other tradesmen employed (by the master, I think) round the quarry such as carpenters and blacksmiths (to maintain the tramways, wagons and flywheels, I assume) who earned much lower amounts. It seems that the crews also hired temporary extra labour from time to time.

Working the quarry. Picture credit Ballachulish Quarrying Stories

The 1841 Statistical Account also described the quarriers' housing in the villages of West and East Laroch. These are now together known as Ballachulish although that name - which is from the Gaelic Baile a' Chaolais meaning "farm (or settlement) at the narrows" - originally applied to the areas two miles further west on either side of the narrows of Loch Leven where the bridge is now and the ferry used to cross. Anyway, the description in the SA is worth quoting at length:-

Upwards of three-fourths of the men employed in the quarries have their houses on the Bailechelish estate [others lived in what's now Glencoe Village], and the houses are built with stone and lime, and slated. The accommodation in each is three partments, all plastered, with chimnies and grates in the principal one, and an open garret above. To most of them a cowhouse is attached, as almost every man with a family has a cow, which is pastured on the adjoining hill, and also a piece of ground, which produces annually from two two and a half tons of potatoes, as well as a small vegetable garden. A man occupying a house of the best description of those just mentioned, pays of yearly rent for the house, £2:5s; pasture of cow, £1:6s; potato ground etc. 15s; total £4:6s [£4.30 or about £450 in today's money]. ... The fuel used is entirely coals, which are brought in at a moderate freight, by vessels coming for slates.

On the whole, the condition of the quarriers is, in most respects, superior to that of the people in the same station of life in the surrounding country. They are sensible of the advantages which they enjoy, and are an orderly and generally a well-behaved body of men in every respect.    

Quarriers' cottages in West Laroch

East Laroch. These houses have all been demolished now and the Isle of Glencoe Hotel now stands just to the right of them. Note also the wharves formed on the tongues of land formed by dumping spoil in the loch.

Someone who doesn't seem to have prospered particularly from the quarries was the "masters", the Stewarts of Ballachulish themselves. Why do I say that? Well other clan chiefs who'd profited from exploiting the natural resources of their estates in response to the new demands of the Industrial Revolution built themselves sumptuous new houses: I'm thinking of the MacDonalds of Sleat who built Armadale Castle on the back of kelp (chemicals derived from seaweed) profits and the Camerons of Lochiel who built Achnacarry out of increased rents from land let for sheep farming. The Stewarts of Ballachulish, however, retained the relatively unpretentious Ballachulish House, built in the 1760s (to replace a previous house burnt in 1746 in the wake of the Battle of Culloden) and modestly extended in the 1790s.

The west front of Ballachulish House added in the 1790s. Picture credit Airbnb

In 1862, the 7th laird of Ballachulish, Dugald Stuart (note the spelling now with a "u" since the estate passed through an heiress, Lilias, d.1840, the daughter of the 5th laird, who married a Mr Stuart) sold the estate "from pecuniary difficulties" following a brief period of operating the quarries himself after the last tenant's lease had expired. Were these above average earnings enjoyed by the quarriers too high and the rents of their superior dwellings too low? That's just flippant speculation on my part - many Highland estates were sold in the mid 19th century when the families who'd held them for centuries succumbed to debt. But it's worth noting the contrast that, whereas the tenantry of kelping and sheep farming estates like Sleat and Lochiel were driven out by clearance and emigration, the people of Ballachulish Estate retained their jobs in the quarry and their cottages.

A view of the East Quarry by John Guthrie Spence Smith (1880-1951) employing quite a lot of artistic licence not least by making it look more like a chalk than a slate quarry. The mountain behind is the Pap of Glencoe which is not visible from this angle in reality. Picture credit ArtUK

I shall return to Ballachulish in the post Stuart era in a subsequent post.