Ballachulish Part 5 - Decline, fall & rehabilitation

Despite the seemingly endless litigation they were embroiled in at the time (as described in Part 4), the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries saw the peak in production from the Ballachulish slate quarries.

Workers at Ballachulish Quarry: picture credit Canmore. You can see a higher resolution version of this image here

The high point was 1897 when slate production in Argyll (i.e. including Easdale and the surrounding "slate islands" as well as Ballachulish) topped 33,000 tons or about 15 million slates. A further boost to the industry came in 1903 with the opening of a railway to Ballachulish to carry the slates away more efficiently than by sea as hitherto: one of the last of the Victorian railway building era, the line branched off the Oban railway at Connell Ferry and crossed Loch Etive over a new bridge.

Railways in red - note that, until the 1960s, the Oban railway ran from Stirling via Callander rather than from Glasgow up Loch Lomond-side as it does today.

Ballachulish Station in the 1920s. Note the quarry and pile of waste slate behind at top right

But despite the investment in the railway, Scottish slate production declined dramatically from the turn of the century high during the ten years to the beginning of the First World War in 1914. There were two reasons for this: first, competition from cheaper slate imported from Wales and abroad. These imports were also by now thought to be of better quality (in terms of the all important regularity of size of the slates produced rather than the raw material). And ironically, it was development of the railway network which allowed the penetration of imported slate into the market.

The second reason for the decline was growing preference for cheaper (but less durable) clay and concrete roof tiles. The Easdale quarries closed in 1911 (although slate production on the neighbouring slate islands - at Cullipool and Toberonochy on Luing and at Balvicar on Seil - continued). By 1913, the all Argyll annual production had slumped to 6,200 tons and then the Ballachulish quarries closed for the duration of the War (I assume because the workers were away in the army). Slate quarrying resumed after the conflict but the industry was by now a shadow of its former self with the all Argyll production running at about 8,000 tons a year: the application of new technologies such as drilling by compressed air were a bit too little, too late. The Ballachulish quarries finally closed in 1955, followed by closure on the slate islands in the early 1960s. 

Clay (left) and concrete (right) put slate out of business. Picture credits Sandtoft Roof Tiles and Kate Otterson 

With its biggest employer gone, the village of Ballachulish went into sustained decline just like a mining village after its pit has closed. To add to its misery, the railway from Oban closed in 1966 as part of the Beeching Cuts of the UK rail network. But if the employment and transport options diminished during the 20th century, at least the housing improved. The rows of whitewashed quarrier's cottages which had been so admired in the previous century were now seen as cramped and insanitary. They were progressively demolished and replaced by Council housing. Today, there seem to be only two of the original cottages left in Ballachulish, those visible on Google Streetview here. They're not even listed buildings either - perhaps they ought to be. If you want to get a flavour of a 19th century Scottish slate quarrying village, you have to go to Eileanabeich on Seil or Cullipool or Toberonochy (in all of where the houses are no doubt mostly second homes and teeteringly expensive).

New houses (foreground) begin to replace the old (background) at Ballachulish. Note the piles of quarry waste at bottom left.

But not long after it was dubbed "Scotland's Dirtiest Village" in 1973 (as mentioned in Part 1), things began to look up for Ballachulish. In December 1975, a road bridge across Loch Leven was opened to replace the age old Ballachulish ferry. This had the effect of drawing more tourist traffic through the village instead going round the head of the loch through Kinlochleven to avoid the ferry queues. (Kinlochleven suffered correspondingly, of course - I have never been there since the bridge opened - but at least it still had its aluminium smelter.) Thus began a gradual rehabilitation of Ballachulish.

Amongst other improvements, the biggest quarry - the East Quarry - has been landscaped and is now home to a tourist trail with interpretation boards scoring 4.5 out of 5 on Tripadvisor. In fact, there are now so many trees around Ballachulish that the quarries can be hard to spot unless you know where to look for them: this whole series of posts was prompted by having seen a remark from a guest at The Isles of Glencoe hotel that she hadn't noticed them! (The West Quarries today house a garage and Council roads depot - see here)

Landscaping around the derelict East Quarry: picture credit malcolmqp

The long derelict railway station (noted for being "the best of a series of station buildings in the Glasgow Style, with distinctive swept roofs decorated with red ridge tiles and ball finials, stylised buttressing, half-circular windows and curvy platform fenestration") is now the doctors' surgery.

The railway station turned medical practice: picture credit Tom Parnell

As far as ownership of Ballachulish Estate - all the land along the south shore of Loch Leven from about half a mile west of Glencoe Village as far as about two miles west of Ballachulish Bridge and back up to the ridge of Beinn a' Bheithir ("Ben a Vair") - is concerned, I mentioned in earlier episodes that this had been in the hands of the Stewart of Ballachulish family since the first half of the 16th century until 1862 when it passed to a Yorkshireman Captain Tennant and from him to Sir George Beresford in 1871. From him it passed to his wife, Lady Elizabeth, in 1873 and then upon her death in 1898 to the Beresfords' daughter, Marcia. She died in 1908 after which I've not been able to discover much about the ownership of the estate except that her husband, Captain Francis Beresford-Drummond, is recorded in directories as still living at Ballachulish House in 1920s. He died in 1926 and, as the Beresford-Drummonds had no children, I'm guessing the estate would have been sold shortly afterwards (probably quite cheaply due to the slump in royalties from the slate quarrying at this time). It was probably around this time as well that the Forestry Commission acquired a large proportion of the inland parts of the estate.

Ballachulish House was bought for £900,000 in 2009 by Russian businessman Alexander Shapovalov without even viewing it. In 2015 he was being prosecuted in Russia when he fled to Britain and claimed asylum. Russia attempted to extradite him back but he opposed that on the basis that, having made an enemy of Vladimir Putin, he feared being murdered in jail. Extradition was eventually refused in 2018 and asylum granted in 2020. Shapovalov's legal troubles are not over, though - in 2015 he attracted suspicion by attempting to withdraw £50,000 in Bank of England £50 notes from the Royal Bank of Scotland in Inverness. As a result, his assets - including Ballachulish House - have been frozen pending a "civil recovery" action by Crown Office (Scottish equivalent of Crown Prosecution Service), that is to say they will be confiscated if proved to have been "obtained through unlawful conduct". This case has yet to be concluded but in the meantime you can stay in Ballachulish House through Airbnb (worth clicking through to that link for the lovely photos of the house). 

Ballachulish House: picture credit Airbnb

What of the slate industry today? For many years, the demand for slate for repairs to the roofs of such slated buildings as remained could be satisfied by re-using slates from buildings being demolished. But with the passage of time, there are fewer and fewer slated buildings being demolished while the number surviving (often those of high heritage value) has stabilised. Most slate for newbuilds is imported from Spain nowadays (although it continues to be quarried in small quantities in England and Wales), but the problem of sourcing slates to repair existing roofs is complicated by the fact that each quarry produces slates of subtly different colours: Ballachulish slates are deep blue-black compared with Easdale's gunmetal grey, for example. So you can't mix them on the same roof and recycled slates as a source have almost run out now. That being so, Historic Scotland (the quango responsible for advising on built heritage) commissioned a study in 2016 into the feasibility of reopening two Scottish slate quarries -  including Khartoum Quarry at Ballachulish - on a small scale. (Khartoum is one of the smaller quarries at Ballachulish, behind the main East Quarry about half a mile up Gleann an Fhiodh and now surrounded by Forestry Commission plantations.) I'm not sure what, if anything, has or will come of this (nothing, I suspect). In the meantime HS recommends slate from the Cabrera Mountains of north west Spain as being the closest analogue to Ballachulish slate.

Spanish slate quarry: picture credit: LBS