... except the Kyles and Western Isles

Stromeferry (again)

2012-01-16T15:17:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of articles about the Wester Ross village of Stromeferry - how it had enjoyed a brief heyday from 1875 as the only railhead on the west coast of Scotland outside the Firth of Clyde until it was eclipsed in 1897 by the railway being extended to Kyle of Lochalsh; how it had come back to life somewhat in the early 20th century when the motor era gave new trade to the ferry across Loch Carron; and how Stromeferry was plunged back into obscurity for a second time in 1970 when the ferry was replaced by a road round the loch which by-passed the village itself and left it noted only for its famous road sign (which most people drive past).

Photo credit Micheal Macintyre

I find myself revisiting this subject to report that - incredibly! - the sign has been rendered temporarily inaccurate and the Strome Ferry has re-opened! This is because the road round the south shore of Loch Carron which replaced the ferry in 1970 (the A890) has been closed by a rockfall.

This happens periodically and usually the road can be re-opened in a day or two but this time it's been closed virtually continuously since 22 December 2011. Highland Council have been advised that the danger of further landslides is so great that the road will have to remain closed until some some radical surgery to the rockface is undertaken which could take weeks if not months.

Road closed at point "X"

What gives this particular urgency is the fact that children from the village of Lochcarron on the north side of the loch go to school at Plockton on the south side. Absent the road round Loch Carron, the only alternative is a 140 mile detour via Inverness. Hence why the Council have been forced to re-open the Strome Ferry across the loch with effect from Monday 16 January 2012.

Two vessels are being used - the first is the Sula Mhor, a boat which normally operates summer seal and dolphin spotting cruises out of Plockton (see Calum's Plockton Seal Trips):-

Picture credit trawlerphotos.co.uk

The Sula Mhor will carry passengers on just a couple of runs morning and afternoon on a schedule designed round the school run - full timetable downloadable here.

The other vessel will be the car ferry Glenachulish. She is the six car turntable ferry which normally operates the summer only Kylerhea ferry to Skye and is laid up in winter at the former oil rig construction site in nearby Loch Kishorn. She was originally built for the Ballachulish Ferry in 1969 but superseded by the Ballachulish Bridge in 1975. The Glenachulish will shuttle across the Strome Ferry between 9am and 5pm. See this link for the Council's arrangements for marshalling vehicles at the Golf Course on the north side and "at the cattle grid" on the south side. I must say, I can't quite visualise how this is going to work - and I'm not sure the Council can either. In the old days, you just drove up and joined the queue. There was no "marshalling" involved! I bet calling 40 year old infrastructure back in to use at short notice is causing a few Health & Safety grey hairs!

Below is the only photo or Youtube I've been able to discover online so far. I believe it shows the Glenachulish conducting a berthing trial at North Strome last week rather than on actual service this week:-

The only remaining turntable ferry, the Glenachulish is of exactly the same configuration as the last ferries to operate at Strome Ferry in 1970:-

That is the Pride of Strome whose remains are still visible beached a short distance up the loch:-

So, to me, seeing a turntable ferry draw up to the slipway at Strome again is like travelling back in time. If anyone's got any photos or videos of the ferry in action, then do leave a comment linking to them.

EDIT - a nice series of the Glenachulish's first day in operation by Donald Morrison here

Picture credit - Donald Morrison

Glencripesdale Estate - Part 4

2011-11-04T17:55:00.000-07:00

I see from the estate agent's website that Glencripesdale is now under offer so I need to wrap this story up.

In Part 3, we'd reached early 2005 when, six weeks before the opening of a public local enquiry into his plans, estate owner Hugh Whittle threw in the towel on his second attempt to get planning permission for a lodge and worker's house and an upgrade to the pier formed by an old barge beached on the shore to enable extraction of timber by sea rather than by road.

Glencripesdale House bottom and the barge pier top

The next development was that, in April 2005, the planners granted a five year extension to the existing time limited planning permission for the barge pier (as distinct from the previous applications to upgrade it which had been refused) to permit extraction of a further 50-80,000 tonnes of timber. This was granted despite the efforts of serial objectors Mr Colville (owner of holiday accommodation locally who believed there was no need for any further holiday accommodation and fretted that the pier's retention would "permanently damage the amenity, scenic value and ecology of Loch Sunart") and Mr Besterman (owner of Glencripesdale House whose lawyers had drafted a lawyerishly pettifogging objection to the effect the application was flawed because it requested extension of the life of a jetty when what was being discussed was a barge.)

But Mr Whittle didn't attempt to lay siege to the planning citadel in earnest again until August 2008 when he lodged four new applications for: (1) extension and permanent retention of the barge pier; (2) estate worker's house; (3) agricultural/forestry store; and (4) "estate manager's house" - i.e. lodge - on the site of the demolished 1870s mansion house.

There's nothing in the public domain to explain the delay of nearly two years before these applications came before the Lochaber Planning Committee in June 2010 but what we do have this time is the planning officer's report to the committee which you can download here (scroll down to "Planning Applications to be Determined"). What's noticeable from this is the statement that the only reason the officials were bringing the applications before the councillors of the committee (as opposed to deciding them themselves under delegated powers) was "minor departure from development plan and number of representations". This was despite - or perhaps because of - the number of reports Mr Whittle lodged in support of his applications including:-

*Supporting Planning Statement by Brindley Consulting dated June 2008.
*Estate Plan dated 4 July 2008.
*Building Design Statement by Iain Dawson Architecture dated 12.10.07.
*Landscape Strategy.
*Ecological Survey Report by Mackenzie Bradshaw Environmental Consulting date June 2008.
*Drainage and Ground Assessment by JIG Environment Ltd dated May 2007.
*Sea Access Background Information, including Condition Survey (Aug.06),
*Options and Recommendations, and Method Statement by Arch Henderson
*Consulting Engineers and Mackenzie Bradshaw Environmental Consulting.
*Operational Needs Assessment by Smiths Gore dated December 2009.

How eye-wateringly expensive does that lot sound?

There was also media coverage in the Scotsman and Press and Journal focussing on Hugh Whittle's claim to be the only laird in Scotland without a house on his estate - which is a little bit disingenuous considering he's got another estate, Glenfeochan just south of Oban, which has a very nice house on it:-

What was no different this time round, though, were the massed ranks of NIMBYs - there were 57 objections. The planning report doesn't tell us who they were although it did record a statement on behalf of Mr Whittle that "a large number of objectors do not live in the neighbouring communities and/or have responded to a factually incorrect flyer circulated out of Glencripesdale House". They included such perennial nanny state, bottom of barrel scraping chestnuts as:-

*Concerns over servicing due to remote location.
*Impacts on the remote wilderness quality of the area through visual impact of buildings and increased activity associated with agricultural and tourism uses.
*Precedent these proposals would set for further development, both locally and nationally.
*Impacts on local biodiversity.
*Development does not offer significant employment to local people.
*Concerns that applications are motivated by personal financial gain.
*Area is inhospitable for a large part of the year and strategically unsuitable for family life.
*Concerns raised over animal welfare due as veterinary visits would be commercially prohibitive.
*Increased light pollution.
*Increased noise pollution.
*Increased traffic and inadequate access.
*Impact of sewerage disposal on the local environment.
*Pollution from dust.
*Inappropriate size of properties proposed.
*Impact on landscape quality.
*Impact on protected species.
*Estate could be managed by someone living on the northern side of the loch, travelling to work by boat.

That last point is particularly egregious considering an objection to previous applications was the health and safety implications of living alone on the otherwise deserted south shore of Loch Sunart - what are the H&S implications of travelling to work every day across the loch in a boat? The only thing missing is the statutory bat colony (although maybe that's implicit in "impact on protected species").

Estate worker's house - nice work if you can get it

But despite (or - again - perhaps because of) all these objections, the final battle with the planners was less of a bang than a whimper: this time, there was no site visit or public hearing and the minutes of the planning committee record simply that it accepted the planning officer's recommendation that all four applications be granted subject to the conditions that they may not be sold separately from the estate and that the estate itself may not in future ever be subdivided. Both houses must be occupied only by the owner of, or a person employed by, Glencripesdale Estate (no allowance for letting to stalking parties which the committee had been prepared to concede in 2004). This time round, Mr Whittle was obviously not of a mood to argue with these conditions which had proved such a stumbling block previously.

The "estate manager's house"

So what's to be made of all this? Is Hugh Whittle a shrewd operator who achieved his goal of an upmarket country sports retreat amongst virgin wilderness by deliberately playing the long game with Highland Council and running rings round them with talk of "estate manager's houses"? (Tiresome conditions can always be lifted at a later stage.) Or is he someone who's suffered from the very worst of everything that's wrong with big government and nanny statism - why shouldn't anyone be allowed to build what they want on their own land?

Glencripesdale Estate sale plan

I suppose you have to rationalise it by saying that, if you accept there has to be a planning system at all, then that involves some people being refused permission. If there were no planning system (or there were but it was too easy to get permission), then presumably the south shore of Loch Sunart would now be lined with houses to its general detriment. But would that be so bad and/or would the problem be as bad in practice as might be feared? There were no planning laws in the 18th century when Glencripesdale Farmhouse was built and it's a listed building. And I bet the Newton Brothers' Victorian mansion would be as well if it were still standing. But having said that, I know from experience here in the Azores what happens when planning laws are lax and the fees for "building permits" form a significant part of local authorities' budgets:-

That's a development by the shore at Faja Grande on the island of Flores where I live. It was begun at the height of the southern European property bubble without a thought being given to whether anyone would buy the apartments. The universal reaction is "How on EARTH could they have given permission to build THAT in such a beautiful environment?". It may not appear from a glance at the photo, but the apartments are not finished and work stopped about a year ago. Now the bubble has burst, theynever will be finished, no-one will ever buy them, and they will form a blot on the landscape for years to come.

I used to argue with locals here who were averse to development, saying they should count themselves lucky because in Scotland it's practically impossible to get planning permission. I've since modified my view a bit but there's balance to be struck. I'm not sure it's being struck in the right place, whether on the shores of Loch Sunart or of Flores.

Glencripesdale Estate - Part 3

2011-10-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

Before carrying on from Part 2, I've discovered another historical nugget in the meantime. Until 1952, MacBraynes ran a cargo steamer to Loch Sunart every 10 days from Glasgow. Called the MV Lochshiel, she called at Glencripesdale amongst a number of other places along the way:-

Scan from "MacBrayne Steamers" by Alistair Deayton which you can buy here

With no pier at Glencripesdale, it was a ferry call involving the Lochshiel lying off and being tendered to by the estate launch. It's an interesting reflection on how small remote settlements used to be served by sea and that the mere fact there wasn't a road to your front door wasn't an insuperable barrier.

Anyway, back in the 21st century, we'd got to the point where, in 2003, the new owner of Glencripesdale, Hugh Whittle, had developed a plan to restore the estate from the Forestry Commission's 1950s mono-culture forestry plantation back to farming cattle among native broadleaves rather as it had been operated by the Newton family in its Victorian and Edwardian hey-day. Changes to forestry and farming management don't require planning permission (p/p) but Mr Whittle also envisaged a new lodge, an estate worker's house and improvements to the "beached barge" pier, all of which do require p/p.

The three planning applications were lodged with Highland Council in spring 2003 but first, a general word about planning. Applications for p/p are decided by reference to the prescriptions of local plans. A feature of the Lochaber Local Plan 1999, the ruling document for the Sunart area in 2003, was "a strong presumption against" new houses in spots as remote as Glencripesdale with exceptions only being permitted where ESSENTIAL (yes, in capitals in the Plan!) for the management of the land. So there was going to be a heavy burden on Mr Whittle to convince the Council that his plans for the estate justified two houses.

As it happened, the planning officials recommended the estate worker's house and the pier upgrade for approval but not the lodge. Presumably intending to keep his powder dry for a future battle on that, Mr Whittle withdrew the lodge application so that only the estate worker's house and pier went before the Lochaber Planning Committee for the first time on 23 June 2003. On that date, the applications were deferred to a site visit and hearing to be held on 1 September 2003.

Looking west down Glen Cripesdale to Loch Sunart and Ardnamurchan

Come the day, only three of the eight members of the planning committee (including the Chairman and the local councillor, Dr Michael Foxley) turned up for the site visit. But they were accompanied by an impressive array of officials and local worthies for the hearing held in Ardnamurchan High School at Strontian afterwards. Along with delegates from both of Morvern and Sunart Community Councils, these included the prime objector to Hugh Whittle's proposals, Adam Besterman, the owner (but not resident) of Glencripesdale Farmhouse who was doubtless very concerned at the prospect of the idyll of his remote holiday home being spoilt by more houses being built nearby.

Oban local historian Iain Thornber was appointed to speak for the majority of the objectors and the NIMBY-ist humbug advanced against the proposals (including the canard that development prejudices tourism) seemed to do the trick - by a majority of two to one (Cllr. Foxley in the majority, the Chairman in the minority) the committee overturned the advice of its officials and rejected both applications. To judge from the obscurely worded minutes of the meeting (you can access the minutes of all the meetings in this saga here), it would seem that, as regards the proposed estate worker's house, the majority were swayed by:-

inappropriate siting with reference to the cumulative impact onadjacent archaeology, or wildlife conservation issues, the amenity of thepotential occupier and the visual impact, particularly from GlencripesdaleHouse.

That seems to suggest that one new house at Glencripesdale was acceptable in principle but not on the exact site applied for. The refusal to allow upgrading of the "barge pier" is more mystifying:-

due to the adverse impact on existing private access road, as a right of way and the conflict of existing users

Surely the whole point of the pier was to remove impacts on the private access road to Glencripesdale along the shore of Loch Sunart through the nature reserve and its existing users?

Looking up Glen Cripesdale from the north west.

Hugh Whittle responded with a two-pronged counter attack: he appealed against rejection of the pier and estate worker's house applications and also, the following year, lodged two new applications for both houses. This time, the planning officials had changed their tune and were now prepared to recommend both houses - i.e. the "estate owner's house" (the lodge) as well as "the estate worker's house". But, crucially, this was provided Mr Whittle agreed to a condition that they only ever be occupied by the owner of or a worker on Glencripesdale and that the estate could never be split up - in other words, so that the houses could never be opportunistically sold off as holiday houses separate from management of the estate.

These new applications came before a hearing of the planning committee on 26 April 2004. Once again, the NIMBYs were out in force: the Area Convenor expressed her concern at the number of letters and phone calls she'd received from objectors; Adam Besterman, the owner of Glencripesdale Farmhouse, placed himself on record that he didn't trust Mr Whittle's motives; Whittle's agent retorted that he felt the Council had given unjustified attention to Besterman's objections; a Mr Tom Colville, the owner of holiday accommodation in the area pointed out that there was no need for any more holiday homes in the area; and Iain Thornber, the local historian, was back to point out there had never been a large farm on Glencripesdale. That's an odd view of the history but it fell to Mr Thornber to make what was perhaps the shrewdest suggestion of the day: that the Council suspend the grant of p/p for two years to see how Mr Whittle's plans were coming along - in other words to be sure that the grand scheme wasn't just a ruse he'd lose interest in as soon as the permission for the two houses had been secured.

The shore of Loch Sunart at Glencripesdale

After the public had withdrawn, the planning committee members retired to consider their decision. Contrary to his position the previous year, the local member, Michael Foxley, was now in favour of both houses. This was on the basis that, if Mr Whittle successfully appealed to the Scottish Government (a scenario Cllr. Foxley considered likely), the Council would lose control over the conditions to be imposed.

The decision reached was that the estate worker's house was refused (again, apparently, for reasons of the precise siting of the house applied for rather than the principle of a house at Glencripesdale) but the owner's house (i.e. lodge) was approved provided it was single storey and no more than 2,000 square feet. It was also subject to the occupancy by owner and no sub-division of the estate conditions. To meet Mr Thornber's point, the p/p would not be suspended but there would be regular monitoring of progress with the estate business plan (pretty toothless as the Council couldn't revoke the p/p if it wasn't satisfied with the progress). The details of these and a number of other detailed conditions were to be thrashed out between the planning department and Mr Whittle's agents and brought back to the Area Committee Meeting on 17 May 2004 for final approval.

Lower Glen Cripesdale from the air in 2007

Let's take a breather at this point in this planning marathon to review where we've reached after more than a year:-

- "barge pier" upgrade - relatively uncontroversial - REFUSED
- estate worker's house - controversial - REFUSED
- estate owner's house - very controversial - APPROVED

The meeting on 17 May 2004 received the depressing news that Mr Whittle's agents and the planning department were still a long way apart on the detailed conditions for the house. The committee therefore agreed (somewhat reluctantly, one detects from the minutes) that the house might be one and a half storeys and 3,000 square feet and that, despite the requirement that it be only for the estate owner's use, up to ten weeks holiday letting would be allowed. The frequency of monitoring the business plan was also reduced and it was remitted back to the officials to continue the negotiations.

The next development in the saga was something of a bomb-shell - Adam Besterman brought an action for judicial review of the Council's decision in principle in favour of the house. But he could have saved his legal fees because, in September 2004, exasperated at Whittle's heel-dragging in the negotiations over the detailed terms of the conditions, the Council brought matters to a head by formally REFUSING the application for the estate owner's house.

Adam Besterman's Glencripesdale House - photo credit Gordon Brown

At their meeting on 1 November 2004, the planning committee noted glumly that the Council was now the respondent in three appeals to the Scottish Government (the other two being the pier and the estate worker's house from back in 2003 - remember them?). They were all going to be conjoined in a single public local inquiry and the committee members noted that a specialist planning lawyer from Council headquarters would attend to put their case. The PLI was scheduled for 25 April 2005 but, six weeks before that date, Mr Whittle withdrew his appeals on the basis that his landscape architect had identified less controversial sites for his proposals, these presumably to be the subject of a third round of planning applications.

Again this post has become too long. I'm going to break here but promise to bring the Glencripesdale planning saga to a conclusion in Part 4. Meanwhile I leave you with a picture of the 5th Duke of Argyll (1770-1806)

Something tells me that, when he planned changes at Glencripesdale in the late 18th century, he didn't have to employ landscape architects to dance to the tune of a planning committee. He probably WAS the planning committee.

Glencripesdale Estate - Part 2

2011-10-02T12:49:00.000-07:00

Before continuing the story, I discovered after I finished writing Part 1, a rental (rent roll) of the MacLean of Duart estates in 1674 shortly before they were taken over by the Earl of Argyll. You can see that here and it includes £200 plus 6 quarts of butter and 6 stones of cheese payable for "Glencribastill". And on the Roy Map of 1747-55 (see that here), it's "Glen Cribsdale" so these two references probably give a big hint as to how "Glencripesdale" is pronounced.

"Glen Cribsdale" on the Roy Map

Also, the tenant in the 1674 rental is given simply as "Lochzeill" which I take to be a reference to Cameron of Lochiel, the chief of Clan Cameron. If so, it's an interesting reflection that, as long ago as the 17th century, one clan chief could be another's tenant, co-existing in an atmosphere of delivering up finished dairy products as opposed to the more traditional norm of thieving each other's cattle at the point of a claymore!

Anyway, carrying on, we'd reached the 1960s when the Forestry Commission (FC) had converted the Newton brothers' Victorian and Edwardian mixed sporting and farming estate into a mono-culture forestry plantation of exotic conifers. It was a fate suffered by many Highland estates in the post-War era when the economics of maintaining rich people's playgrounds had ceased to be viable.

When Mrs Thatcher's Conservative government came to power in 1979 (an era of fiscal austerity much like today), it promptly resolved to stop funding the FC's endless deficits and decreed that, henceforth, it would have to make up its losses by selling off parts of its vast landholding.

Hence, the 18th century Glencripesdale Farmhouse was sold off in 1983. I'm not sure if he bought it directly from the FC or from a previous purchaser but, for the last 10 years or so, the farmhouse has been owned by one Adam Besterman. As well as farms in Gloucestershire and Wales, he owns Auch Estate near Tyndrum - a remarkable coincidence that that was where the Stewarts who bought Glencripesdale from the Duke of Argyll in 1821 farmed. (Auch is the farm below Beinn Dorain in the horse-shoe loop of the railway to the east of the A82 between Tyndrum and Bridge of Orchy.)

Auch from the A82 - Beinn Dorain on the left

At some stage - I would guess in the 1980s - the north east portion of Glencripesdale Estate along the south shore of Loch Sunart was transferred from the Forestry Commission to Scotland's conservation quango, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH). This was due to the internationally important native oak woods along the shore of the loch left unaffected while the FC had planted of exotic conifers elsewhere on the estate. This land was eventually declared a National Nature Reserve - brochure about this here (pdf download: it's shortly to be "de-declared" as an NNR for reasons you can see here. That doesn't mean the oak trees will lose their statutory protections as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), it just means there won't be a re-print of that brochure.)

In 1993, the remainder of Glencripesdale (the bit with the Sitka Spruces on it) came to the top of the Forestry Commission's disposal list and was sold to a Danish trio called Niels Tandrup and Viggo & Helle Sorensen.

Their first priority was to fell the commercial plantations established by the FC 35-40 years earlier and now reaching maturity. But how to export the timber? Rather than having heavy lorries laden with logs thundering down the private track along the shore of Loch Sunart through the fragile habitat of the National Nature Reserve, the Danes hit upon the innovative solution of exporting the timber by sea. To facilitate this, a steel barge was beached on the shore to act as a makeshift pier to load logs from. Though crude, it was an early and far sighted instance of extraction of timber by sea which has now become best practice, even for the Forestry Commission itself.

The "barge pier" at Glencripesdale - Picture credit Keith Cunneen

In 2002, the Tandrup/Sorensens sold the property to Hugh Whittle, the owner of Glenfeochan Estate just south of Oban. He developed a dream for Glencripesdale which was to progressively fell the remaining FC plantations of exotic commercial species as they matured and, in a very long term (30+ years) plan, gradually restore the estate to the mixed environment of farming Highland Cattle amongst native woodlands much as it had existed under the Newtons a century before.

This is all very much in tune with the latest officially endorsed fads in conservation and, as part of an integrated plan, Whittle also planned a new lodge on the site of the Newtons' demolished mansion and an estate worker's house. The remaining commercial timber would be exported via a consolidated version of the "barge pier". With the prospect of grant assistance from an enthusiastic Forestry Commission (who are far keener nowadays on restoring native woodlands than establishing commercial timber plantations) and SNH also keen to see restoration of a part of the native woodland for which Loch Sunart is famous, he lodged the necessary planning applications for the houses and pier upgrade with Highland Council.

What followed was an exhausting seven years of bureaucracy and red-tape which I'll pick up in Part 3.

Native oak trees in Glencripesdale National Nature Reserve - photo credit Gordon Brown

Glencripesdale Estate

2011-09-12T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how you pronounce it (I think it's "Crippiss-dale") but it's for sale at offers over £2.6 million through estate agents Bell Ingram - you can download the sale brochure here.

Glencripesdale is 4,580 acres (1,850 hectares) of the Morvern peninsula, eight miles from the end of the nearest public road on the remote south shore of Loch Sunart in north west Argyll. It's history spans the clash of medieval broadswords to the flying of 21st century writs for judicial review: it epitomises nicely the blood, sweat and consultancy fees of Highland landownership through five centuries.

Since medieval times Morvern had been the territory of the MacLeans of Duart. In the 1670s, they distinguished themselves by becoming the first clan in history to lose their patrimony not by blood-feud but by defaulting on their mortgage payments. Unfortunately their lender wasn't the Nationwide Building Society but the chief of Clan Campbell, the Earl of Argyll, an unforgiving creditor who had assiduously bought up MacLean debts specifically with a view to foreclosing on them.

In the second half of the 18th century, the Dukes of Argyll (as the Campbell chiefs had become) reorganised their estates, including the former MacLean land in Morvern, by renting them as commercial sheep and cattle farms in place of the communal peasant farming which had prevailed hitherto. This was an early phase of what became known as "the Highland Clearances". That's an expression which covers a multitude of not properly understood sins but, whatever the rights and wrongs, the Argyll estates in Morvern are significant for having left an architectural heritage of 18th century farmhouses built by these incoming capitalist farmers. You can read an article about them here (Big pdf download.)

Glencripesdale was one of these farms and its farmhouse was typical of the genre. It was built by its tenant, Duncan Campbell of Gleunure, around 1775. A farmhouse may seem a pretty mundane thing but the fact is Glencripesdale is one of the oldest farmhouses (as we understand them today) in Scotland. It retains the original wooden sash and case windows installed when it was built 230 years ago.

Glencripesdale Farmhouse - photo credit Gil Campbell

In the 1820s, it became the Argylls' turn to succumb to debt. In the first half of the 19th century it was virtually par for the course for clan chiefs to lose their estates to creditors, including such illustrious names as MacNeil of Barra, MacDonald of Clanranald and MacDonell of Glengarry. The Campbells managed to retain their core estates around Inveraray but most of the former Maclean lands in Mull and Morvern went under the hammer to meet the gambling debts of the 6th Duke, a friend of the Prince Regent. It was an ironic reversal of fortunes vis a vis the MacLeans of Duart 150 years earlier.

Glencripesdale was bought by Donald Stewart of Auch in 1821 and by the 1840s, the farm belonged to his son, Alexander. Nicknamed "Glenstool" for reasons unknown, he features in the journal of James Robertson, the Sheriff of Tobermory on Mull in two entries in 1843:-

"Onmy arrival at [home] I found Sandy StewartGlencripesdale with his pretty bride, andhis brother in law Niel Stewart, Foss, and a young Edinburgh lad, Bob Renton, sitting roundthe Table with a quantity of biscuits, glasses and an empty Wine decanterbefore them.I procured a reinforcement of solids and liquids, and we passed an hour or twovery jovially.Mrs Stewart retired at half past 11 and Niel and his young friend went down tothe Inn at the same time to roost. Sandy took his threetumblers of toddy and enlarged wisely andemphatically on the incomparable felicity of the married state which hestrongly recommendedto my consideration and adoption.

Wednesday9 August 1843

WhenI was dressing Glenstool came in to my roomlooking drumly and unrefreshed; hecomplained of our late sederunt [sitting] last night. I denied the premises, upon whichhe exclaimedhurriedly: "aye aye its well for you to say so, but mind - I had to give ahorn to the wifeafter I went to bed - mind that, mind that - that makes the difference, yousee", rubbing hishands and winking ..."

Married life doesn't seem to have agreed with Glenstool, however, as he was dead less than three years later.

In 1871, the third generation of Stewarts sold up. By the later 19th century, the primary interest in Highland estates was no longer as farms but as sporting estates where nouveaux riches could entertain their guests stalking deer, shooting grouse and fishing for salmon - it was the Victorian equivalent of today's Russian oligarchs buying Premiership football clubs.

The purchasers of Glencripesdale were the Reverend Horace Newton and his two brothers, one also a clergyman. Heirs to a vast fortune derived from the fact that their family happened to own the land a big chunk of Birmingham had been built on during the Industrial Revolution, they immediately adorned their Scottish acquisition with a new mansion house beside the 18th century farmhouse: it was so opulent even the servants' bedrooms had hot and cold running water.

Picture scanned from "The Western Seaboard - An illustrated architectural guide" by Mary Miers which you can buy here

In a pattern repeated all over the Highlands of Scotland in the high Victorian era, Glencripesdale was built into a community of retainers - 100 strong, at its peak - dedicated to the Newtons' summer house parties. There was a school, a shop, church services in the billiard room and annual Highland Games on the lawn. Farming was not totally eschewed and a prize winning herd of Highland cattle was built up although this was hobby farming albeit on a megalomaniac scale.

These Victorian and Edwardian sporting estates never really recovered their former glory after the First World War. During the Second War, Glencripesdale House was requisitioned by the army for special operations training and left in poor condition, a fate suffered by a number of big houses in the West Highlands. In 1955, the estate was sold to the Forestry Commission. Having no use for it, the FC arranged in the early 1960s for the army to return to dynamite the Newtons' mansion house which had been roofless since the late 1940s. This was also the fate of many big houses on estates bought by the Forestry Commission after the War.

It's said it took the army two attempts to blow up Glencripesdale House due to the fact that it was built of concrete. In the 1870s, the Newton brothers were very early exponents of building in concrete and, while their mansion house is no longer visible, there are still some more humble survivors of their concrete buildings to be seen such as the pier and storehouse by the shore of Loch Sunart pictured below: like the 18th century Glencripesdale Farmhouse, it's a mundane enough structure but it's is one of the earliest concrete buildings in Scotland:-

And that's probably a good point to leave this overlong post at. In Part 2, I'll resume the story with the latest generation of Highland landlords after the Forestry Commission sold Glencripesdale in the 1980s and 90s.

Mallaig to Lochboisdale Ferry

2011-09-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

The island of South Uist (pop. 1,950) in the Outer Hebrides considers itself badly served by Caledonian MacBrayne's car ferry services.

SU's primary connection with the mainland is the ferry from Lochmaddy on North Uist (linked to SU by causeways) to Uig on Skye (linked to the mainland by a bridge). There are eleven departures a week in summer and the crossing takes 1h 45m.

But the downside is that, depending where you live on SU, it's a drive of anywhere between 22 and 47 miles - distances unparalleled on the islands served by Calmac - to even get to the point of departure at Lochmaddy. Then, when you ariive at Uig, it's a 230 mile drive to Glasgow.

Total time from SU to Glasgow via Lochmaddy-Uig (including Calmac's vehicle check-in time of 45 minutes) - 8h 55m; total cost (60p/mile plus ferry fare for car and one passenger) - £190

There is an alternative. There's also a ferry from Lochboisdale on South Uist to Oban. At 5h 10m, it's the longest crossing in the Calmac network but on the plus side, Oban is only 96 miles from Glasgow - less than half the distance from Uig.

Total time from SU to Glasgow via Lochboisdale-Oban - 8h 25m; total cost - £130

Calmac ferry MV Lord of the Isles at Lochboisdale - Photo credit Allan Macdonald

But the big problem with the Lochboisdale-Oban service is that there are only four departures a week (compared with eleven from Lochmaddy to Uig) and one of these sails via Castlebay on the neighbouring island of Barra (pop. 1,000) adding another 1h 30m to the journey (though nothing to the cost). The lower frequency is not just because of the much longer crossing but also due to the same ship also being Barra's only link to the mainland in a "triangular" service to Oban.

What the people of South Uist would ideally like is a dedicated ferry running from Lochboisdale to Mallaig. This is a crossing of 3h 20m and Mallaig is 150 miles from Glasgow so the total journey time is 7h 55m - quicker than going via Uig or Oban. Because Calmac's fares are calculated on the basis of "Road Equivalent Tariff" (i.e. the fare is the same as it would cost to drive to the mainland as if there were a causeway, currently set at 60p/mile to include fuel and all other costs associated with running a car such as tyres, insurance and depreciation etc.), it's possible to predict the cost of SU to Glasgow via Mallaig at £145 - £45 cheaper than going via Lochmaddy. In 2006, Calmac proposed a scheme for a Lochboisdale-Mallaig service with fourteen departures a week (in summer; seven in winter) so let's put the three options on a grid:-

The Mallaig option looks like a total no-brainer until you factor in that Calmac said it would need a new ship to operate the service. This was because the people of Barra had made it clear they wanted to retain Oban as their mainland port (it's a much longer crossing to Mallaig from Castlebay than it is from Lochboisdale) so it wasn't just a question of relocating the existing services from Oban to Mallaig. The prospect of c.£25m for a new ship gave Calmac's paymasters in the Scottish Government a big problem.

For a time there was a suggestion Calmac could charter a ferry called the Claymore. She had been built by Calmac in 1978 specifically to serve Barra and South Uist from Oban but was retired from that route in 1989 and in 2006/07 was surplus to the requirements of Pentland Ferries, a private company running to Orkney. But there were serious question marks over the suitability of a 30 year old ferry to serve South Uist again and the suggestion lapsed.

The Claymore at Castlebay, Barra in the 1980s

And so the Mallaig option remained in the long grass until 2011 when things changed by Calmac taking delivery of a new vessel, the Finlaggan, to serve the island of Islay. The reason why that made a difference to South Uist is that Islay had been being served by two ferries, the Isle of Arran and the Hebridean Isles. With the advent of the Finlaggan, one of these two - it's not yet been decided which on a long term basis but generally assumed to be the IoA - will become available to be redeployed elsewhere. So it can become the Mallaig-Lochboisdale ferry, right?

Well not quite. As ever, things are not quite so simple. The reason is that, before the Finlaggan came along, one of the two Islay ferries was also the fleet reserve, liable to be called away at any time to cover for a break-down elsewhere in the network. This happened in summer 2010 and caused howls of protest from Islay that they were being deprived of one of "their" ferries. But with the advent of the Finlaggan, the theory was that the Isle of Arran would be released to be on permanent stand-by, tied up somewhere but ready to sail at a moment's notice: Islay would never again be deprived of one of its two ferries.

Calmac ferry Lord of the Isles at Lochboisdale - photo credit Allan Macdonald

But couldn't the Isle of Arran not at least be sailing between Lochboisdale and Mallaig rather than be tied up idle when there are no other calls on its time - would that not be consistent with the "pilot study" of the route local politicians are calling for? Well possibly but these pilot studies tend to be genies it's difficult to put back into bottles: as soon as the IoA was called away from South Uist, the same local politicians would doubtless be hurling abuse at Calmac/the SG that "their" ferry had been taken away. And there may be other calls on the IoA - Arran (the island, not the ferry) is looking for a bigger second ferry to run there in summer next year, an option that would doubtless be far more profitable to Calmac (i.e. less of a drain on the taxpayer) than SU ...

So what to do? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Not even please some of the people all of the time ... Glad I'm not the Transport Minister.

Leaving Lochboisdale - Photo credit Hugh Spicer

Cladh nan Sasunnach

2011-08-24T14:34:00.000-07:00

On the east shore of Loch Maree in Wester Ross, near its head, there's a spot called Cladh nan Sasunnach - it's Gaelic for "the sassenachs' graveyard".

Cladh nan Sasunnach - Picture Credit Nigel Brown

Quick aside about the word "sassenach". It's commonly supposed to be a term of abuse used by Scots to describe the English. Wrong. It's simply the Gaelic word for a non-Gael. So in the eyes of a native of Wester Ross, someone from Edinburgh is as much of a sassenach as someone from London. It's a Gaelic corruption of the word "Saxon".

Anyway, the southerners interred by the shore of Loch Maree were not some isolated troop of redcoats slaughtered by a posse of vengeful clansmen in the aftermath of Culloden. The truth was something rather more prosaic - they were the employees of a local ironworks.

Or so tradition tells. Scholarly investigation suggests the fragmentary remains barely visible in the bracken are of a much older graveyard. But what is undeniable is that there was an ironworks on the shores of Loch Maree in the early 17th century which did employ "English" (which could have meant Lowland Scots). It's reputed the earliest industrial ironworks (as opposed to cottage industry supplying purely local needs) in Scotland: it's not a coincidence there's also a spot called Furnace on the east shore of the loch near Letterewe.

But the lure to this remote spot was not local deposits of iron ore but trees which could be cut to make charcoal to fuel the smelters to produce the metal: in the tree-less land Scotland was at the time, it was a case of the raw material mountain going to the fuel source Mohammed.

It's not the last time strangers have been buried in a remote Highland location in pursuit of a valuable metal. Fast forward 300 years and 70 miles south to Kinlochleven near Fort William. In an isolated spot in the hills a couple of miles above the village, you'll find the Navvies' Graveyard.

Picture credit RCAHMS

It contains the graves of 21 navvies (labourers) who died between 1905 and 1909 building the Blackwater Dam which looms behind the cemetery. One of the graves is marked "Not Known" and another is of "Mrs Riley who died at the dam March 27 1909". I don't know her story but perhaps the navvies (Irish?) lived in a camp on site with their families ...


Picture credit - John Ferguson

The dam was built between 1905 and 1909 to create a reservoir to power a hydro-electric power station for an aluminium smelter at Kinlochleven. At the turn of the 20th century, aluminium was the new wonder material but, once again, it was not deposits of ore locally (bauxite is imported from countries like Australia) which attracted development to this virgin site (Kinlochleven was merely a remote roadless farm before 1905) but the local energy resource. It takes twenty times as much energy to render aluminium from its ore as it does iron and, in the early 1900s, the only way to produce that economically was hydro-electricity for which mountainous and wet northern Argyll is ideally suited.

Just as the iron works by Loch Maree are long gone, so too the aluminium smelter at Kinlochleven is no longer. It shut in 2000 although the power station is still operating, feeding electricity in to the national grid. And the Navvies' Graveyard remains in a nice example of how history has a habit of repeating itself.

The Grampian Hotel, Dalwhinnie

2011-07-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

I'm a great fan of 1930s art deco architecture and here's a fine example which is sadly no longer with us: the Grampian Hotel at Dalwhinnie on the A9 between Perth and Inverness:-

The second floor was a later addition as this earlier postcard from another angle demonstrates:-

The Grampian Hotel stood on the road to the station at Dalwhinnie, just off what was the old A9 through the village by-passed since the late 70s. The hotel was still standing relatively recently as you can see it on Google Earth imagery dated 2005:-

But it had gone by the time the Google Streetview car was driving round in 2008/2009:-

I'm sorry to have missed it. Except for the snippet that apparently Barbara Cartland regularly stayed there, there's frustratingly little information about the Grampian Hotel available online - you'd normally expect the demolition of an art deco building to have generated quite a lot of interest

Anyway, the Grampian Hotel was one of a number of road-side hotels built in the 1930s to capture trade from what was, at the time, the relatively new-fangled but growing craze of motoring. They were a sort of new generation of coaching inns and also a sort of previous generation of motorway service stations and "travel lodges". The A9 itself was considerably upgraded in the late 1920s in response to the growth of road traffic having been little changed since General Wade built it as a military road in the mid 18th century.

Another example of a hotel built in the 1930s in response to the growth in motor traffic is the the Bridge of Orchy Hotel, although this was built in a more vernacular style of architecture:-

A new hotel was necessitated here by the realignment of the A82 between Tyndrum and Glen Coe in the early 1930s carrying it round the east end of Loch Tulla and by-passing the centuries old coaching inn at Inveroran at the west end of the loch. (Happily, in more recent decades the Inveroran Inn has gained a new lease of life from walkers on the West Highland Way which follows the line of the old A82 past its front door).

Some other examples in art deco style are:-

The Royal Stuart Motor Hotel on the old A9 just south of Inverness, like Dalwhinnie by-passed by the new A9 since the late 70s. I remember this when the old A9 still went past its front door in the early 70s on our way to family holidays in Wester Ross - passing it meant we were nearly at Inverness and thus at a significant waymarker on what was at the time a long, long drive from Edinburgh. The RSMH is still very much in business today as the New Drumossie Hotel.

As you'd expect, there are some good examples along the A8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Going from east to west, first, there's the Maybury Roadhouse in Edinburgh situated at what, in the 1930s, would have been one of the most important road junctions in Scotland - straight ahead on the A8 for Glasgow; middle fork for the A9 to Stirling (this was where the A9 used to begin before it was cut by the building of the "new" runway at Edinburgh Airport in the mid 70s: now it's just the road to the airport cargo terminal); and right up Maybury Road to take you to the A90 at Barnton for Queensferry.

Maybury Junction in 1945

Fittingly, Maybury Road and the Roadhouse were named after the engineer Sir Henry Maybury who designed the road in the late 1920s as part of a scheme to bring Edinburgh's road network up to date for the motor era. The Roadhouse is now a casino:-


Maybury Roadhouse - photo credit Pete Cracknell

Further west on the A8, at Whitburn, there's a building I don't know the original name of except that it's now the Royal Regent Cantonese Restaurant:-

Like the A9, the A8 was also re-engineered in the late 1920s/early 1930s to meet the demands of the new motor age. Although built as a single carriageway, the verges and bridges were built wide enough to accommodate a future upgrading to dual carriageway. In fact this never happened and the M8 motorway was eventually built in the 1960s along a different line but you can see this all in the extract below from Google Earth. The Royal Regent is the building at the top and the 1930s A8 is the road coming in diagonally from top right - note its wide verges and the equally wide "ghost" bridge over the River Almond just left of the roundabout. The M8 runs along the bottom.

Further west still on the old (1930s) A8 before it was by-passed by the motorway is the splendid Newhouse Hotel.

Note the petrol pumps to the right emphasising the establishment's importance to the motorist. The Newhouse Hotel is still in business as a Premier Inn, although recent alterations have masked its art deco features somewhat:-

And finally, back in Edinburgh, another building in the same genre is the Hillburn Roadhouse on Biggar Road (A702 to Biggar and Abington) on the edge of the city in Fairmilehead. Like the Maybury, it was not built as a hotel but as a bar-restaurant catering to passing motorists. More recently it was known as the Fairmile Inn but has been empty and vandalised for a number of years.

Well, I've strayed quite a long way from the Grampian Hotel at Dalwhinnie - and nowhere near a kyle or a Western Isle - but if you know of any other 1930s or art deco "roadhouses", wherever they may be, then do leave a comment.

Gourock-Dunoon ferry

2011-07-03T17:48:00.000-07:00

Last week saw the closure of the first ever car ferry service on the west coast of Scotland - that between Gourock and Dunoon operated by Caledonian MacBrayne which opened on 4 January 1954.

MV Saturn approaches Dunoon for the final sailing - Photo credit Stuart MacKillop

First, I have to define "first car ferry service": I'm not including Stranraer to Larne in Northern Ireland which started in 1939 or the many short crossings (half a mile maximum) across lochs and estuaries such as the Erskine Ferry or the Corran Ferry which had been carrying vehicles since the 1920s or earlier. Gourock to Dunoon was the first "sea-going" car ferry within Scotland on the west coast. This is its story.

As car ownership grew in the 1930s, the London Midland & Scottish Railway Company's shipping subsidiary, the Caledonian Steam Packet Company (CSP), began to draw up plans for car ferries on the prime Clyde routes. These were interrupted by the War but revived when peace returned and a car ferry service from Gourock to Dunoon eventually opened in 1954 with Scotland's first ever car ferry (by the same definition), the MV Arran. There followed two sister ships called Bute and Cowal and, between them, these three "ABC ferries" as they became known, covered the Dunoon service and another between Wemyss Bay and Rothesay which opened later in 1954.

MV Arran on passage between Gourock & Dunoon in 1958. Photo credit Douglas Campbell

Vehicle traffic on the Dunoon route exceeded expectations but development was hampered somewhat by the method of loading vehicles onto the ships. This was the "hoist loading" system whereby cars had to drive, four or five at a time, onto a platform which was then lowered slowly by pulleys down to the ship's car deck. The same laborious process had to repeated for disembarkation at the other side. It was a huge advance on the previous system of driving over precariously balanced planks onto the deck of a passenger steamer when the tide happened to be at the right level but far from ideal.

Hoist loading cars aboard an ABC ferry in a line drawing scanned from a late 60s CSP brochure

In the late 60s, a private company, Western Ferries Ltd, recognised the limitations in the CSP's service and laid plans for an alternative car ferry service using the more sophisticated ro-ro system we're familar with today whereby vehicles drive down a ramp adjustable to the state of the tide (called a "linkspan") directly on to the ship's car deck. This service eventually began in 1973 between McInroy's Point just west of Gourock and Hunter's Quay just north of Dunoon.

The CSP (which changed its name to Caledonian MacBrayne in 1973 after merging with David MacBrayne Ltd that year) responded with plans to upgrade its Gourock-Dunoon service involving the installation of linkspans at both terminals and the ordering of two new ro-ro ferries, the Jupiter and the Juno which entered service in 1973.

But the CSP/Calmac had missed a trick somewhat in that its new service (which was replicated at Wemyss Bay to Rothesay in 1977 with a third new ship, the Saturn, which, with the 1973 sisters, were known as "the streakers") was not a totally "drive through" one like WF's (i.e. drive on via the ship's stern and off in the same direction via the bow or vice versa). Instead, vehicles would board over the stern of the ferry at Gourock (and Wemyss Bay) but disembark at Dunoon (and Rothesay) over a ramp in the ship's side landing on a linkspan let in at right angles to the pier face. Again, it was great advance on hoist loading but while the 90 degree turn on the car deck was not too much of a hardship for cars, it was no good for artics so, again, was not ideal.

This view aft down the car deck of the Jupiter (1973) by Dave Forbes demonstrates the 90 degree turn needed to disembark at Dunoon

So, despite the improvements to Calmac's Gourock-Dunoon service, it was no surprise that Western Ferries - with a shorter crossing as well as greater operational flexibility - secured a substantial proportion of the vehicular traffic to Cowal in the 1970s.

One of Calmac's "streaker" class ferries, MV Jupiter, on the firth while two WF ferries cross in the background. Photo credit Hugh Spicer

The next act in the story was political rather than operational. A state subsidised public sector competing with private industry may have been the norm under 1970s style socialism but it was anethema to Mrs Thatcher's government which took office in 1979. The spotlight soon turned on the rival ferry services to Cowal. In its defence, Calmac pointed out that its was the service of choice for foot passengers in that its ferries departed from the doorstep of Gourock station with its links from Glasgow Central in contrast with WF's rather more "out of town" terminals. In fact, Calmac was carrying about two thirds of the foot passengers whereas WF was carrying about two thirds of the vehicles crossing the firth. There was also a strength of feeling in Cowal that, if Calmac's car ferry service were withdrawn, it would leave WF with a monopoly which might lead to increased fares. So a messy political fudge was arrived at in 1982 whereby Calmac would continue to operate car ferries to Dunoon but, in order not to compete too directly with WF, would be restricted to one crossing per hour and would only receive subsididy for the passenger element of the service. With one hand thus tied behind its back, it's hardly a surprise that Calmac's share of the vehicle traffic continued to dwindle ...

A single vehicle on the car deck of a ship designed to take 40 was not an uncommon sight. Photo credit Hugh Spicer

Matters continued like this until 2000 when the Scottish Government woke up to the fact it was obliged under EU law to put the subsidies it was paying Calmac out to competitive tender. Tendering services hitherto performed by "iconic" public sector bodies is always politically thorny and for a while it looked as if a European court case involving subsidised bus services in Germany (the "Altmark" case) might spare the SG the opprobrium but further investigation revealed that this was not so.

The requirement to tender applied to all of Calmac's routes, not just Dunoon. But what set Dunoon apart was that it was the only route in the network which had a private sector competitor. The solution arrived at in 2006 was that all the other routes were offered in one bundle (Calmac won this tender but that's another story) while Dunoon was offered separately on the basis that the successful bidder would have to operate a car and passenger service but with no subsidy. Not surprisingly, nobody bid for this dubious privilege, not even Calmac! The result was that the Scottish Government simply continued to subsidise Calmac to run car ferries to Dunoon as before (except that the service was now run by a company called Cowal Ferries Ltd. However this operated under Calmac branding and management and with their ships, the familiar "streakers", so this was not a change the travelling public noticed.)

Aboard the Jupiter - Picture credit Hugh Spicer

But if the SG thought it had finessed this irritating thorn in its side, it was wrong: Western Ferries cried foul and.the European Commission initiated formal proceedings for payment of illegal "state aid" (subsidy). It eventually ruled in 2009 that subsidising a passenger service from Gourock station to Dunoon town centre was unobjectionable in principle provided it was properly put out to tender. Hence a new tendering process began in which there would be a subsidy for a passenger service with an unrestricted timetable. The successful bidder could carry vehicles if it wanted to and at its own expense but this would not be compulsory as in 2006.

The result of the tender was announced on 25 May 2011 and the winner was Argyll Ferries Ltd. This is in fact another subsidiary of Calmac although to avoid even the perception of any of the mistakes of the failed 2006 tender, this will operate under its own brand. The underbidders were Western Ferries and Clyde Marine Services (the operator of the passenger ferry to Kilcreggan). Not surprisingly, none offered to carry cars.

Argyll Ferries will be offering a much more frequent service over a much longer day than Calmac (Cowal Ferries) did using two vessels. One is a ferry called Banrion Chonamara acquired from Ireland where she had been serving the Aran Islands. Seen in profile on the extract from AF's website above, she has been renamed Argyll Flyer for the new Dunoon service. The other is a vessel which Calmac had had on charter for a number of years to give peak time sailings to Dunoon to supplement the sailings by the "streaker" car ferries: she is called Ali Cat and has now been purchased outright by AF.

Ali Cat at Gourock - a bit of a rubber duck, lookswise IMO! - Photo credit Stuart MacKillop

And what of the 35 year old "streaker" car ferries? One of them was rendered redundant in 2007 upon completion of deployment on the Rothesay route of the third generation of Upper Clyde car ferries, the Argyle and Bute (II). So the Juno was laid up at Rosneath on the Gareloch to act as a source of spare parts for the two survivors, the Jupiter and Saturn. Their roles were now confined to Gourock to Dunoon and summer second ship on the Ardrossan-Brodick (Arran) run. When the Saturn ceased in the latter role at the end of the 2010 summer season, she took up the Dunoon run and the Jupiter was sent to Rosneath as well. As soon as it became clear that the future of the Dunoon run was likely to be passenger only, the Juno was sold for scrapping in situ at Rosneath. As I type this, there's little left of her. Within days of the formal announcement that Gourock-Dunoon was to go passenger only, the Jupiter was also sold for scrapping and was towed away to ship-breakers in Denmark on 25 June. Having been designed exclusively for the relatively sheltered waters of the Upper Clyde, there is no market for such old ships elsewhere (as there has been for other ex-Calmac ships of similar vintage, e.g. Iona (1970) and Pioneer (1974) in West Africa). This just left the Saturn to perform the final car ferry sailing from Dunoon to Gourock at 20.45 on Wednesday 29 June 2011. The Saturn then sailed to Ardrossan to take up a programme of extra summer sailings to Brodick. In the autumn, she will probably repair to "hot layup" at Rosneath and be retained in the medium term on standby to cover breakdowns on the Rothesay or Brodick routes.

MV Saturn sails away from Dunoon for the last time - Photo credit John Newth

Argyll Ferries did not get off to a brilliant start on Thursday 30 June, it has to be admitted: the Argyll Flyer is still not ready to enter service (she was still at Ardmaliesh Boatyard on Bute undergoing conversion) and her place had to be taken by a vessel called Clyde Clipper chartered from Clyde Marine Services at short notice. Time keeping on the first few days has been poor leading to trains for Glasgow departing Gourock before the connecting ferry had arrived - there's a suggestion the late running is due to the boarding gangways being too narrow for the passengers to be able to board quickly enough. It's a problem which has bedevilled many a previous Clyde steamer service!

All grist to the mill of the nay-sayers - those who believe Western Ferries have been handed a monopoly. Well you didn't "vote with your wheels" and patronise Calmac so a classic case of you didn't use it so you lost it! No doubt the teething troubles of Argyll Ferries' new service will be ironed out shortly. It should be viewed as Calmac having gone back to its roots. The Caledonian Railway Company incorporated the CSP as a separate company in 1889 to circumvent legal diffulculties over, in effect, extending the rail network across the Firth of Clyde with ships. The same thing has been done in 2011 with the incorporation of Argyll Ferries.

MV Arran - first ever Scottish car ferry between Gorock and Dunoon

Taransay

2011-06-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

Most famous as the location of the first ever TV reality show, the BBC's "Castaway 2000", the island of Taransay off the west coast of Harris in the Outer Hebrides is for sale at the astonishing price of £2 million.

The sale brochure by estate agents CKD Galbraith of Inverness (which you can download via this link) features beautiful photography of the island showing the Outer Hebrides at their stunning best in glorious weather but what are you actually getting for your £2m?

Well, it's basically a sheep-farm of 3,475 acres (1,400 hectares). That's pretty standard for a Scottish sheep farm but the Taransay sheep, all 680 of them, are not included in the price. You have to buy them and the all important right to collect the EU Common Agricultural Policy subsidies separately. That's also standard practice in Scottish farm sales but what's not standard about Taransay is having 2 miles of angry Atlantic Ocean to cross from Harris to get to your farm. There's no ferry (because nobody lives on Taransay) nor is there even a pier on the Harris shore opposite to embark from.

Once you've managed, in reasonable weather (i.e. impossible October to March), to land on Taransay (no pier on the island either), what's there? Well there's a farmhouse in reasonable condition for a house in such an exposed location which hasn't been lived in permanently since the early 1970s:-

There's also the old school which has been converted to self catering holiday accommodation:-

Old schools are a common feature of deserted Hebridean islands. They date back to the late 19th/early 20th centuries when they still had sizeable populations. The population of Taransay was 76 in 1911. The houses of the native population (it's not always accurate to call them "crofters") were of the "black house" type with low drystone walls which, now roofless, have receded back into the landscape (although are still discoverable if you look carefully and clearly visible on Google Earth). But "public buildings" such as schools - churches are another example - were of stone and lime and slated and have survived more prominently in the environment. The island of Mingulay south of Barra is another example of a deserted island (abandoned in 1911) where the school and the church remain prominent while the houses have retreated into the environment.

It's often a similar story with the house of the commercial sheep farmer who intruded himself onto the scene in the second half of the 19th century - many's the Hebridean island with the gaunt remains of an empty farmhouse. I don't know the history of the coexistence of the farmer with the native population on Taransay - it was probably tense and would be an interesting historical study.

Back in 2011, the farm buildings also remain on Taransay. The sale brochure describes them as "the Bothy" and providing "fairly basic" accommodation for groups of up to 10 people. For estate agents to describe something in such lukewarm terms must mean it's pretty crap and I'd guess it's not been maintained since the Castaways lived there in 1999. Certainly, the Bothy is not advertised as self catering holiday accommodation as the farmhouse and old school are on the island's website.

If they were situated on Harris (where there would be mains electricity and a public road to the front door so you can reach them 365 days a year!), the farmhouse would probably be worth about £150,000, the old schoolhouse about £100,000 and "the Bothy" about £50,000. So, given that the profits from a sheep farm on the mainland, never mind an offshore island are sweeties, what are you paying the other £1.7 million for on Taransay?

Well, a whole lot of this:-

and a big chunk of that:-

The thing is, you don't need to buy the right to enjoy "that". There's no such thing as a private island in Scottish Law a la Mustique or Necker Island in the Caribbean. Any yachtsman or kayaker is at liberty to land on Taransay and, provided he behaves "responsibly" and doesn't do it on the doorstep of the farmhouse or the other buildings while anyone's staying there, have a barbecue, camp for the night or walk all over the island. He wouldn't be allowed to fish the lochs or shoot the deer but I'm not sure that dubious privilege is worth paying seven figures for.

In reality, the estate agents are hoping there's someone out there gullible enough to cough up nearly two big ones solely for the privilege of being able to say they're the owner of Taransay - it's really just an upmarket version of these rackets where you buy a square foot to call yourself the "laird" of Glen Teuchter.

Enter Ben Fogle, daytime TV presenter and most famous of the Castaways. He's been quoted in the Stornoway Gazette saying he wants to get a consortium together to buy Taransay for a wildlife reserve. Well, it's kind of already a wildlife reserve, Ben - it doesn't need you and your chums' money to make it one!

MV Loch Seaforth

2011-05-24T16:27:00.000-07:00

As Caledonian MacBrayne take delivery this week of their latest ship, the MV Finlaggan destined to serve the island of Islay, and flesh is finally put on the bones of what has for long merely been an artist's impression, it's interesting to go back 64 years and look at an artist's impression of another new ship for service to the Western Isles:-

This was the MV Loch Seaforth ordered by MacBrayne's for the important run from Mallaig and Kyle of Lochalsh to Stornoway on the island of Lewis. The picture above is scanned from their 1947 summer timetable printed on very thin, post-war utility type paper of almost toilet paper thin-ness. Post war scarcity also led to the new ship not, in fact, being ready "early this summer" as the brochure predicted and being delayed until December 1947.

The artist's impression is a good likeness of how the ship ended up looking except that her funnel was actually a bit narrower and taller and she also ended up being called "Loch Seaforth" (two words) rather than "Lochseaforth" (one word). It wasn't a printing mistake in the brochure, though. In 1928, when the company passed from the MacBrayne family to the joint ownership of Coast Lines and the London, Midland & Scottish Railway Company, MacBrayne's adopted the convention of naming all their new ships after Scottish lochs but always as one word - thus "Lochearn" rather than "Loch Earn". The Loch Seaforth broke that rule and became the first new ship in the fleet with a two word loch name (although in 1934, an existing ship, the Plover, had been renamed Loch Aline). Thereafter, new ships named after lochs followed the same pattern unless a one word loch name was being re-used (thus "Lochdunvegan" (1950) because she was the second MacBrayne ship of that name but "Loch Carron" (1951) because there had never previously been a "Lochcarron" in the fleet).

The Loch Seaforth at Kyle of Lochalsh - picture credit clydeboy63

The Loch Seaforth served the Mallaig-Kyle-Stornoway run for over 24 years until she was replaced by a car ferry, the MV Iona, in 1972. The following year, the mainland terminus for the Stornoway service was moved to Ullapool and also in 1973, while on passge between Lochboisdale in South Uist and Tiree, the Loch Seaforth struck a rock in the Gunna Sound between Coll and Tiree. The passengers were evacuated in the lifeboats (without injury) and the ship made it to Tiree but she sank alongside the pier (I remember watching this on Reporting Scotland - I was 9 at the time) and remained there until patched up and towed away some weeks later to be scrapped. As the shipping services on the west coast would be totally converted to ro-ro car ferry operations by 1975, the Loch Seaforth's days were more or less numbered in 1973 anyway but she bowed out early with the dubious distinction of being the last Calmac (or antecedent companies) ship whose passengers have had to take to the lifeboats! Let's hope a similar fate doesn't befall the Finlaggan entering service this week

Finlaggan at Port Askaig - picture credit Richard Cameron

Mallaig

2011-05-16T13:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a postcard I bought off eBay recently:-

It cost £6.50 plus p+p which is way beyond my normal price range but what made this one a "must have" was the little vignette of fishing history encapsulated in the message on the back.

Postmarked at Mallaig on 27 February 1927 and addressed from the SS Adequate (a steam powered fishing boat), the message reads:-

"Dear Bro. We had a hundred cran & the price was ten bob. We are fishing at the Rhu Rea just now. The herring was down to five bob yesterday & some boats lost their nets and ropes too. I think we will be home next week if we get a shot to run with. Hope you are all well at Home. Alex."

A cran is a measure of herring equal to about 170 litres and containing about 1,200 ungutted fish. So at 10 bob - i.e. 10 shillings or 50p - a cran, a catch of 100 earned the boat £50. "Rhu Rea" is the headland of Rubha Reidh where there's a lighthouse north of Loch Gairloch. (I wonder why, if they were fishing off RR, they went south, a further distance and further from home, to Mallaig to discharge their catch rather than to Stornoway, closer and nearer to home?)

Rubha Reidh light - Skye on the horizon - Photo credit Andy Hemingway

If anyone knows the answer to that or is related to Alex or William Slater from Gordonsburgh, Buckie or knows anything about the steam fishing vessel "Adequate", then do leave a comment.

Gordonsburgh

The Parliamentary Churches

2011-05-13T14:29:00.000-07:00

There are some awfully big parishes in the West Highlands of Scotland. In the early 19th century, one of the biggest was Kilmallie which included all the land on the west side of the Great Glen from north of Loch Arkaig to deep into Morvern as well as a big wedge of land on the east side of the Glen from Fort William to Loch Leven.

Another problem was parishes which were not only large but in which the church had ended up being in the wrong place due to shifts of population as a result of the Highland Clearances or the creation of new fishing villages (such as Tobermory and Ullapool) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A good example of the latter syndrome was the parish of Assynt in Sutherland.

The church was at Inchnadamph at the head of Loch Assynt which was a nice central location when the population lived in the inland glens but quite useless once it had been cleared out to the western and northern coastal strip and the new village of Lochinver. (Note, incidentally, that these two maps are not at the same scale. They make Kilmallie and Assynt look roughly the same sort of size but Kilmallie is actually much larger than Assynt.)

Ever since the Reformation (1560 in Scotland), there had existed a statutory procedure for building a new church where required, jurisdiction over such matters being vested in the sonorously titled "Commission for Plantation of Kirks". But the responsibility for actually paying for kirks, manses (Scottish equivalent of the vicarage) and the salaries of the ministers of the Church of Scotland rested with the "heritors" (landowners) of the parish. The initiative to "plant" (build) a new kirk had to come from the heritors and they were generally reluctant due to the multiplication of expense to themselves this involved.

A Highland heritor reluctant to put his hand is his sporran to pay for a new church.

The response to these tensions so far as the Highlands were concerned came with the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland appealing in 1819 for public funds for the endowment of new churches. 200 years ago, the provision of churches and ministers was regarded as a matter almost as (if not more) important than the provision of schools or dosctors would be today so Parliament eventually responded favourably with the Additional Places of Worship in the Highlands Act 1823.

This provided £50,000 of public money to build not more than 40 new churches (with relative manses), none to cost not more than £1,500. Provision was also made to renovate not more than 10 dilapidated churches and provide them with new manses. A stipend of £120 a year would be paid by the government to the ministers appointed to these "Parliamentary Churches", as they became known, and thus the heritors had nothing to fear bar the cost of maintaining the church to an amount not exceeding 1% of its building cost (i.e. max. £15 per year) so far as that wasn't covered by the pew rents of 2 shillings and sixpence per sitter a year. Imagine having to pay for the privilege of sitting in church! It was standard at the time and the 1823 Act provided that a third of the pews were to be set aside for the free use of poorer parishioners (and imagine the sort of "do you live in a coonsil hoose or a bought coonsil hoose" sort of snobbery that must have engendered!).

The Act set up a Commission to oversee the building of the new churches and appointed as its consulting engineer (to use an anachronistic modern expression) the celebrated Scottish engineer, Thomas Telford: hence they are also sometimes referred to as "Telford Churches". They were all built in the late 1820s to a standard design (by William Thomson rather than Telford). For the manses, there was the option of the one or two storey design.

The example at Ullapool (now a museum) is typical with the Tudor "Y tracery" latticed windows and "spikily pinnacled birdcage bellcote" being characteristic of the Parliamentary Churches:-

Photo credit - The Poss

The manse at Hallin in Vaternish on Skye is a well preserved example of the two storey manse:-

Photo credit - RCAHMS

And the manse at Shieldaig, Loch Torridon is a good example of the one storey option - these are rather stylish Georgian villas:-

According to the Tenth Schedule of the Church of Scotland (Property and Endowments) Act 1925 (a more authoritative source it's hard to think of), 35 Parliamentary Churches (PCs) were built plus eight extra manses alongside churches which were renovated.

As well as those built in huge parishes like Kilmallie - which had two PCs built within its bounds, one at Corran of Ardgour and the other at North Ballachulish (Onich), these both to be served by the same minister whose single storey manse was at the latter location - and parishes in which the population had moved (Assynt where a PC was built at Stoer on the coast north of Lochinver), others were built on islands which weren't parishes in their own right (Iona, Ulva and Berneray). Others were built in the "new" fishing villages of the era (Tobermory, Ullapool, Plockton, Shieldaig, Portnahaven.)

The Parliamentary Church and Manse on Ulva - the "H-plan" is distinctive of the single storey manse design.

Sixteen of the PCs are still in use, five have been rebuilt (Tomintoul, Tobermory, Lochgilphead, Shieldaig & North Ballachulish - all still in use), two have been demolished (Cross & Knock in Lewis), nine are intact but no longer in use as churches and four are in ruins (Berneray, Trumisgarry (N Uist), Oa (Islay) and Stoer). All of the manses are still standing but none - with the possible exception of Sandwick in Shetland which I'm not sure about - is still in use as a manse. The manse at Kinlochbervie is derelict.

The derelict Parliamentary Manse at Kinlochbervie - the little wings on either side are a classic part of the original design - Photo credit Gary Sutherland

There's an irony about some of the Parliamentary Churches which is that, despite the great effort of having to get an Act of Parliament passed to get them built, many didn't retain the congregations they were designed for for very long. This was due to two factors. First, further clearances. This was exemplified by Ulva. In 1841, thirteen years after the PC was built, the island's population peaked at 859 but was reduced by clearance to 150 only 7 years later. By 1889, the population of Ulva had slumped to 53 and today is less than 20.

The second (and more prevalent) cause of the PCs losing their congregations so soon after they were built was "the Disruption" in 1843 whereby many Highland congregations walked out of the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church. Both syndromes (clearance and Disruption) are exemplified at what's probably the most famous of all the PCs, Croick in Easter Ross.

Croick Parliamentary Church - Photo credit Frank Stephen

The minister of Croick, the Rev. Gustavus Aird, led most of his congregation out to the Free Church leaving only two families worshipping in the Parliamentary Church. Two years later, in 1845, 90 people were evicted from nearby Glen Calvie and took temporary shelter in the church yard of Croick PC. The Glen Calvie clearance became famous for two reasons - first, it was covered "live" (as it were) by The Times newspaper and, second, a number of the evicted people scratched messages on the window panes of the church where they can still be seen to this day.

Scratchings on the window of Croick PC - Photo credit thefourthcraw

In combination with other less well publicised clearances from the glens around Croick Church, it is left at the end of the public road in a virtually deserted glen in a place less appropriate for a church it is now hard to imagine. Having said that, Croick remains in use to this day as a church despite - or perhaps because of - its history.

Inside Croick Parliamentary Church - photo credit Lee Carson

No doubt there are other Parliamentary Churches with good stories to tell. I'd particularly like to hear about how Kinlochbervie came to be the only one: (a) in use today other than by the Church of Scotland (it's a Free Presbyterian Church); and (b) where the manse is derelict.

I leave you with a map of all the PCs and manses - click to enlarge.

The loss of the brigantine "Aid" of Dundee

2011-05-01T04:10:00.000-07:00

Amongst the thousands of volumes digitised in Google Books are some volumes of early 19th century Scottish legal case reports. I was drawn to these as a retired lawyer but they're as of much, if not more, interest for the human interest stories from a bygone era and local history they contain.

One such is the case of Thomson v Bisset, a suit between the owners of the brigantine "Aid" of Dundee and the ship's insurers arising out of its loss in East Loch Tarbert, Harris, in the Outer Hebrides in 1819.

In October that year, the Aid sailed from Riga (now in Latvia but in Russia in 1819) for Londonderry with a cargo of flax seed. Nearing the end of her voyage on the morning of the 15th, the Aid was sailing down the Minch when she was "driven by stress of weather into the harbour of Scalpa in the Hebrides" - Scalpay, as it's called nowadays, an island off the east coast of Harris.

As the Aid closed the Outer Hebrides, she came within what's known in nautical parlance as "pilot's fairway". In other words, she was sailing close enough to land away from home to merit having on board a local pilot to navigate her safely. The nearest official pilot was at Stornoway, 24 miles away to the north, but the Aid took on board the assistant lighthouse keeper from the Eilean Glas lighthouse at the east end of Scalpay who conducted her through the Sound of Scalpay to an anchorage at the west end of island. She dropped anchor at 1.00pm. The assistant keeper returned to the lighthouse (one of the very few in the 1820s) about three miles away and the sun set that day at about nine minutes past five.

At 6.00am the following morning, about two hours after high water, the Aid set sail again for Londonderry. She planned to follow the wind (being a sailing ship, she had little choice) and leave Scalpay to the west via East Loch Tarbert. But shortly after weighing anchor, the Aid ran aground on a sunken rock. She was stuck fast and holed and, as the tide fell, the ship fell off the rock and sank and was a total loss.

The map below shows the Aid's route in from the north east via the Sound of Scalpay to her anchorage near point X. The dotted line shows her planned route out to the west on the morning of the 16th except she was wrecked probably round about point Y. The Eilean Glas lighthouse is at the eastmost point of the island.

The owners of the Aid duly claimed on their insurance but the underwriters - a Mr Bisset and two others who were each liable to the tune of £100 - refused the claim. Not because the master of the Aid had been at fault in allowing the ship to run aground - it is, after all, against such accidents that one is insured - but rather due to an arcane nicety of marine insurance law as follows: The owners of a ship give its insurers a warranty that it will at all times be adequately crwed. When the ship is "in pilot's fairway", this involves having a local pilot aboard to navigate it safely. It is recognised that an official pilot is not available everywhere and the underwriters were not suggesting it was incumbent on the master of the Aid to send for the nearest one at Stornoway before sailing from Scalpay. But it was incumbent on him to take such local assistance as might have been had, namely, the Eilean Glas lighthouse keeper or at the very least one of the local fisherman (some of whom, it was noted, could speak English as well as their native Gaelic.)

Looking from the west end of Scalpay over the water where the Aid anchored on the night of 15th October 1819. She arrived from the right and attempted to leave to the left.

Legally, it mattered not that, in fact, when conducting the Aid in to Scalpay the previous day, the lighthouse keeper had pointed out to the master the rock the ship foundered on and warned him to take care of it if leaving to the west. In other words, the Aid went aground on a rock the location of which was known and the presence on board of a pilot would not have prevented the grounding. But that was beside the point, legally - if the Aid was deemed to be insufficiently crewed by being within pilot's fairway and not having a local pilot on board, whether the lighthouse keeper or a local fisherman, then the owners were "in breach of warranty" and the insurance was void.

So did the absence of a pilot in the particular circumstances the Aid found herself in on the morning of 16th October 1819 mean that her insurance was void? Five judges of Scotland's highest court, the Court of Session, ruled. You can tell that they all felt it was rather a hard case but in the end they voted three to two that the Aid was insufficiently crewed by not having the lighthouse keeper or a local fisherman aboard when she weighed anchor from Scalpay. An object lesson in taking care to comply with the conditions of your insurance to the letter even when it makes no difference to the outcome!

The Aid is not the only vessel to have come to grief in the treacherous waters of East Loch Tarbert. The Royal Commission on Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland lists at least eight, not including the Aid or what I believe to be the most recent wreck which you could still see on a rock off the south coast of Scalpay from the car ferry to Tarbert from Uig in 2006 when I was last on that ferry. I don't know if there's anything still visible but you can see it on Bing Maps aerial photography:-

If anyone knows the story about that wreck, then do leave a comment.

Troon to Campbeltown ferry

2011-03-26T18:58:00.000-07:00

A new passenger ferry from Troon to Campbeltown begins on 1st April.

It's being operated by new-start Kintyre Express, a subsidiary of West Coast Motors, the locally owned Campbeltown bus company which already operates the Scottish Citylink coaches to Kintyre from Glasgow (whether as franchisee or sub-contractor I'm not sure).

The boat to be used is an 11 metre Redbay Stormforce RIB (rigid inflatable boat) with accommodation for just 12 passengers. Centrally heated but lifejackets to be worn at all times:-

The passage time is 1h 15m and combined with a 40 minute train ride from Glasgow to Troon, KE are claiming Glasgow to Campbeltown in less than 2 hours. That compares favourably with the 4h 25m on the coach except the "less than 2 hours" claim is a little disingenuous in that the train gets in to Troon 20 minutes before the ferry departs so it's really 2h 15m (and the train connecting with the Sunday morning sailing is an hour so that's 2h 35m)

How do the prices compare? Well it's £17 to Campbeltown from Glasgow on the bus but £50 on the Kintyre Express boat. Add £6.50 for the train and, as it's more than a mile from Troon Station to the harbour, lets call that £60 from GLA to CTN including the cab fare.

So the Kintyre Express is the equivalent of going on the Heathrow Express from Paddington (15-20 minutes - £16.50) as opposed to going to the airport on the Tube (about an hour - £5.00). But to my mind, these premium services only justify their fares if, as well as a much quicker journey time, they also have a "turn up and go" frequency. The Heathrow Express is every 15 minutes from about 05.00 to 23.30 seven days a week but the Kintyre Express only operates on Monday, Wednesday and Sunday with two departures on these days, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Compare the WCM/Citylink coach with three departures, seven days a week.

But even if KE's restricted timetable does happen to suit you, a sailing "may" be cancelled if there are fewer than four passengers booked. I hate to be the harbinger of doom but I can't really see this taking off as a credible addition to the public transport network. I suspect it will degenerate into "bookable by parties of 3+ and, if you want to book, these are times we go at."

KE are also starting a Campbeltown to Ballycastle (Northern Ireland) service on 27 May with the same type of boat. This has a slightly more reasonable timetable of two departures a day, Friday to Monday. These are not subject to cancellation for lack of demand and the price is £30 single - compare that with £26 single on Stenaline between Belfast and Stranraer and this seems a bit more credible as an alternative tourist link between NI and Scotland. I wish it good fortune but it's only fair to say that previous fast passenger ferry services in Scotland have met with little success.

Western Ferries (the company that now operates the very successful McInroy's Point to Hunter's Quay car ferry across the Clyde) experimented with a catamaran called the Highland Seabird between Oban and Fort William and Moville in Donegal in the mid 70s but it only lasted two summers, 1977 and 78, as I recall. I went on it between Oban and FW once - great fun but I think my father and I were the only passengers aboard.

And more recently, a RIB service began between Tayvallich (on the mainland coast of Argyll) and the island of Jura in 2008 on a three year trial basis. This was with subsidy from Argyll & Bute Council but it's not yet been decided whether this will be continuing in 2011. See this link and this one for more info on the Jura ferry. It's my understanding KE are not receiving any subsidy for either of their services.

So, I say again, I wish KE all the best. If I had the opportunity, I'd make a point of using them but experience suggests that perhaps not enough people think like I do. But I hope I'm proved wrong. Let's see.

Photo credit Kintyre Express

Mallaig - a tale of two ferries

2011-03-16T16:09:00.000-07:00

Periodically, I go to Flickr and enter "Mallaig" in the search box, recent entries first, to see what new comes up. Yesterday I was rewarded with this postcard

Picture credit Blackislebennet

My interest in old postcards is due to the fact they're a great source of images of the past and my interest in Calmac ferries stemmed partly from a desire to be able to date a photo from the evidence of any ship appearing in it.

This postcard is a case in point and the coincidence of the two ferries you can see berthed at Mallaig allows this photo to be dated quite precisely to between 6 May and 18 July 1979.

The reason is that the ship on the right is the MV Pioneer. Entering service in 1974 between West Loch Tarbert and Port Ellen on Islay as a stern loading car ferry, she was altered in 1979 by being equipped with a vehicle loading hoist to enable her to take up the Mallaig to Armadale service. This is because there were no linkspans (ramps adjustable to the level of the tide) at Mallaig or Armadale in the 70s to allow vehicles to drive on by the ramp at the stern of the ship. Hence she had to have the hoist added - this is basically a sort of "dumb waiter" to move vehicles between the level of the pier and the ship's car deck. You can see the hoist on the Pioneer in this picture and the seasonal Mallaig-Armadale service opened on 6 May in 1979 so that fixes the earliest date.

The Pioneer arriving at Mallaig in 1988 - the hoist is clearly visible immediately aft of the red and black funnel

The ship on the left in the postcard at the top is the MV Arran. Entering service between Gourock and Dunoon in 1954, she was the first ever car ferry on the west coast of Scotland (except for the ferry from Stranraer to Larne and estuarial short crossings like the Corran and Erskine ferries etc.). The Arran started life as a hoist loading ferry but was altered in 1970 to have her hoist removed and be converted to a stern-loader - this was the "Pioneer treatment" in reverse. The picture below shows how the Arran (left) was altered compared with her identical sister ship, the MV Cowal (right), which remained in her original hoist loading configuration.

Picture credit mona's isle

By the late 70s, the advent of newer ferries had relegated the Arran to spare/relief ferry in the Calmac fleet and in early 1979 she was deputising on the run from Mallaig to the Small Isles. (The previous incumbent of that route, the Loch Arkaig, had sunk alongside the pier at Mallaig in March 1979 and the new ship to the Small Isles, the Lochmor, entered service in July.) The Arran gave her last sailing for Calmac on 18 July 1979 so that fixes the last possible date for the postcard.

All of which is a lot of rather useless knowledge devoted to a rather pointless end! Although in my defence, it enables me to search out smashing archive pics such as the one I leave you with below of the Arran at Port Askaig on Islay (before she had been converted from hoist loading)


Picture credit beaches

That picture can be dated to between 1 August 1969 (entry into service of the red ship on the right, Western Ferries' MV Sound of Jura) and 30 December 1972 (withdrawal of the Arran for conversion to stern loading). See what I mean? Don't get me started, I can't help myself anymore ...!

Cruising from Ayr, Troon and Ardrossan

2011-03-10T16:19:00.000-08:00

That's the cover of a fold out brochure I bought off eBay recently for 99p.

The fact that 1964 was the last year the splendidly named Caledonian Steam Packet Company (CSP) offered a programme of cruises from Ayr, Troon and Ardrossan is just the start of the history involved here.

For a start, the CSP was the shipping subsidiary operating on the Clyde of the nationalised British Railways. Due to a quirk of history, it managed to retain its identity and livery of yellow funnel embossed with red lion when the identities of the other pre-nationalisation railway shipping subsidiaries to Ireland and across the Channel were suppressed and BR imposed their standard red funnel with their "double arrow" logo. The CSP also became the "Caledonian" which gave its name to Caledonian MacBrayne (Calmac) when, divorced from railway control, it merged with David MacBrayne in 1973.

The ships pictured on the brochure next to the Cloch Lighthouse just south of Gourock on the east bank of the Clyde are, in the foreground, the SS Queen Mary II (1933). She ended up being the last dedicated cruising steamer in the CSP/Calmac fleet in 1977 and until very recently she was a floating restaurant on the Thames. The vessel in the background is one of the three "ABC" (because they were called Arran, Bute and Cowal) class of car ferries which operated to Dunoon and Rothesay from 1954. These were the first car ferries in Scotland (apart from the short crossings like Queensferry etc, now replaced by bridges).

The map on the back of the brochure - Ayr and Troon off the bottom!

The ship stationed at Ayr to give the cruise programme advertised in the brochure was the paddle steamer Caledonia built in 1934. During the summer of 1964, she sailed from Ayr every day at around 10.00am and called at Troon and Ardrossan before sailing to a variety of destinations around the Firth of Clyde including Largs, Rothesay, Loch Riddon, Millport, Dunoon, Loch Goil, Arran, Campbeltown, Tighnabraich and the Kyles of Bute.

The Caledonia was withdrawn from service in 1969 - she too later spent time on the Thames as a floating restaurant before being destroyed by fire in 1980. Calmac finally ceased all cruise sailings - since 1977 operated by diesel car ferries in their "spare time" - in 1996. (I think that was the year because I went on a sail on either the Jupiter, Juno or Saturn from Rothesay to Tarbert in 96 and I don't think there were cruise sailings in later years but correct me if I'm wrong.)

Finally, note that the brochure (top picture) has a date stamp 2 Sep 1964 saying "Caledonia". I think that means the brochure was picked up on the ship and stamped with the ship's own stamp kept on board in her ticket office. So that gives it a bit of extra "provenance" as they say on the Antiques Roadshow!

I leave you with two pictures of the Caledonia in her heyday in the 60s

Picture credit Mona's Isle

Picture credit Phil Wilson

The Pigeon House

2011-02-28T17:05:00.000-08:00

I was reading the Glasgow Herald of 30 May 1806 the other day - "Why?", I hear you ask. The answer is because I can. You can read nearly every single edition of the Herald all the way back to 1806 for free via the Google News Archive function. I say "nearly every edition" because the late 1990s and early 2000s are Pay-per-View and even before then there seem to be a small random percentage of editions missing. But even so, it's an amazing archive to have access to for free. (Contrast the Scotsman which costs £159.95 for a year's access to their 1817-1950 archive.)

Anyway, in the edition of 30 May 1806, there was a report of the sort of crime you'd expect to see reported in 1806 - a mail coach being held up by highwaymen!

It happened just outside Dublin and the full story is as follows:-

Wednesday last, about a quarter past ten, the long coach which conveys passengers from the Mail coach office, Dawson Street, Dublin, to the packets at the Pidgeon-house, was stopped by ten or more persons armed with blunderbusses, pistols, and swords, at the other side of the Canal bridge, near a Limekiln, at the Low Ground, who robbed all the passengers, about seven or eight in number.

They first called out to the coach-man to stop; who not immediately obeying their mandate, one of the villains made several cuts at him with a sword, which the driver luckily warded off with his whip. The villains obliged the passengers to come from the carriage, and rifled them as they came out, commanding them to turn their faces to a wall that was near, immediately after plundering them, that they should not have an opportunity of observing their persons. Lord Cahir, and Mr George Latouche were two of the passengers; from his Lordship they took about £400 and it is said 70 guineas from Mr. L. They robbed the other passengers of money, and also off some light packages from them; a small box which contained some of their articles, was found yesterday at the Commons of Kilmainham, to which place it is supposed they retired after the robbery, by going up the Circular-road, to divide the spoil. One of the persons in the Long Coach, we understand, they somewhat maltreated, because he did not readily submit to their depredations. The villains, we are informed, had rather a better appearance than might be expected of such offenders.

Hah! So blackguards and scoundrels they may have been but at least they were gentlemen highwaymen!

But as well as the report of a real life highway robbery, what piqued my interest was the coach's destination - "the packets, at the Pidgeon-house".

This means the coach was taking passengers from the centre of Dublin to the terminal for "the packets" - in effect the ferry service to Great Britain in the days before steamships. This was at a spot called the Pigeon House half way out along The Great South Wall which is the southern arm of the two great breakwaters enclosing the mouth of Dublin harbour on the River Liffey to protect it from the shifting sand banks of Dublin Bay.

It was called the Pigeon House because it was at this spot that, in the 1760s, John Pidgeon started selling refreshments to passengers waiting for the packets from a storehouse used in connection with the construction of the Great South Wall he was the caretaker of. In 1793, a hotel for packet travellers was built on the spot and this building still exists despite the site having been converted to a military fort and then a power station.

In the picture below, the former Pigeon House Hotel is the Georgian building on the left. The power station is now called Poolbeg but the road out to it from Dublin is still called Pigeon House Road.

But highwaymen on the way to the Pigeon House were probably less of a risk than "the packets" themselves as another story from the Glasgow Herald in 1806 graphically illustrates.

The edition of 26 September includes "interesting particulars" of the loss of the King George Packet from Parkgate (on the west coast of the Wirral on the estuary of the River Dee in Cheshire, a port long since silted up) to Dublin on a sandbank just an hour and a half into her journey.

The report suggests that running aground on the sandbank was an event which, if not exactly routine, was one about which "no apprehensions were then entertained" and it was just a case of waiting for the tide to refloat the ship. The problems seem to have stemmed from a change of wind direction which blew the ship onto its own anchor as it began to refloat and punctured its hull causing it to flood.

As the tide came in, she filled rapidly with water; the night was dark, with rain. Her passengers, mostly Irish harvest-men, about one hundred in number, who were going home with pittances of their labours to their families, were under hatches. The pumps were soon choaked, and the water came fast on the Irishmen in the hold, that they drew their large harvest pocket knives, and with a desperation that a dread of death alone inspires, slew one another to make their way upon deck.

The story goes on to report how the captain and "an Irish gentleman" abandoned ship in the ship's boat but thought better of it and went back on board. Others remained in the boat whereupon:-

One of the sailors in the boat, seeing a poor Irish sailor boy clinging to the side of the vessel, pulled him by the hair of the head into the boat, cut the rope that fastened it to the vessel, and the tide drove them away. At this time great numbers ran screaming up the mast; a woman with her child fastened to her back, was at the top mast head; the mast broke, the vessel being on her side, and they were all precipitated into the waves! Only five men and the poor Irish sailor boy have escaped; the remainder, one hundred and twenty five in number, among whom were seven cabin passngers, perished!

The "cabin passengers" were the gentry, exactly the sort of people who would have been on the coach to the Pigeon House held up by the highwaymen and it's all worth giving a thought to next time you board Stena Line's complimentary bus service from Dublin city centre to Dublin Port (on the north side of the Liffey almost directly opposite the Pigeon House) to get on a superferry to Holyhead.

Photo credit Peter Griffin

The Great Glen Cattle Ranch

2011-02-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

What connects trendy Edinburgh bar and restaurant Cruz with American style cattle ranching?

Well, the answer is not the steaks on the menu but the fact that Cruz is the latest incarnation of the venue at Leith on the former steamship Ocean Mist which, in a previous life, was the private yacht of Joseph W Hobbs, the Anglo-Canadian owner of the Great Glen Cattle Ranch between Fort William and Spean Bridge in Lochaber.

Below is a picture of the Ocean Mist berthed at Banavie on the Caledonian Canal near Fort William (Ben Nevis in the background) when it was Hobbs' yacht:-

Joe Hobbs was born in Hampshire in 1891 but emigrated with his parents to Canada in 1900. From ranching in Calgary, he became a naval flyer during the First World War and then went on to make a fortune in shipping and real estate. But he was ruined during the Great Depression of 1929 and that's when he came to Scotland and got involved in the whisky trade. Before long Hobbs owned seven distilleries, including the Ben Nevis Distillery at Fort William.

In 1945, Hobbs bought Inverlochy Estate at Fort William and renamed it "The Great Glen Cattle Ranch" with the idea of introducing American style cattle ranching to the Highlands of Scotland. Now I have to confess I don't understand enough about cattle farming to know the difference between "ranching" cattle and farming them in the usual Scottish fashion. Suffice it to say that the Greensburg (Pennsylvania) Daily Tribune reported in 1951 that Hobbs was employing "four Gaelic-speaking cattle hands. From dawn to dusk they range this Scottish ranch on horseback and carry 12 foot whips." And in the Glasgow Herald in 1957 Hobbs was quoted as saying that the ultimate object was to "make the hills of Lochaber like the English Downs or better."

Hobbs sold the Great Glen Cattle Ranch in 1961 but retained 300 acres centred on the estate mansion house, Inverlochy Castle. He died two years later, coy about whether he was a rich man but with his ideas about cattle ranching never really having caught on. But Joe Hobbs certainly left some legacies even if they were not the ones he imagined or hoped for.

His yacht, the Ocean Mist, you can read a detailed history of here. In short, she was built at Greenock in 1918 for the Admiralty as part of a programme to replace the many fishing trawlers called up for service as minesweepers and lost during the First World War. But with the end of the war, she was surplus and sold as a yacht to a member of the Guinness brewing family who adapted her fish holds to carry his racing cars to the Mediterranean. After passing through a number of hands, including doing duty during the Second War as a torpedo recovery vessel on the Clyde, she was bought by Joe Hobbs in 1960. After he died, the Ocean Mist was kept on by his son Joe, Junior and she remained on the Caledonian Canal until moved to Leith in the mid 1980s. I don't know exact sequence of events of her history there but this is what she looked like when first parked at Leith (pretty much how she looked at Banavie):-

Photo credit Martin Third

It was in 2005, I believe, after around 20 years at Leith, that the Ocean Mist was radically altered by having her original superstructure and funnel removed and replaced with the current superstructure as seen in the first picture in this post. The picture below shows her during the transformation:-

Photo credit Leith Podcaster

Meanwhile, back in Lochaber, Joe Hobbs, Junior and his wife opened their home as a hotel in 1969 and Inverlochy Castle Hotel has since gone on to become one of Scotland's finest hotels, with a Michelin star and patronised by the international glitterati. Joe Junior's wife, Grete, was still running the hotel personally in 1976 but I don't know if the Hobbs' still own it - I suspect not but I don't know who does. As ever, leave a comment if you know.

Photo credit Celtic Castles - Ben Nevis in the background

And the Great Glen Cattle Ranch is still on the go, 5,922 acres (according to Andy Wightman) based at Auchindaul Farm just up the road from Inverlochy Castle in the direction of Spean Bridge and belonging nowadays to Paulo Berardelli. I'm not sure if there are any gaelic speaking bull-whip wielding cowboys these days but they've kept up the white painted steading buildings with the GGCR logo in that distinctive typeface.


Photo credit Keith Long

I recall these buildings clearly from when we used to go on family holidays in the West Highlands in the early 70s (when I was about 7-10 year old). The GGCR shelters, clearly visible from the A82 between Fort William and Spean Bridge, were landmarks on our journeys by car and I always felt we were missing out on something by not stopping for a closer look. "We'll be stopping for chips at Fort William in about 10 minutes" was usually the riposte from my father.

I'm glad the GGCR buildings are still here. My father isn't.

Glenelg Inn

2011-02-02T16:52:00.000-08:00

The Glenelg Inn has been through a few changes in its time.

The present establishment, as pictured above (from the east), is the third incarnation of the Glenelg Inn - or Glenelg Hotel as it used to be called - and is, in fact, just the stable block of the two previous incarnations. The first of these is pictured below (from the south west) in a postcard which bears a 1903 postmark:-

This is the building I've marked "Hotel" on the 1875 Ordnance Survey 6 inch scale map below. The present day Inn is the stable block behind it (to the north):-

At some point around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, the hotel was extended to the west as seen in the following picture - the building in the postcard above is the lower wing to the right.

The Glenelg Hotel burnt down in 1947 with the only trace remaining being the floor tiles of the entrance porch which it's still possible to see in the car park of the present day inn - well, you could still see them when I was last there in the early 90s: I hope they've been preserved and if anyone can add a photograph or confirm or deny, please leave a comment.

The present day Glenelg Inn gets rave reviews on Tripadvisor but it was not always so. When Johnson and Boswell passed through Glenelg in 1773, Johnson had this to say about the inn they found there after a particularly trying day's journey crossing the Mam Ratagan on horseback:-

At last we came to our inn weary and peevish, and began to inquire for meat and beds. Of the provisions the negative catalogue was very copious. Here was no meat, no milk, no bread, no eggs, no wine. ... Whisky we might have, and I believe at last they caught a fowl and killed it.

But if the bar supper was a disappointment, the bedroom at the Glenelg was worse:-

We were now to examine our lodging. Out of one of the beds, on which we were to repose, started up at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge. Other circumstances of no elegant recital concurred to disgust us. ... Sleep, however, was necessary. Our highlanders [servants] had at last found some hay, with which the inn could not supply them. I ... slept upon it in my riding coat. Mr Boswell being more delicate, laid himself sheets with hay over and under him, and lay in linen like a gentleman.

Boswell's account of the Glenelg Inn was scarcely less uncomplimentary:-

A maid shewed us up stairs into a room damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table, and forms of the same kind ... This inn was furnished with not a single article that we could either eat or drink.

The Glenelg Inn today

Seconds from disaster?

2011-01-30T15:12:00.000-08:00

Having been a yachtsman on the west coast of Scotland in the past, I'm a great admirer of the work of the RNLI. Hence I was a bit disappointed to see that their advertising agents appear to have been indulging in a bit of what I might call "tabloid" advertising techniques:-

Of course, the yacht is not sinking any more than the lifeboat is - it's just the swell obscuring parts of the respective craft. So unless there's a jagged reef of rock just yards out of view to the left of the yacht, it is manifestly not "seconds from disaster".

The blurb on the back of this flyer says:-

Twenty miles off the coast, in Force 9 gales, high waves and poor visibility, the sailing yacht Galasma's engine and electrics failed. Those on board could do nothing but hope for rescue. RNLI lifeboat crews battled the gale for a gruelling 10 hours, before bringing them safely home.

Let's analyse that.

Twenty miles off the coast, your engine and electrics fail. Well it's a yacht, could you not hoist your sails? Whatever, you're not "seconds from disaster" and it's not the case that you can do "nothing but hope for rescue". That's a criticism of the crew of the yacht of course, not the RNLI. But that photo doesn't look to me like a Force 9 gale - high waves and poor visibility, admittedly, but not Force 9. I really hesitate before accusing the RNLI of a direct lie, but the bit about "battling for 10 gruelling hours" to rendezvous with a sailing yacht, albeit with no engine or electrics but still floating upright and apparently with its mast and rigging all in place just doesn't ring true to me if that photo's anything to go by.

I'm going to give the RNLI - and its advertising agency - the benefit of the doubt and say they probably put the wrong story with the photo and the reality was something more like that the lifeboat was called out to take a casualty off a perfectly seaworthy craft.

Lifeboat at Castlebay, Barra - 2003

Garvault Hotel - remotest in Britain?

2011-01-23T17:32:00.000-08:00

The Garvault Hotel in Sutherland claims on its website to be the remotest hotel in Britain. It's rubbed shoulders with establishments in the Australian Outback and Alaska in a Forbes magazine remote places to stay survey but even if that seems hard to credit, it's pretty flipping remote.

Not content with being in the middle of nowhere, it's even half a mile down a side road off a road to the middle of nowhere.

And if you turn through 180 degrees from that view above, this is what you see:-

This is what it looks like close up:-

Photo credit - Colin Kinnear

And this is where it is:-

Before I acquired my first car in 1987 (an Alfa Romeo Alfasud reg. USX 9V), I used to pore over Ordnance Survey maps looking for impossibly remote and interesting places to go when I got a car and the Garvault Hotel was very much noted down for future reference. Although I did subsequently acquire a car, and a wife, and we did a lot of motoring round pretty remote country house hotels in the far wild reaches of the country, the Garvault always eluded me - perhaps because it was just too remote. Although when we acquired our first flat and had our first flat warming party, I recall being very intrigued to hear our new neighbour was a regular guest at the Garvault for the fishing: "Oh, at that very remote hotel in Sutherland - does it actually exist, then?" I asked. He was amazed I'd even heard of it.

I have to confess the Garvault Hotel has never crossed my radar since that evening in 1991 until today when I was doing one of my virtual tours round remote parts of Sutherland courtesy of Google Maps Streetview. I found myself virtually on the B971 approaching Garvault and I thought, surely the hotel won't exist any longer ...

But it does. There don't seem to be any TripAdvisor reviews but there's quite a funny article in the Telegraph you can see here - scroll about half way down. Here's a taster:-

I enter out of the blinding rain into a bar that for some reason immediately makes me think of the 1970s, in particular the 1970s of Party Seven cans, Double Diamond and New Faces on the TV. The Garvault is run by an English couple, but at first I meet only the husband, Graham. He is cheery in a manner that, were this a film, would presage some terrible event about to happen. 'We wanted to get out of the rat race,’ he explains, and their success seems beyond doubt.

That the Garvault Hotel is remote, we can all agree on, but is it the remotest in Britain? This is a challenge someone like me with too much time on his hands has to take up.

Now, of course, it depends on how you define "remote" but I'd like to offer as a definition the distance to the next permanently inhabited house. In that case the Garvault Hotel is 4 miles from the houses at Badanloch Lodge. And the nearest village is Kinbrace at 8 miles (admittedly just half a dozen houses but does have a railway station, a primary school and street lights).

I'd like to offer up as a challenger to remotest hotel in Britain, the Cluanie Inn on the A87 from Invergarry to Kyle Of Lochalsh at the head of Glen Shiel:-

Photo credit - Claypotts Productions

Assuming Cluanie Lodge 2 miles away is not permanently inhabited (unless there's a permanent housekeeper in which case I admit defeat), the nearest house to the Cluanie is Achnagart Farmhouse 8 miles west in the direction of Kyle down Glen Shiel. The nearest village is Shiel Bridge 10 miles in the same direction (no station or school but it does have a shop, petrol station and caravan park). Admittedly, there's two little cottages next to the Cluanie but I think they may be staff accommodation. But if they're permanently inhabited independent of the hotel, do leave a comment and I will admit my error.

Photo credit Allan MacIver

It also has to be admitted that the Cluanie Inn is beside a double track trunk road to Kyle of Lochalsh and the Isle of Skye whereas the Garvault Hotel is half a mile off a single track road from nowhere to the back of beyond. Judge for yourself.

I stayed at the Cluanie a number of times in the early 90s. The main reason for stopping there was because we could - in other words it served its function of being a wayside inn on a journey which could not be accomplished that day. It was because we were leaving after work from Edinburgh to go to Skye before the bridge and couldn't reach Kyle before the ferry went off for the night. It was very good, the Cluanie in these days, nearly 20 years ago - I hope it still is ...

Photo credit Callum MacLellan

I seem to have digressed away a bit from whether the Garvault Hotel is Britain's remotest. Do leave a comment defending it or offering other challengers (the Kingshouse on Rannoch Moor perhaps? The house at Altnafeadh's only a couple of miles away ...)

Garvault - Photo credit MolloF

Connel Ferry

2011-01-15T07:17:00.000-08:00

Local roadsigns ...

... and the Ordnance Survey ...

... both refer to it simply as "Connel" so it's pleasing to note that Scotrail and Railtrack still stubbornly refer to the last stop on the line to Oban as "Connel Ferry".

This is because, when the railway to Oban was built in 1880, there was a ferry here across the narrows of Loch Etive and not much else except an inn where the present day Oyster Inn now stands.

Extract from the ordnance Survey 25 inch scale map - note that it shows no detail of the north side of the loch because it was in a different parish from the south side.

On the beach opposite the Oyster Inn, the remains of the ferry slipway shown on the map above can still be seen:-

The narrowness of the mouth of Loch Etive and sunken rocks combine to produce a strong tidal stream, today called the Falls of Lora (but interesting to note marked on the 1870s OS map as "Falls of Connell") and when the tide is flowing at its fastest, the narrows look more like a turbulent river than an arm of the sea.

Picture credit - James T M Towill

The falls are just upstream (to the right when looking from the south side) of the ferry but must nevertheless have produced a boisterous crossing at times. One traveller recorded in 1797:-

"Leaving Dunstaffage, we crossed the narrow mouth of Loch Etive by what is called the Connel ferry. The tide rushes through this channel with such rapidity, that it sometimes forms a cascade of six feet. The ferry, in consequence, is frequently dangerous and always requires the cautious management of an experienced boatman The old pilot who conducted us over, with our horses had attended the ferry upwards of sixty years, and the management of it has been in the same family, handed from father to son for three hundred years. The mode by which we crossed it, reminded me of the rivers in Piedmont, the passage over which is exactly the same. The boat is launched from one side of the river, and intrusted to the torrent which carries it with great rapidity down the stream, the men all the while tugging at the oars, till at last it reaches the opposite side a considerable way lower down. By constant practice, the ferrymen are dexterous enough to reach generally the same point, where there is a sort of quay for landing; but this is not always the case, nor was it so when we crossed over. Sometimes the eddies are violent enough to turn the boat round, by which they lose the command of her, for a few seconds, and you are then hurried somewhat lower down the stream. Notwithstanding the perilous nature of the stream itself, the uncertainty of the old crazy boat they use, frequently thronged with passengers and terrified horses, who betray great uneasiness in passing I heard of no instance in which an accident had been fatal to any one."

Connel from the west before the bridge

Having been transformed once in 1880 by the arrival of the railway to Oban, the scene at Connel Ferry was transformed again in 1903 by the construction of a bridge over the Falls of Lora to carry a branch line north to Ballachulish.

Connel Bridge from the east - picture credit Wikipedia

At first, the bridge was exclusively for use by trains and the ferry survived alongside it as can be seen on the 1906 OS one inch map:-

In 1909, a special carriage was adapted to carry a single car across the bridge and then, in 1914, a roadway was added so that vehicles could cross the bridge on payment of a toll. This, I think, would have marked the end of the ferry. Marie Weir's book Ferries in Scotland suggests the ferry continued until the railway line across the bridge was closed and the vehicle toll lifted in 1966 but I'm pretty certain she's mistaking the Connel Ferry with the Bonawe Ferry across Loch Etive at Taynuilt which - it is my understanding - continued as a car ferry until finally put out of business by the lifting of the vehicle tolls on the Connel Bridge five miles west. This is corroborated by the fact that the 1927 OS one inch map no longer indicates a ferry at Connel:-

So now the ferry is only recalled in the name of the railway station and the aptly named Ferryman's Bar of the Oyster Inn.


OS six inch map, 1871 - before the railway and bridge.

Fain Inn

2010-12-27T17:06:00.000-08:00

A good five miles from the nearest habitation, a derelict house stands beside the A832 between Dundonnell and Braemore Junction in Wester Ross.

Photo Credit Wilde Tucker. The mountain in the background is An Teallach (pronounced "TCHALL-ach" - gaelic for "The Anvil"

This remote spot - which I drove past this afternoon - is called Fain. (It's from the gaelic word feithean meaning "boggy channels" which is apt because this is on the watershed where streamlets gather amongst the peat bogs to form the Dundonnell River.)

The empty house has something of a reputation as having once been a droving inn called the Fain Inn but I've always had my doubts about this. For a start, it doesn't look old enough to have been a droving inn (even allowing its present corrugated iron roof to have been a later addition). Also, it just doesn't look very "inn shaped", somehow. There's more pictures of the house here.

Photo credit Ben Allison

Anyway, the amazing wealth of information you can derive from the internet allows me confirm that there was an inn at Fain but this building isn't it. Here's the proof:-

First, Ordnance Survey 6 inch map surveyed in 1875

Note how the inn is marked to the north of the burn running in from the north east.

Next, the present day aerial view from Bing Maps:-

Note how the present day building is south of the burn.

The road from Dundonnell to Braemore is known as the Destitution Road because it was built in the 1840s to provide work for the local tenantry suffering from the potato famine. Before this, the main route east from Dundonnell was directly to Altnaharrie (still a hotel until recently) on the west shore of Loch Broom from where there was a ferry across the loch to Ullapool.

The original Fain Inn, of which no trace now survives, would have been established with the opening of the Destitution Road to Braemore in the 1840s. This was years after droving (taking herds of cattle south to market) had ceased but a Widow Mackinnon was noted as living at Fain in the 1861 census.

Photo credit Photospool

Although I didn't stop at the Fain Inn this afternoon, I did stop a couple of miles south and noted this brass plaque recording the upgrading of the Destitution Road from a single track to double track in the 1960s

Lots of history going on in the remotest of places!

The Porter's Lodge

2010-10-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

Just before the end of the public road out to the Rhue of Arisaig there's a splendidly remote cottage which rejoices under the rather incongruous name "The Porter's Lodge".

As is so often the case with such names, there's an interesting story - this is it.

A few hundred yards past The Porter's Lodge, at the end of the public road, there's a stone shed with a slate roof looking out towards the islands of Rum and Eigg.

This was the goods shed for Arisaig Pier which used to stand here but has now completely crumbled away. Before the railway to Mallaig was built in 1901, Arisaig Pier was the port of call by steamers for the Arisaig - Morar area given that Mallaig and its harbour (like Kyle of Lochalsh) didn't exist before the railway.

The pier was away out here, about 3-4 miles by road from Arisaig Inn at the end of the road from Fort William, because the loch the village sits at the head of - Loch nan Ceall - has a narrow, shallow and reef strewn entrance unsuitable for steamers to enter as the Google Earth image below shows ...

and the 1858 Admiralty Chart confirms:-

So the MacBrayne's steamers, Claymore (1881-1931) and Clansman (1870-1909), on their weekly trips from Glasgow - which were the main means of conveyance of passengers and goods to the remote parts of the West Highlands before road transport became prevalent in the 1930s - didn't go up the loch. Nor, even, did they come alongside the pier at its mouth because Arisaig was a ferry call - i.e. where the steamer lay off shore and a small launch (the ferry) went out from the shore to meet it.

The eponymous "porter", then, was the ferryman who had acquired his alternative job title because, amongst his duties, was lugging the trunks of passengers - very often gentry visiting the various "big houses" in the area during the season - in and out of the ferry. And the "lodge" was not just where the "porter" lived but also the waiting room for steamer passengers.

A ferry coming out to a ship I know, although you can't see it, to be the Claymore at an unidentified location

I'm obliged to the online edition of the Arisaig, Mallaig and surrounding areas and islands local newspaper, "West Word", for educating me about Arisaig Pier and The Porter's Lodge. The October 2000 edition carries a reprint of an article originally written in 1965 by the Arisaig postman, Pat McCarthy, who lived at The Porter's Lodge and whose great grandfather, Donald MacKinnon, was the last (indeed possibly only) ferryman at Arisaig. The article contains some interesting details such as that the pier was built in 1885 and "the Lodge" a couple of years later. There's a description of the waiting room and a small photo of the pier when it was still in use equipped with a hand crane.

Steamers stopped calling at Arisaig when Mallaig harbour - where they could get alongside - was opened with the arrival of the railway in April 1901. Apparently, MacBrayne's offered their redundant ferryman, Donald MacKinnon, another job in Glasgow but he declined it. Presumably, if his descendants were still living there in the 1960s, they sold him the equally redundant Porter's Lodge - one would like to think at a pretty cheap price as compensation for not having offered him a new job at Mallaig!

The Claymore at Mallaig

Duncraig Castle

2010-10-24T17:56:00.000-07:00

It's the great gothic pile across the bay from Plockton in Wester Ross which featured prominently in "Hamish Macbeth". It was also the scene of the 2004 BBC docudrama "The Dobsons of Duncraig" featuring the extended Dobson family's attempts to transform the castle from dereliction into an upmarket guest house and falling out spectularly in the process.

Photo credit Jeremie Rocher

It's not a castle at all, of course, but a Victorian mansion. It's said the ceilings are adorned with plaster mouldings of poppies and tacked on to its north end (though not visible in that picture) is an awful 1960s modernist institutional extension. This is why.

Duncraig Castle was built in 1866 for Sir Alexander Matheson. He was born in 1805 at nearby Attadale, the son of the tenant farmer there, but made an immense fortune as a partner in the Hong Kong firm of Jardine Matheson & Co. The eponymous co-founder, James Matheson, was Alexander's uncle. The core of JM&Co's business was importing opium into China in exchange for tea to be exported to Britain, hence the poppies on the ceilings at Duncraig: the firm's story was the inspiration for James Clavell's Tai-Pan novels.

Alexander Matheson returned to Scotland, was knighted and bought Attadale before going on to amass a huge estate comprising almost the whole of the parish of Lochalsh (i.e. all the land bordered by Loch Carron down as far as Kyle on the north and west and Loch Alsh and Loch Long on the south east). With his other estate at Ardross Castle in Easter Ross, it made Matheson the biggest landowner in Ross-shire.

Note how some of the tower roofs have since been removed

Duncraig is not Gothic either but what architects call Jacobean, in other words aping the style which followed Tudor when King James VI & I was on the throne of England (1603-25). It's characterised by clusters of tall narrow windows. The architect was Alexander Ross of Inverness who designed a number of Victorian mansion houses and shooting lodges in north west Scotland but also some more humble buildings including many parish schools in the 1870s.

Alexander Matheson was also a prime mover behind the construction of the railway from Inverness and Dingwall to Stromeferry in the 1870s. When the line was extended to Kyle of Lochalsh in 1897, it ran along the shore in front of Duncraig and a private railway station was built for the service of the house. This was common practice during the railway boom - it was sort of the Victorian equivalent of today's "community benefit" from building a wind farm except the benefit went to a local grandee (who in fairness had paid for a hefty chunk of the railway so the analogy is not exact.)

Duncraig Castle bottom right looking over Plockton to Applecross, the Crowlin Islands and Raasay - note the railway line along the shore in the left foreground

In fact, Sir Alexander Matheson had died in 1886 so the benefit of the private station was for his son, Sir Kenneth. But as is often the case with nouveaux riches, however, the money to maintain such a lavish country estate was not destined to pass down many generations and Kenneth Matheson sold Duncraig to Sir Daniel Hamilton in the 1920s (not sure of the exact date.) Hamilton also owned the neighbouring Balmacara Estate to the south of Duncraig - that had also belonged to the Mathesons but again I'm not sure if the two were bought together as all part of the same sale or not.

Daniel Hamilton had in common with Alexander Matheson that he had made money in a family business in the east, India this time. He bought a tract of land in a swamp called the Sunderbans in the Ganges Delta in Bengal, reclaimed it and did much to promote the interests of the local peasantry. He was a pioneer of what would now be called "micro-credit", was said to be close to Gandhi and is still remembered fondly in the Sunderbans. Back home in Scotland, he showed the same philanthropic spirit by bequeathing Balmacara Estate to the National Trust for Scotland and Duncraig Castle to Ross & Cromarty County Council for use as a domestic science college. Sir Daniel died in 1939 and these bequests were to take effect after the death of his wife, Lady Margaret. That happened in 1947 although during the war, Duncraig Castle was used as a naval hospital.

Photo credit Jürgen Ossa

It was during its time as Duncraig Castle College, in 1969, that the hideous modernist extension was added to the north (left) end of the house. This is plainly obvious in the aerial photo above but fortunately it's largely masked by trees and not really obvious in the view from Plockton which is where most people see the Castle from.

Duncraig Castle College closed in 1989 but it took Highland Council 13 years to decide what to do with the building. Apart from accommodating the production team for "Hamish MacBeth" (1995-97 BBC series filmed on location around Plockton starring Robert Carlyle as a village policeman, in the same mould as "Monarch of the Glen"), it mostly lay empty and deteriorating rapidly: a house like Duncraig - any house - dies quickly if left empty in a damp climate like Wester Ross. In the 90s, I subscribed to the West Highland Free Press and recall endless stories about proposals for Duncraig being rented as a back-packers hostel being objected to vociferously by the residents of Plockton and coming to nothing.

The elevation to the sea is at the bottom as in the picture above and this plan doesn't include the 60s extension to the left

Eventually, in 2002, the Council grasped the nettle and concluded it had no option but to sell the Castle. It was put on the market at offers over £350,000 and bought for £505,000 by Sam and Perlin Dobson, a couple from Nottinghamshire with experience in doing up and selling or renting houses. With plans to renovate it as an upmarket guest house-cum-wedding venue etc. (the Castle has a private chapel) Duncraig would be their biggest challenge. The Dobsons imported Sam's parents and several of his siblings and their families to join in the project - and a BBC film crew for good measure to catch them all falling out big style over the next two years and broadcast it to the nation in "The Dobsons of Duncraig". I didn't catch any of that series myself but you can read the unedifying details in this New York Times article.

60's extension cunningly hidden by the trees on the left

All we need to know for present purposes is that once the dust had settled on the televised shenanigans of 2003-04 and the rest of the family had been evicted (literally, I gather), the Dobsons continued to run Duncraig Castle as a bed and breakfast for five years with some success. But they put it up for sale in early 2009 at offers over £750,000. I don't know how to link directly to a pdf but you can download the sale brochure from top people's estate agents Strutt & Parker via this link (look for the "Download Duncraig" link near the top of that article).

It was bought by Suzanne Hazeldine who is continuing to run the Castle as a bed and breakfast. Duncraig gets pretty good write-ups on Tripadvisor - you can see how people are just blown away by the location and views and the experience of staying in a "Scottish castle" although a regular theme of comments is having to try and ignore the decayed 60s extension as you sweep up the driveway (it's never been occupied again since the college closed in 1989 and the new owner now has plans to demolish it).

The view from Lady Matheson's Room

Meanwhile, Highland Council used the proceeds of sale of the Castle as an endowment for the Duncraig Educational Trust Scheme which makes grants to young people from the Highlands pursuing further education - it seems a reasonable compromise considering the Council couldn't retain Sir Daniel Hamilton's bequest of the building itself.

To bring some other threads of the story up to date, Jardine Matheson & Co is still very much in business and still trading in tea, though not opium. Now known as just "Jardines", the company is still based in Hong Kong, privately owned and run by Scots, the direct descendants of founder William Jardine. Though not a household name itself, perhaps Jardines' best known subsidiary is the Mandarin Oriental luxury hotel chain.

The private railway station, with its miniature octagonal waiting room, remains open as Duncraig Station albeit just a request stop now. I can understand why they kept it open while the college was still going but you can't help thinking it must now be near the top of Network Rail's "to close" list - if I were a railway buff (which I'm not really enough of), I'd be making a point of getting on (or off, or both) at Duncraig soon before the opportunity is lost for ever.

Photo credit Seoras

Sir Alexander Matheson's uncle, James Matheson, the co-founder of Jardine Matheson & Co, also bought a Scottish estate, the whole island of Lewis. And he built in 1847 a castle of similar style and dimensions to Duncraig which also became a college. Happily, though, Lews Castle at Stornoway has managed to retain its further education function to the present as Lews Castle College, a campus of the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Lews Castle, Stornoway - Photo credit Steve

As far as I know, however, there are no poppies moulded in the ceilings of Lews Castle as there are at Duncraig Castle.

And finally, I expect Sir Daniel Hamilton would have approved of the recent trend towards community ownership of Scottish country estates in the Highlands. Indeed, I wonder if he's not kicking himself in his grave that he didn't leave Balmacara-Duncraig to Plockton Community Trust (or some such) rather than the National Trust. I wonder who he left his estate in Bengal to?

Salisbury's Dam

2010-10-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

Wherever you find an overtly English name in the Gaelic-Norse cultural milieu of the West Highlands and Islands, there's usually an interesting story behind it.

Extract from the Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 map via Streetmap.co.uk

Sounding as if it would be more at home on the Zambezi, Salisbury's Dam is in fact to be found on the headwaters of the Kilmory River on the island of Rum - or rather that's where its remains are because the dam burst very shortly after it had been completed. This is the story.

Picture copyright RCAHMS

The island of Rum has a fascinating history. It's the site of the earliest yet recorded human settlement in Scotland - a nomadic Mesolithic hunter gatherers' camp dating to around 7,000BC. In medieval times, the island belong to the Clan Macdonald of Clanranald and was purchased from them by the Macleans of Coll, the price being a galley - tradition has it that its timbers were found to be rotten and that Clanranald regretted the deal and had to be held prisoner by Coll before he gave up possession of Rum. But despite the boisterous clan history, the Macleans had little compunction in clearing (or "assisting to emigrate" depending who you listen to) almost the entire population - around 400 people - in the late 1820s in order that the island could be let as a sheep farm. So thorough was this clearance that the farmer actually had to import some families who had been cleared from Skye to act as his labour force. The farm did not prosper, however, and the tenant went bankrupt in 1839. In poor financial shape themselves (in common with a number of clan chiefs at the time), the Macleans sold Rum in 1845 to the Marquis of Salisbury.

"Part of the Isle of Rum" by William Daniell, c.1815. Daniell tended to exaggerate his pictures vertically.

Although he continued to farm the island, Salisbury's main reason for buying Rum was to run it as a sporting estate. This was part of a common cycle - in the 1790s, Hebridean islands became valuable for their kelp (seaweed). When the bottom fell out of that market in 1820s, sheep farming was the thing. When that became less profitable not long after, sporting estates became all the rage following the trend set by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at their newly acquired Balmoral. The fact that there weren't any deer on Rum to stalk did not deter Salisbury in the least - they could be imported from his English estates. But it was his plans for developing the salmon and sea-trout fishing which were the most audacious.

There are three main rivers on Rum with catchment areas as shown on the following map:-

From Bartholomew's Half Inch scale Sheet 14 "Arisaig and Rum" (1931)

The Kilmory River (catchment outlined by dark red dots) flows north to meet the sea near the north-most point of the island; the Kinloch River (yellow dots) flows east to drain in to Loch Scresort; and the Abhainn Rhangail (turquoise dots) has its source in a loch near the centre of the island called Long Loch (also marked on early maps by its original name of Loch Sgathaig) and flows to the south west coast at Harris.

These were all really little more than large streams so the plan was to increase the flow in the Kinloch River by diverting the headwaters of the Kilmory River and Abhainn Rhangail into it. This would add the area outlined by pink dots to the Kinloch catchment and create - so Salisbury hoped - a decent salmon river running past the lodge at Kinloch (this was before Kinloch Castle was built and the lodge at the time no longer exists).

The best account of these works is in "Rum: A Landscape Without Figures" by John Love. He had access to the Salisbury archives and still found it hard to piece together the exact chronology but the first operation, in 1849, seems to have been the building of a dam at the south end of the Long Loch (aka Loch Sgathaig) to raise its level and send its overflow northwards into the Kilmory River instead of south into the Abhainn Rhangail. This dam still exists and can been seen on Google Earth.

At first, there seems to have been a more modest scheme not including the Kinloch River and involving another dam at the north end of the Long Loch and an artificial cut to the Kilmory River. This dam collapsed about two months after it was completed. It seems to have been rebuilt in 1850 and to have stood for a while although there is no trace of it now - I suspect it was removed during a later phase of the works.

The Long Loch (Loch Sgathaig) standing on the dam at its south end - photo credit John Craig

In 1852, the work to divert the headwaters of the Kilmory River (already augmented by the overflow from the Long Loch) into the Kinloch River began. This involved the creation of a new loch by the construction of a dam across the Kilmory about half a mile north of the Long Loch. From this new loch, an artificial channel about 600-700 yards long would take its overflow east to the headwaters of the Kinloch River. This dam is the one the remains of which are marked on the OS 1:25,000 map as "Salisbury's Dam" and photographed above. It famously collapsed just after it was completed in August 1854, sending a torrent of water down Kilmory Glen.

Kilmory River - photo credit Richard Webb

Many accounts give the impression that hydro-engineering on Rum stopped there, the whole thing an expensive fiasco, but this is not so. The idea of a dam across the Kilmory River was abandoned but the following year, 1855, a new channel about half a mile long to run from the Long Loch to the Kinloch River was begun. It seems, however, that Lord Salisbury finally tired of the expense and halted this work shortly before it was completed.

Whether his lordship ever caught a salmon in the Kilmory or Kinloch Rivers is not recorded but he died in 1868 and his son (three times Prime Minister between 1885 and 1902) sold Rum in 1870. The purchaser was Farquhar Campbell of Aros on Mull (an estate which, by coincidence, had also once belonged to the Macleans of Coll). He let the island to grazing and sporting tenants, one of the latter of which, a Lancashire industrialist who had made a fortune in the manufacture of spinning and weaving machinery called John Bullough, bought it in 1888. He was succeeded as owner by his son Sir George in 1891.

The Bulloughs' main interest in Rum was as a sporting estate. Their biggest legacy was the construction of the magnificent Kinloch Castle in 1897 but they also picked up where Salisbury had left off in the importation of deer to improve the island's stock and hydro-engineering to improve the fishing. Not only did they finish off the artificial channel to lead the waters of the Long Loch into the Kinloch River which Lord Salisbury had baulked at completing in 1855, the Bulloughs also commissioned an entirely new cut to the west of the Long Loch (aka Loch Sgathaig) to divert the principal tributary of the Kilmory River into the loch and thereby indirectly into the Kinloch River. Thus was Salisbury's scheme finally completed, albeit without his eponymous dam and about 50 years late. It's all visible on Google Earth as seen below (click to enlarge)

A to B is the cut to lead the overflow from the Long Loch north into the Kilmory River. From Salisbury's Dam to D via C was the cut to lead the headwaters of the Kilmory River into the Kinloch River. B to C was Salisbury's "Plan B" to take the overflow from the Long Loch to the Kinloch River after his dam failed. E to F is the Bulloughs' cut to divert the main tributary of the Kilmory River into a burn running into the Long Loch and thus indirectly into the Kinloch River.

This system all still exists although in places the works have been breached to allow water to flow back into its natural course down the Kilmory River to alleviate flooding in Kinloch Glen. This is what the lower reaches of the Kinloch River look like today in a spate:-

Kinloch River in spate - photo credit Anne Burgess

I've never fished it but I'd guess the fishing on the Kinloch is what estate agents call "challenging" which means it's theoretically possible to catch a migratory fish but, in practice, very unlikely.

Just looking over the Bartholomew's half inch map (pictured above) again, I note also "Schooner Point" next to "Wreck Bay" which sound like they too have an interesting story attached to them. But perhaps most intriguingly of all there's "Ashworth's Model Loch". I suspect I shall be revisiting the place names of Rum in future posts.

Clansman & Hebrides

2010-09-13T17:20:00.000-07:00

I meant to finish off the story of the Hebridean Princess by mentioning the fate of the Columba's two sister ships, the Clansman and the Hebrides.

The Clansman was originally posted to the summer only Mallaig to Armadale (Skye) ferry service. These were light duties for such an imposing vessel (although latterly she also gave some sailings to Lochboisdale (South Uist) and Castlebay (Barra)) but her strategic role in MacBrayne's fleet was as back-up to her two sisters on their "lifeline" services to Mull and the Outer Hebrides. In winter 1972, the Clansman was lengthened and converted to a drive-through ferry for the new Ullapool to Stornoway car ferry service which opened in 1973. She was replaced on this route by the Suilven in September 1974 and in summer 1975, the Clansman was on the Oban to Craignure (Mull) service. From 1976 to 1983, she was the summer car ferry between Ardrossan and Brodick (Arran) while in winter, she generally relieved other members of the Calmac fleet during their overhaul.

The Clansman was never particularly successful after her alteration to ro-ro as her engines were not upgraded to cope with her increased tonnage and in September 1983, at less than 20 years old, she was offered for sale by Calmac. She was bought in 1984 by a company called Torbay Seaways who wanted to open a car ferry service between Torquay and the Channel Islands. Unfortunately, they couldn't get planning permission for the necessary vehicle loading linkspan (ramp) so the Clansman was sold later the same year to a Maltese company and renamed Tamira for a service between Malta and its satellite island of Gozo.

The Clansman in Valetta, Malta, in the mid-80s. Picture credit Fakta om Fartyg

But she was soon sold on again for service across the Red Sea (the fate of many British ferries although some luckier ones end up in the Aegean sailing to the Greek islands) renamed Al Hussein and then Al Rasheed. She was last recorded in Lloyd's Register in 1994-95 and in 2002 was lying abandoned off the coast of Sudan - she can still be seen on Google Earth at co-ordinates 19 22' 35.87"N, 37 18' 56.11"E

The Hebrides spent her entire career with MacBrayne's/Calmac year round on the "Uig Triangle" service between Uig on Skye and Tarbert (Harris) and Lochmaddy (North Uist) until she was sold in 1985 in anticipation of that route being upgraded to ro-ro the following year. The Hebrides was acquired by Torbay Seaways, the same company which had bought the Clansman: not having managed to secure a ro-ro linkspan, the Hebrides' hoist loading method of embarking vehicles off the pier would do as second best.

Renamed Devoniun, she sailed quite successfully to the Channel Islands in the late 80s before being laid up at Ipswich in 1990. Three years later, in 1993, she was sailing across the Adriatic from Italy to Albania named Illyria but by the end of the 90s was laid up once again, this time at Eleusina near Athens in Greece.

Picture credit Fakta om Fartyg

The Illyria ex Devoniun ex Hebrides is also still visible on Google Earth at co-ordinates 38 2.577' N, 23 31.496' E

The give away is the two white dots on either side near the bow which are the two "telephone box" type control positions for the vehicle loading hoist. Though still visible, that's old GE imagery dated in June 2003 and only just caught the ship as she was very soon after towed away to Aliaga in Turkey (some reports say India) for breaking up, apparently in a fire damaged condition.

On a more cheerful note, Calmac to this day have two sister ships in their fleet called Clansman and Hebrides built in 1998 and 2001 respectively. The Clansman sails from Oban to Castlebay (Barra) and Lochboisdale (South Uist) while the Hebrides follows in her ancestor's footsteps on the route from Uig to Tarbert and Lochmaddy. In the picture below I took in 2003, the Hebridean Princess (ex Columba of 1964) is vacating Castlebay pier to allow the 1998 Clansman in - 30 years earlier, it would have been the other ship having to move to let the Columba in!

Hebridean Princess (ex Columba) - Part 3

2010-09-07T15:13:00.000-07:00

Picking up from Part 2, less than a year after she had given her last "Sacred Isle Cruise" to Iona and Staffa for Caledonian MacBrayne in September 1988 certificated for 870 passengers, the 1964 built car ferry Columba emerged from a refit at Lowestoft as the mini-cruise liner Hebridean Princess in May 1989 to embark on her new career for Hebridean Island Cruises Ltd with luxury accommodation for just 49.

In common with her past life was still being based at Oban and her ports of call up and down the west coast but the contrast with Calmac's "Mini Cruises" - with their meals in the self service cafeteria and extra for an en suite shower - was out of this world!

To begin with, the Hebridean Princess retained the vehicle loading hoist, the new owners envisaging cruise passengers taking their cars with them, but this was removed after a few years and the space now accommodates the ship's tenders for taking passengers ashore at ports of call where there is no pier she can get alongside. This is clearly seen in the picture below of the HP at Craignure on Mull alongside the pier she was built to serve as a car ferry in 1964

Photo credit hebrides

The idea of luxury cruises in the dubious weather of the west coast of Scotland was ahead of its time in 1989 but the HP prospered beyond expectations. The company expanded in 2000 by adding another ship, the Hebridean Spirit, and cruises abroad. The name was changed to "Hebridean International Cruises" and the Hebridean Princess sometimes even ventured to such places as the Norwegian fjords. The crowning - literally! - glory came in 2006 with the Queen chartering her for a Scottish cruise to replace the lost Royal Yacht Britannia.

But the recession caught up with HIC and weeks after axing the international cruises and announcing the sale of the Hebridean Spirit, the company went into administration in April 2009. Fortunately, the administrators recognised the strength of the core business of the Hebridean Princess' Scottish cruise programme and she was sold as a going concern to Swan Hellenic: service continues uninterrupted.

"Is that Leonardo de Caprio out there?"

Having been on the go as a cruise ship for 21 years now, the Hebridean Princess is now close to the 24 years (1964-88) she spent as the car ferry Columba for MacBrayne's and Calmac and she seems set fair to celebrate her 50th birthday in 2014 still sailing the same waters she was designed for.

I used to sail on a yacht out of Oban in the late 70s and the Columba was always a familiar and reassuring sight as she did her rounds of the islands. Sadly I never sailed on her - and I'm never likely to now given the Hebridean Princess' legendarily high prices! From Hebridean Island Cruises' website, I see the cheapest berth on the last cruise this year, 5 nights from Fairlie round the Clyde departing 16 November is £928 in a windowless cabin on the "Hebridean Deck" (the car deck!) as pictured below.

At the other end of the spectrum, a billet in the Isle of Arran suite for the 10 night Grand Cruise to St Kilda and the North departing next June will set you back a cool £13,000. And that's per person by the way, albeit fully inclusive with the dinner menu featuring such delights as Guinea Fowl with a Herb Mash and Ribbons of Courgette and Chocolate Nemesis [?] with Crème Chantilly and Mint Syrup.

So it's a lottery win or a fairy godmother for me but, if the latter, then my wish wouldn't be the Hebridean Princess but to be transported 30 years back in time to go on a Calmac Mini Cruise on the Columba (£63 for 3 nights with pie, beans and chips in the cafeteria £1.75 extra and protection from chemical attack thrown in).

"Diz yiz want anurra dod ae herb mash wi yir nemesis there, doll?"

A scan from an early 70s MacBrayne's brochure - I wonder what a "plain" breakfast and tea was like and was the extra 30p for a "non-plain" one worth it?

And finally, below, the Columba, as I recall her in the Sound of Mull in 1986. Sorry about the fore-sheet (bit of yacht rigging belonging to a Westerly 33 called Traigh Iar which I believe is also still very much in commission in the same waters) cutting across what otherwise might have been quite a good picture.

PS - a full detailed history of the Columba available on Ships of Calmac.

Hebridean Princess (ex Columba) - Part 2

2010-08-26T17:35:00.000-07:00

Continuing from Part 1, in 1975 the Columba - the Caledonian MacBrayne car ferry built in 1964 which now operates as the "boutique" luxury cruise ship Hebridean Princess which the Queen chartered recently - moved her summer base from Mallaig back south to Oban to take up a new role as the ferry serving the islands of Coll, Tiree and Colonsay and performing the "Sacred Isle Cruise" to Iona and Staffa. (Hitherto, that cruise had, ever since 1936, been given by the venerable steamer King George V but she was retired in 1974.)

The Columba (left) at her Oban base, the North Pier, in 1975. On the right is her sister, Clansman after lengthening and conversion to a drive-through ro-ro ferry: in 1975 she was operating the Columba's old (1964-72) route to Craignure on Mull. Photo credit "hebrides"

The Columba's 1986 summer schedule was typical. On Monday morning, she sailed from Oban at 08.15 up the Sound of Mull for Tiree via calls at Lochaline (09.20), Tobermory (10.30) and Coll (12.15). Arriving at Tiree at 13.15, she retraced her steps back via the same calls to Oban, arriving there at 19.00. But the day wasn't over yet for at 22.00 she sailed for Colonsay where she arrived at 22.30 and spent the night.

On Tuesday morning, the Columba left Colonsay at 06.00 for Oban where she arrived at 08.30. Then it was the "Sacred Isle Cruise" leaving at 09.15, sailing up the Sound of Mull and out round the west of Mull, close by Staffa for a view of Fingal's cave and then to Iona where she arrived at 13.30. Weather permitting, passengers were ferried ashore by the Fionnphort-Iona ferry for an hour or so before the Columba set off again at 16.00 to return via the south coast of Mull and the Firth of Lorne to Oban, getting back there at 18.45 (Price of the cruise in 1986 - £10.45).

Wednesday's schedule was the same as Monday's (Coll & Tiree then Colonsay in the evening) and Thursday was the Sacred Isle Cruise again but on Fridays, the Columba left Oban at 05.30 and sailed directly to Tiree, arriving there at 09.30. She then returned via Coll getting back to Oban at 15.00 and this earlier arrival allowed an onward connection by bus or coach to Glasgow (arriving 20.50 and 21.02 respectively). The Columba then sailed at 16.30 for Colonsay from where she returned the same evening.

On Saturdays, it was out to Coll and Tiree via Tobermory (but not Lochaline) at 06.00 and back via the same calls to arrive back at Oban at 16.30. There was no evening sail to Colonsay on a Saturday and Sunday was spent tied up at Oban's North Pier.

The Columba in the Sound of Mull in 1986 - the name of her owners was painted on the hull in 1984

When built, the Columba and her two sisters, the Clansman and the Hebrides, had been equipped with passenger cabins and this enabled the Columba's summer schedule in the 70s and 80s to be marketed as "Mini Cruises". For example, on Tour A, three nights, you boarded at Oban on Monday evening in time for the sail down to Colonsay and spend the night on board there. Tuesday and Wednesday nights were spent alongside at Oban having spent the days on the Sacred Isle Cruise and the run out to Coll & Tiree respectively. The price in 1986 was £63 per person (£20 supplement for deluxe cabin with en suite shower and toilet) and breakfast, lunch and "high tea" in the self service cafeteria was included.

The restaurant on the Columba (or one of her sisters) as seen in a 1967 MacBrayne brochure - the table service and white tablecloths had been replaced with self service and formica in the 70s

The two pictures below are from a MacBrayne's brochure of 1970:-

In winter in the 70s and 80s (when the Sacred Isle Cruise didn't run and Coll & Tiree and Colonsay were looked after by the Mull and Barra-'Boisdale ferries respectively) the Columba continued as the relief car ferry and was laid up at Greenock when not required where she is seen below in dry-dock in another superb picture by hebrides

That picture shows the vehicle loading hoist (down at car deck level) very clearly and also another less well known feature of the Columba and her sisters. Note the two vertical sliding doors, one up (left) and the other down (right). If you think they look a bit over-engineered just to seal the car deck while at sea, you'd be right. Commissioned at the height of the Cold War, these three car ferries were designed to be floating "citadels" (command posts) in the event of a "NBC (nuclear, biological or chemical) attack" and these doors were part of the equipment designed to hermetically seal the ship's accommodation. They were also equipped with apparatus to spray the decks to wash off nuclear fall-out etc.

Cold War considerations aside, MacBraynes' priority in the 1960s and early 70s had been the introduction of car ferry services to the Western Isles even if, to begin with, this meant adopting less than ideal hoist-loading. In the 1980s the priority became to convert all the services to ro-ro.

In 1988, Calmac decided to axe the Sacred Isle Cruise and commission a new ro-ro ferry - the Lord of the Isles - which was also equipped with a hoist to cover the transition to serve Lochboisdale (ro-ro since 1974), Castlebay (converted to ro-ro 1989) and Coll & Tiree (converted to ro-ro early 90s). As the last remaining purely hoist-loading ferry in the fleet, the Columba was redundant and sold.

A vignette from an early 70s MacBrayne's brochure

But instead of going to the Aegean or the Red Sea pilgrim trade where most redundant British ferries go, the Columba was sold to a new venture started by a Yorkshire family who had previously operated canal boats: keen amarteur sailors in the Western Isles, they were storm-bound one day in Loch Scresort on the Isle of Rum, when they had the idea of offering exclusive "yacht-style" cruises on the west coast ...

... and as once again this post is getting overly long, this is a good point to break before the next instalment to come.

Hebridean Princess

2010-07-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

On 23 July 2010, the Queen and other members of the royal family left Stornoway in a blaze of publicity for a cruise round the Western Isles on a "boutique" luxury cruise ship she had chartered. The ship - which she had chartered previously in 2006 for a cruise to celebrate her 80th birthday - is the Hebridean Princess and it has an interesting history.

Picture credit Hugh Spicer

The Hebridean Princess was built in Aberdeen in 1964 as the car ferry Columba. She was one of three identical sister ships - the others being named Hebrides and Clansman - built for David MacBrayne Ltd to inaugurate the first car ferry services on the west coast of Scotland beyond the Firth of Clyde (where car ferries had been operating since the mid 1950s).

An artist's impression of one of the three new ferries from MacBrayne's 1964 summer brochure

The Hebrides was allocated to a new route from Uig on Skye to Tarbert (Harris) and Lochmaddy (North Uist) in the Outer Hebrides and the Columba to a new route from Oban to Craignure on Mull and Lochaline in Morvern. The Clansman was intended as back-up to the other two ferries but in summer was placed on the non-essential Mallaig to Armadale (Skye) run to keep her busy when not required to deputise for her two sisters on their "lifeline" services.

The three views below - courtesy of Ken Connell - show the Columba at Lochaline shortly after she entered service on 30th July 1964

The black gantry, left, is for loading silica sand from the nearby mine on to cargo ships, not for boarding the Columba!

The Columba and her sisters technically belonged to the Secretary of State for Scotland and were chartered to MacBrayne's hence the port of registry at Leith rather than Glasgow as with all other ships in their fleet. In 1972, ownership passed to MacBrayne's and the port of registry was changed to Glasgow.

The Columba heads back towards Craignure and Oban

The original timetable and fares from MacBrayne's 1964 summer brochure

The initial summer schedule was four return sailings daily except Sunday to Craignure, two of which were extended to Lochaline. A motor coach came down from Tobermory via Salen to connect with the 10.45am sailing from Craignure to Oban and in the afternoon the coach met the Columba arriving at Craignure at 3.15pm to drive up to Tobermory. Thus did a combination of car ferry and motor coach replace the age old Sound of Mull mail steamer service which had sailed down from Tobermory every morning for Oban via calls at Salen, Lochaline and Craignure and returning in the afternoon.

The Columba and her sisters had capacity for 50 cars but they weren't ro-ro ferries of the sort familiar today where vehicles drive from the pier down a ramp adjustable to the height of the tide - called a "linkspan" - directly on to the ship's car deck. This is because ro-ro operations require investment in linkspans as well as ships and this wasn't considered justified on these "thin" routes on the west coast of Scotland in the early 1960s (c.f. the Channel and Irish Sea where ro-ro was well established in the 1950s).

Hence MacBraynes opted for the system adopted in the 50s by the Caledonian Steam Packet Company for their pioneering car ferries on the Clyde - "hoist-loading". With this system, which avoided the need for expensive linkspans, the ship was equippped with a vehicle lift which could be raised and lowered between the car deck and pier head. In the picture below of the Columba at Craignure, five cars have just been carefully positioned on the lift, the ramp is being raised and shortly it will descend to the car deck: a turntable in the floor of the lift will have helped the two cars nearest the camera be turned through 90 degrees and the car deck itself was liberally supplied with further turntables to assist the tricky manoeuvring required there to position the cars to be able to drive back onto the lift for disembarkation at the other end.

Being able to drive one's car on to the ship was a vast improvement on the previous generation of steamers with their capacity for only a dozen or so cars which had to be individually craned aboard as seen below in another memorable shot from Ken Connell's collection, this time of the MV Lochmor (1930) at Lochaline in 1964 just weeks before she was replaced by the Columba -

But there was no escaping the fact that hoist loading was cumbersome and slow - particularly for caravans and commercial vehicles. MacBrayne's scheduled 30 minutes for a turnround at Craignure (cf 15 minutes today for a much larger ro-ro ferry) but this was hopelessly optimistic for a full load and the ferries regularly fell way behind schedule.

In 1969, however, MacBrayne's was fully nationalised (hitherto it had been 50% owned by British Railways and 50% by Coast Lines, a private shipping company later taken over by P&O) and placed under the state transport quango, the Scottish Transport Group. The STG's aim was to convert all of Scotland's west coast ferry services to ro-ro as soon as possible and as part of this process, in 1973, the Oban to Craignure run was upgraded to ro-ro and the Columba's sister ship, Clansman, was converted to a ro-ro ferry. Hence in 1973 and 1974 the Columba moved north to operate the Clansman's summer only Mallaig to Armadale run. In 1973, she also sailed three times a week from Mallaig overnight to Lochboisdale in South Uist, this sailing continuing twice a week to Castlebay in Barra. (These Outer Hebridean sailings were not repeated in 1974 because that year a new ro-ro car ferry service was inaugurated from Oban to Castlebay and Lochboisdale.) In winter, the Columba became relief ferry.

Columba at Armadale, 1974 - Picture credit Phil Wilson

In 1973 also, the Columba and her sisters became the property of Caledonian MacBrayne, the company formed by the merger of MacBrayne's with the Clyde ferry operator, the Caledonian Steam Packet Company (which had also been taken over by the STG in 1969 having previously been 100% owned by British Railways).

In 1975, the Columba moved back to Oban to take up new summer duties but as this post is getting a bit over long, I'll come to this in the next episode.

Kyle of Lochalsh

2010-07-16T17:31:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting cutting from the Glasgow Herald of 2 June 1950 - a plan for the proposed development of Kyle of Lochalsh:-

The core of the development plan is the building of a new fishery pier with related infrastructure to the east of the Railway Pier on land which had been occupied by the Admiralty during the War and then in the late 1940s by the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board in connection with the nearby Nostie Hydro Electric Scheme.

As well as the pier, facilities mentioned in the accompanying article (see page 6) included two or three kippering kilns (to smoke herring into kippers), huts for the accommodation of fisher girls (to gut the fish landed), a quick freeze plant, a canning factory and an engine shop. Space for all this was going to be at a premium and there was talk of blasting away the hillside to create enough level space.

As ever with ambitious plans such as these, not all of it came to fruition. The fishery pier was duly built in the planned location and Kyle was - and remains - the site of a modest fish processing industry albeit prawns etc. nowadays rather than fish, I suspect. But I don't think any kippering kilns or canning factories were ever built. The early 1960s postcard view below of Kyle from the east seems to show the site a bit less developed than envisaged in 1950:-

The blue boat in that picture is MacBrayne's MV Lochbuie (1949-68) which served the route from Tobermory to Mingary (Ardmurchan). She was probably at Kyle for maintenance at the boat yard just out of sight to the right.

Note also that the 1950 plan includes a "Proposed New Road" running east along the coast of Loch Alsh towards Balmacara. This is what is now the main road out of Kyle heading east, the A87, but this part of the plan did not materialise for almost 20 years with this stretch of road not being built until the late 60s or early 70s. Before then, the A87 to Balmacara ran north (what's now the Plockton road) before turning inland and east to Balmacara at Erbusaig. (This road is also identified for straightening on the 1950 plan but this never happened.)

What was not anticipated in 1950 was the return of the Ministry of Defence in the shape of the establishment in the early 70s of the British Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre (BUTEC). Basically this involves testing submarines and torpedoes and whatnot in the Inner Sound immediately north west of Kyle. The shore base and pier for this was established to the east of the fishery pier, not on a level site blasted out the hillside as envisaged in 1950, but on land reclaimed from the sea over the tidal rocks in the foreground of the postcard view above.

Picture credit RCAHMS

The BUTEC buildings and pier are at bottom right of the picture above. It's now privatised and run by Qinetiq (I believe it's pronounced "kinetic") on behalf of the MoD.

Finally, another aspect of the 1950 plan which came to pass by land reclamation was the establishment of the playing field you can see at about 11 o' clock in the picture above over the tidal creek called the Pladaig. The 1950 article in the Herald reports that the villagers were undertaking this themselves without the benefit of any government assistance but £1,400 raised by a local entertainment committee.

I leave you with this photo of Kyle from the east. The fishery development site is broadly the buildings (mostly a small industrial estate now) in the foreground to the left of the main road (the A87 to Balmacara). At bottom left can be seen the road to the fishery pier and the BUTEC buildings are out of sight to the left.

Picture credit Daniel Blok

I wonder if they imagined a bridge to Skye in 1950?

If anyone can add to any of this or correct any mistakes, please do leave a comment.

Eoligarry House

2010-06-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

The original seat of the clan MacNeil of Barra, Kisimul Castle, is one of the most distinctive landmarks of the Western Isles and, fully restored, it is in the care of Historic Scotland and open to the public.

Of almost as much interest to me, however, is a later house of the MacNeil chiefs after Kisimul had been abondoned as a residence in the early 18th century. This was Eoligarry House at the north end of Barra. It was demolished in the mid 1970s but for many years formed an almost equally distinctive landmark at the opposite end of the island in stark contrast to the croft houses around it.

Picture credit RCAHMS

Eoligarry House was built around 1790 by Colonel Roderick MacNeil, the 40th chief, and as it stood in one of the most fertile parts of the island (indeed the site was doubtless deliberately chosen for that reason), it became the MacNeil chiefs' home farm as well as residence. As such, the house was surrounded by farm steadings and "offices" (which in 19th century Scotland signified buildings such as stables, workshops etc. attached to a big house) as well as a walled garden.

The MacNeils didn't enjoy Eoligarry for long, however, for the next chief, General MacNeil went bankrupt in 1838 (in common with a number of Highland chiefs around this time) and his estates were sold to meet his debts. Barra was sold to Colonel Gordon of Cluny from Aberdeenshire who had also owned neighbouring South Uist and Benbecula since the bankruptcy of the Macdonalds of Clanranald.

Cluny let Eoligarry Farm to a Dr MacGillivray in 1840 so Eoligarry House no doubt became a slightly grander than usual farmhouse. In the 1900s, Cluny's daughter, Lady Gordon-Cathcart, sold Eoligarry to Dr MacGillivray's two sons but in 1917 the farm was "raided" by landless men of Barra and parts of it staked out into crofts. To regularise this, Eoligarry Farm was bought by the Board of Agriculture for Scotland in 1919 and the rest of it divided into crofts as well. But the MacGillivray brothers retained the house until the survivor of them died in 1939.

In the 1940s, the now empty Eoligarry House was bought by the Roman Catholic church to serve as a church for the new community of crofters in the vicinity. It continued in this role until a new purpose built church was built in the walled garden in 1963. With no further role, the house fell into decay and was finally demolished in the mid 1970s. But the footprint of Eoligarry House and its walled garden and "offices" can still be seen on Google Earth - compare with the map above:-

As well as the church in the walled garden, some council houses have been built on the site as well. This is what it looks like today courtesy of Google Streetview:-

Was it an act of 70s cultural vandalism to demolish such a Georgian house? Probably, but you also have to ask what could be done with a decaying mansion in such an incongruous location. And as I type this, I answer my own question - convert it to a hotel. Better a restoration of Eoligarry House than the construction of the awful (in terms of architectural merit, I mean, not quality of service) Isle of Barra Hotel which was built - I think I'm right in saying as a flagship project of the old Highlands and Islands Development Board - at around the time Eoligarry House was demolished. Oh well, they just didn't think like that in the 60s and 70s, did they? No point moaning about the sins of the fathers. Doubtless someone will bemoan the demolition of the IoBH a hundred years from now - if it survives that long. Will Kisimul Castle survive them both?

Picture credit RCAHMS

Picture credit Ramsay Imlach

And again as I type this, I find the IoBH growing on me. Doubtless in the 1790s someone moaned about the incongruity of Eoligarry House's "modernistic" architecture!

PS - I believe it's pronounced EE-awl-uh-gurrie - but don't quote me on that.

Seaflower

2010-06-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, in the early 70s, we used to go on family holidays to Gairloch in Wester Ross. Every evening, we would go down to the pier to watch the fishing boats unloading. In these days, there were about a dozen or so boats, mostly east coasters I think, which unloaded white fish (i.e. cod, haddock etc. as opposed to herring or prawns) at Gairloch. The pictures below were taken in the 80s after the new pier had been built but are similar to the scenes on a summer evening 10-15 years earlier I'm recalling:-

Back in the 70s, as kids we had a note-book in which were noted the names and numbers of the fishing boats just as trainspotters do with trains. Among the names I recall were the Scotia, True Love and Nimrod (INS 4) but the boat that sticks in my mind most clearly was the Seaflower.

About 35 feet long, painted a vivid emerald green and with just a simple wheelhouse at the stern, she bore registration number BRD411. This signified a port of registry at Broadford on Skye but the Seaflower's home port, engraved on her stern, was Ardheslaig (I believe it's pronounced "ARDISS-laig" but I'm quite prepared to be told that's wrong.) in Applecross on Loch Torridon. Whereas the other boats seemed to "bustle" at the pier, the Seaflower always seemed to be the last to arrive and approach with an unhurried air. I can also vividly recall the skipper, a big man called Calum in his 60s, with a rosy face, white hair, a blue boiler suit and a bunnet: he also had an unhurried sort of air about him.

I've no idea what became of the Seaflower (and alas have no pictures of her) but I was very interested to discover from the Ross-shire Journal the other day that there's now a new Seaflower on the go on Loch Torridon. It's operated by Calum's son Kenny and his daughter Gemma and offers trips out of Shieldaig. A bigger contrast from the Seaflower of my memories from the 70s it's hard to imagine:-

The picture above is grabbed from Torridon Sea Tours' lovely website which is well worth a look just for the superb photography of the Torridon area if nothing else. I wish the venture all success.

I wonder what Calum would have thought? I imagine he's the sort of gent who might have said something like "A catamaran for taking trippers out, you say? Ach well, we'll have to be seeing about that now, won't we just."

Craignure ferries (again)

2010-05-26T16:17:00.000-07:00

A while back I wrote about what used to be understood by the words ferries and steamers and more recently highlighted this postcard of the ferry at Craignure on Mull:-

Disembarking from the "steamer" and going ashore by "ferry" looks like a lot of fun. Indeed, it was an experience still possible at the islands of Rum, Eigg and Muck until 2001 and I did it myself a couple of times at Rum in the early 90s off the "steamer" from Mallaig, the Lochmor (1979), in balmy summer weather:-

But an article I spotted in the Glasgow Herald archives from November 1937 reminds us what a hazardous operation disembarking in to a ferry could be in winter:-

Here's the full story:-

During a storm on Wednesday afternoon two Mull ferryboats which meet the Oban and Tobermory steamer Lochinvar for passengers for Craignure, were driven ashore near Craignure. No lives were lost nor was anyone injured, but one of the boats was wrecked.

One of them is motor-driven, and the other, a large open boat used for carrying heavy luggage and freight, had just cast off from the Lochinvar when, it appears the propeller of the motor boat was fouled and the steering wheel jammed.

The anchors of both boats were thrown overboard to prevent drifting, while an endeavour was made to clear the propeller of the obstruction. On account of the high seas, which were lashing the small craft with heavy spray, the anchors began to drag, and the anchor ropes, becoming frayed by the incessant pitching of the boats, broke. Immediately the plight of the two boats was seen from the shore the alarm was raised, and villagers rushed to the beach to give what help they could.

A telephone call was put through to Lochaline, the next port of call of the Lochinvar, asking her to turn back and give assistance if needed. Meantime the boats were driven to the shore, and it was not long before they grounded opposite Java Lodge. Some of those on the beach waded into the water to rescue those on board.

A ram in one of the boats was drowned before it could be rescued.

It must have been a severe storm indeed for the same edition of the Herald contains a rather hauting story of the Port Erin (Isle of Man) lifeboat attending an Irish schooner out of Arklow called the Invermore whose sails had been carried away and auxiliary engine had broken down. Rather than be taken off, the Invermore's crew preferred that the lifeboat return to port to send word to Liverpool to request a tug. The lifeboat complied but when it attempted to return to stand by the schooner, it couldn't find the Invermore. As the Herald laconically reported:

Since then there has been no word of the schooner, It is not known whether she obtained assistance from another vessel or whether she met with disaster.

I leave you with a picture below of the "ferry" (flit boat) from Muck alongside the "steamer" (ferry) from Mallaig (the Lochmor) in fairly benign weather in 1988.

Sailing smacks

2010-04-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

Until the 1880s, the Outer Hebrides (except Stornoway) and many of the remoter Inner Hebrides (e.g. Coll and Tiree) were dependent for communication with the mainland on sailing smacks.

These were beamy, deep draughted vessels designed for the carriage of cargoes rather than speed, around 60-80 feet long and with one or two masts. Some ran to a schedule, e.g. the mail smacks which ran from Poolewe to Stornoway until a steam service to Ullapool was introduced in the 1840s and from Dunvegan to Lochmaddy and Lochboisdale (N and S Uist) until the 1880s. But most just sailed as and when a cargo offered. Passenger accommodation was rudimentary in the extreme.

It's pointless trying to describe such a vessel without a picture but when I started to write this, I couldn't think of any picture of a West Highland sailing smack I'd ever seen except the one - called the Mary Stewart - only the vestigial remains of which are sunk in the sand at Scarinish on the island of Tiree.

Picture credit James and Tizzy

But in the course of googling a picture of the remains of the Mary Stewart, I came across a fantastic series of pictures of smacks at Scarinish taken by Erskine Beveridge (1851-1920). He was a Dunfermline textile manufacturer and amateur antiquarian who took numerous photographs in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. I believe the following photos date from about the 1870s:-

It seems that Tiree was quite a centre for sailing smacks trading around the islands but I don't know if any of these ships is the Mary Stewart. The building in the background is the Scarinish Hotel which is still very much on the go and getting some good reviews on Tripadvisor.

You can see more of Erskine Beveridge's pictures on the website of the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments website. Just type "Erskine Beveridge" in as the search term and check the "online items only" box to get only returns with photos.

The sailing smacks were gradually replaced in the 1880s by the steamers of David MacBrayne, Martin Orme and John MacCallum for the carriage of passengers, livestock and cargo and the "puffer" for the carriage of bulk loads (typically coal). So I leave this post with a nice J Arthur Dixon postcard from the 1960s showing two puffers at Scarinish just yards from the remains of the Mary Stewart.

Stromeferry - Part 7

2010-03-31T16:52:00.000-07:00

Part 1 here.

Picking up the story from Part 5, in the years after the First World War (1914-18) when motoring began to take off, the car ferry across Loch Carron developed firstly by becoming itself motor powered and secondly by the addition of a method of embarking vehicles more convenient than a pair of long planks of wood.

This was the turntable which, once the vehicle was aboard, could be swung round and stowed lengthwise along the boat's main axis while on passage. As well as avoiding the payload sitting awkwardly athwart-ships as on the "plank-loading" ferries, the main advantage was that, as the turntable could be swung though 360 degrees, the car could drive off "ahead" even when, as was the case at the Strome Ferry, the slipways at both sides only allowed the boat to berth port (left) side to: without the turntable, the car had to reverse off or else the boat had to reverse in at the other side. Turntable ferries became the norm at most short vehicular ferries on the west coast of Scotland in the 1920s.

Now I don't know the exact history of the sequence of the various vessels on the Strome Ferry over the years (if anyone does, please leave a comment) but the next development - in the late 1930s I'd guess - from a single vehicle turntable ferry as pictured above was a two vehicle ferry as seen below at the north terminus in a mid 1950s view:-

Note how the crew appear to be dressed in shorts and stockings and peaked caps. I bet they only dressed like this for the J Arthur Dixon photographer and it was boiler suits and bunnets every other day of the year!

Picture credit Rob Beale

Perhaps the stockings and peaked caps were to mollify angry MPs. Sir William Anstruther-Gray, member for Lanarkshire North, mentioned in the House of Commons in 1937 being stranded on the ferry with his car for three hours. It seemed that, having got the car on board, the state of the tide was such that it could not be disembarked again at either side for three hours. It's unclear from the parliamentary report whether the difficulty was due to the tide being too high or too low but either could pose a problem - at a very low tide, the water is too shallow for the ferry to get alongside but at a very high tide, the slipway simply disappears under the water. Whichever, the issue was dealt with by the slipways at both sides being raised and extended in concrete in the late 1950s (note that in the pictures above, the slipways are still the original stone before this improvement).

The final generation of car ferry at Strome arrived in 1959, this being the Strome Castle, a six car turntable ferry built by Forbes' of Sandhaven, just east of Fraserburgh pictured below at Stromeferry:-

But improved piers and a bigger ferry were not enough to prevent continued questions in the House. In June 1960, the Independent MP for Ross & Cromarty, John MacLeod, in whose constituency the ferry lay, rose to ask the Secretary of State for Scotland if he was aware that there had recently been an instance of people having to wait three hours for the ferry in a queue of 42 cars and when the Government proposed to build a road round the south side of Loch Carron? The minister was typically non-committal and replied by pointing out that such delays were exceptional and highlighting the recent improvement in the ferry service with the deployment of the six car Strome Castle.

In 1962, another six car turntable ferry, the Pride of Strome, built by Nobles of Fraserburgh, was introduced:-

But by now the question was no longer "if" but "when" a by-pass road would be built and the Government eventually approved the funding in October 1965. But it was not for another five years, in October 1970, that the road round the south shore of Loch Carron was finally opened and the ferry closed.

This time, however, the village not only ceased to be a terminus as had happened when the railway was continued to Kyle of Lochalsh in 1897 but it was totally by-passed and left as a dead end as the new road passed by up the hill-side and giving rise to that famous "Strome Ferry - No Ferry" sign.

In a further episode, I'll bring you up to date with what's been going on at Stromeferry in the 40 years since the ferry closed but my own memories of the ferry are that, in the late 60s, we used to go on family holidays to Kishorn just north of Loch Carron and the journey always involved crossing the Strome Ferry (unless we were travelling on a Sunday when the ferry didn't operate so we went round via Inverness instead: in the days before the new A9, that involved a considerable extra distance.)

Although I was only 6 or 7 at the time, I remember the ferry well. I distinctly recall the sound of its diesel engine as it swept up to the slipway and the helmsman abruptly put it into full astern to bring it to a halt, expertly kissing the pier, the water white with foam - water being churned by a ship's propellor was a source of great fascination to me at that age. Another crewman was poised to step ashore with a rope with a metal hook on the end which was inserted in a hole on a metal strap down the centre of the slipway. The mooring rope was either run out from the stern of the ferry and the hook put in a hole forward and the engine left running astern to keep the boat against the pier while loading (as in the picture below of the 1959 Strome Castle) or vice versa (rope from bow and engine left running ahead).

I'm guessing it depended on the state of the tide and how much of the slip there was above water to berth alongside but either option produced lots of churning water for my youthful delectation.

Then after the cars were all aboard (bearing in mind that, at low season, that could be a wait of 20 minutes or so waiting for four or five cars to appear if not necessarily the full compliment of six), the engine was momentarily relaxed to give a bit of slack to release the hook. Then a big burst astern to pull the ferry away from the pier and cut back to neutral as it was turned round to face the other side. Then full ahead again for a passage of just three or four minutes before the engine was cut for a moment and full astern for the whole process to begin again at the opposite terminus.

Picture credit Anne Burgess

I remember one occasion arriving late at the south terminus at Stromeferry and the last ferry had gone for the night. But my father could see movement on the pier at the other side so flashed the headlights of the car in an attempt to encourage the ferry to come back over to collect us. But no joy and we slept in the car till the next morning - a great treat when you're aged 7 but a bit of a chore otherwise. But in 1969 you just put up with these things ...

Pabail

2010-03-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

I read somewhere recently that Google Earth is of great assistance to archaeologists researching sites in parts of Afghanistan which are off-limits due to the sway of the Taliban. Well the same is equally true of the Eye Peninsula on the east coast of the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides (off limits - on a Sunday, anyway - due to the sway of the Free Church of Scotland!).

Note how on the following extract from GE in the village of Pabail, on the south east coast of the Eye Peninsula, you can see the footprints of various buildings I've labelled A, B, C, D & E

And note how you can see the same buildings on the 1849 Ordnance Survey 6 inch (1:10,560) map:-

A village cleared during the Highland Clearances? I don't think so because, if you pull back the scale a bit, you can see the village of Pabail still existing close by: it's unlikely the occupants of these ruins would have been "cleared" to a location so close by:-

One theory - and this is just pure amateur educated guesswork - is that these ruins are the remains of parts of the old run-rig village of Pabail before it was re-arranged into lots (crofts) on the pattern shown on the 1849 map during the kelp boom of the early 19th century.

I accept, incidentally, that the distinction between "re-arrangement" and "clearance" of a village is a fine one except to note that a number of "re-arranged" villages were later "cleared" in the decades after the end of the kelp boom at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815).

Pabail, however, survives to the present day in roughly the same pattern as in the 1840s as can be seen from the present day OS 1:25,000 map (courtesy of Streetmap.co.uk, the best place to view the OS 25k map) and GE which both show the crofting layout well:-

And this is what it looks like courtesy of Google Street View:-

And in the picture below, the ruins are half way to the houses on the skyline (which is the "suburb" of Pabail called Eagleton which didn't exist in 1849):-

And finally a word about the Gaelic rendering of the name of the village. It has two parts and on my unreconstructed 1960 OS one inch map, they are labelled Upper and Lower Bayble. As you can see on the 1849 OS map, these are rendered respectively Pabaill Ard and Pabaill Iosal but on the modern 1:25k map they've become Pabail Uarach and Pabaill Iarach. Now I'm no Gaelic scholar but I'm aware that ard and uarach both mean something like "high" or "upper" whereas iosal and iarach both mean something like "low" or "lower". But why the change over 150 years?

I can't help suspecting the OS went to their in-house Gaelic speaker and asked "What's the Gaelic for "upper"?" and he/she answered uarach. And thus the subtle nuance which led to the upper part of Pabail being named Pabail Ard (as recorded in 1849) rather than Uarach is at risk of being lost to history. Ditto Pabal Iosal/Iarach.

I gather that whether you spell it Pabail, Pabaill or Bayble is pretty academic because it's not a Gaelic name anyway but a Norwegian one meaning "Priest's Village". Of equal interest (to me) is how a place in this Norse-Celtic milieu came to be given the very English name of Eagleton. There must be a story behind that to be discovered - although I note that someone at the Comhairle with more sense of political correctness than history has transliterated it into Baile na h'Iolaire. Tsk!

Google Street View

2010-03-14T17:44:00.000-07:00

As usual, I'm probably the last to hear about this but if you haven't yet, Google Street View has been rolled out to the West Highlands and Islands.

If you thought Bing aerial photography was good, then Street View really is the dog's knob. But be warned it's very Not Safe For Work because you can waste seriously large amounts of time browsing on it.

For anyone not aware of this, go to Google Maps. Type in the name of your place of interest (or navigate to it on the map) and zoom in a bit until you can see roads. Note the little orange man at the top of the scale bar to the left of the map. Click and drag him to where you want to go. If there is Street View coverage (and I haven't found anywhere in Scotland yet that doesn't have it along a public road, be it ever so remote), the roads with coverage will be highlighted blue and then in a few seconds, you'll be looking at a view along the road where you dropped the orange man.

My tip for navigating along a road is to use the mouse to drop the white disc as far away as it will go - about to the next passing place, usually - and double click and you'll be taken to that point. (Don't double click if the disc turns into a square though - you'll see what I mean when you try it.) You can navigate ahead (or back) with the up and down arrows on the keyboard (not the ones in the number pad) but that takes you at a rather slow pace. Using the mouse click method described above takes you at about walking speed. Use the right left arrow keys to rotate the view clock- or anti-clockwise.

So, as it was the Isle of Jura blog which drew this to my attention, I took myself off to Craighouse first, a place I haven't been for 15 years.

I was struck by the similarity between this and the same view almost 200 years earlier as recorded by the water colourist William Daniell who circumnavigated Britain in 1814.

That's exactly the same building, pier and bridge. And although Daniell has exaggerated vertically a bit, that's the north-most of the Paps of Jura, Beinn Shiantaidh, visible in both views.

Today, I spent a lot of time "virtually" on Raasay where I encountered this remarkably suburban scene:-

The reason is that Raasay is home to, of all things, a mining village. Outside toilets and coalsheds in sight of the Cuillins - who'd have thought. This is a subject I will return to in a future post.

One thing that does strike me having "virtually" wandered round quite a lot of Raasay this afternoon is that the Highland Council bright blue wheelie-bins are incredibly ugly. Would a different colour - like khaki or dark brown - not blend into the landscape a bit more? Not so much here amongst the white cottages of Inverarish but they're a real blot on the landscape at the road ends of Balachuirn and Balmeanach. It seems a bit rich of Highland Council to restrict planning permission to "aesthetically sensitive" buildings when they roll out blue wheelie bins. Philistines!

Another good tip for browsing on Street View is to have the Ordnance Survey current 1:25,000 scale map open in another window courtesy of Streetmap. And the 19th century OS 6 inch map (1:10,560) available via National Libraries of Scotland open in a third window. And, of course, Bing aerial photography and/or Google Earth on the go too (GE in the case of the south end of Raasay).

The fact that all this material is available free, I find just incredible. It's great for someone like me who loves Scotland but doesn't live there to be able to explore it in this way. I wonder where I'll go tomorrow - Rodel? Salen? Arinagour? Lochboisdale? Laxford Bridge? All of them - I'm like a kid in a sweetie shop!

Loch Etive

2010-03-11T17:20:00.000-08:00

A nice postcard posted in June 1958 from Ledaig - better known as Benderloch nowadays - just north of Oban in Argyll to Edinburgh.

The view is of Achnacloich Pier on the south shore of Loch Etive about 3 miles east of Connel and about 8 miles from Oban. There used to be a halt here on the railway to Oban (between Taynuilt and Connel) but it was closed in the 1960s.

The boat at the pier is the Darthula II. She was built by Dickies' of Tarbert (Loch Fyne) in 1939 and sailed from Achnacloich to the head of Loch Etive as part of a circular tour returning by motor coach via Glen Etive and Glen Coe and then the train from Ballachulish to Connel and Oban. The tour was advertised in Brtish Railways' 1957 "Circular Tours in Scotland" brochure with the Darthula II being described as a yacht and she certainly looks it in this closer up picture:-

Picture credit Simplon Postcards

In 1957, the round trip from Oban was every day (except Sunday, of course) from June to September and cost 19 shillings and threepence (96p) 1st Class or 16 shillings (80p) 2nd Class. You could go either way round but the "anti-clockwise" route involved boarding the train at Oban at 9.18am and alighting at Achnacloich at 9.44am. The Darthula II sailed at 10.15 and, via a call at Taynuilt, took two and a quarter hours to get to the head of Loch Etive arriving there at 12.30pm. 50 minutes later (what did you do at Lochetivehead for 50 minutes if it was pouring?), the coach left for a 2 hour 10 minute drive up Glen Etive and down Glen Coe to Ballachulish. Arriving there at 3.30, it was only 20 minutes till departure of the train back to Oban where it arrived at 5.35pm.

The Darthula II continued on Loch Etive until 1963 after which she gave cruises on the Thames for a number of years. I was quite surprised to discover that she was still sailing in Portsmouth Harbour until the last few years, a little bit altered (and slightly less "yacht-like"), although I can't find her present status - if anyone knows, do leave a comment.

Picture credit Simplon Postcards

Meanwhile, back on Loch Etive, Achnacloich Station has closed as already mentioned and I don't think the pier there exists anymore either. The railway between Connel and Ballachulish also closed in 1966 and the pier at the head of Loch Etive is rotting away from disuse.

Copyright Nigel Brown and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

So there's no longer a circular tour but it is still possible go on a non-landing cruise up Loch Etive from Taynuilt in summer. Until recently, this was on a vessel called Anne of Etive which looked remarkably similar to the Darthula II in her latter incarnation:-

Picture credit Airds Cottage

But more recently, I gather the cruises on Loch Etive have been on a boat called Mara. It even sails on a Sunday. More information here.

Stromeferry - Part 6

2010-03-10T14:19:00.000-08:00

Part 1 here.

Before picking up the story from Part 5, here's an interesting snippet about the Strome Ferry I've found in the interim in Black's Picturesque Tourist of Scotland published in 1869 (just before the railway got to Stromeferry in 1870) and available on Google Books:-

"Strome Ferry is nearly a quarter of a mile broad, and the ferry boat being but a large cobble [a wide-beamed, flat-bottomed boat] into which horses have to leap from the pier, it is far from being either a safe or an easy means of transit for horses unaccustomed to such work.* ... Boats can be hired from Strome Ferry [here referring to the north terminus] to Plockton, from which there is a short cut to Kyle Akin, Skye. Port Chulan, where there is a small inn, is the name of the landing place on the Lochalsh side of Loch Carron from which there is a steep ascent of about two miles.

*Rates chargeable at Strome Ferry: 1 horse and 1 man, 1s.; 1 man, 6d.; 2 men, 3d. each; 3 men, 2d. each; 1 horse and 1 two-wheeled vehicle 2s 6d.; two horses and four-wheeled vehicle, 5s. The rates at Dornie and Totaig ferries are much the same as those at Strome."

I was particularly intrigued by the reference to the south terminus being called "Port Chulan". Modern maps mark a cluster of houses called "Portchullin" about a mile west of the south terminus of the ferry.

I suspect what may have happened is that Port Chulan (Portchullin) was originally the name of the south terminus of the ferry, a place where there was an inn before the railway arrived in 1870. But when the railway arrived, it was renamed "Stromeferry" (rather as "Kyle Akin Ferry" was renamed "Kyle of Lochalsh" when the railway got there in 1897). Meanwhile, the Ordnance Survey were a bit out of the loop about this railway "re-branding" and, refusing to believe that "Portchullin" had been simply abolished, reallocated the name to the nearest available settlement.

That may sound a bit of a tall tale, but I can well believe it's plausible in the days when English speaking Ordnance Survey personnel may have been pretty vague about the place information being given them by Gaelic speaking locals. Anyway, below is what Portchullin looks like today:-

Picture credit Dave Fergusson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Either that or the authors of Picturesque Tourist were talking out of a hole in their you-know-wheres so perhaps best I return to the safer ground of the ferry in the next chapter (which I can't promise will be the last either!)

Old Maps (Colonsay)

2010-03-07T16:00:00.000-08:00

Regular readers will have spotted by now that I'm a fan of old maps.

There are lots of them at lots of scales viewable online - free of charge - at the maps section of the National Library of Scotland website but I would have to say the NLS website scores only 6 out of 10 in terms of navigability in my book so the purpose of this post is to showcase what's on offer and give you the direct links:-

OS Quarter Inch (1921-23)

Bartholomew Half Inch (1926-35)

OS Inch - 1st edition (1856-91)

From that link, you can link to the 2nd (1885-1900) and 3rd (1903-12) editions of the one inch map. These three editions are all black and white, thus:-

With the above maps, when you click the sheet you want, it opens in a new window. I recommend the "View with Plug-in" option (he says like he knows what a plug-in option is - just press "yes", "accept" etc.) which enables you to zoom right in and drag the map around the screen etc.

For the OS One Inch "Popular" edition of the 1930s (coloured), you just keep zooming in on the same window with no plug-in.

For the next scales up, 6 inch and 25 inch, you can just keep zooming in but a preferable option is, once you've got to a scale which shows the boundaries of the sheet, click "By point" (top right) and then click your desired location on the map. This will highlight the sheet in purple and top right of the map you'll see a link like Ordnance Survey Map - Argyllshire - 1:10,560 Sheet CLVI. Click that to take you to the map.

OS 6 inch (1st ed. 1843-82)

OS 25 inch (1st ed. 1855-82) - there isn't total coverage of Scotland at 25 inch scale yet. I assume it's a work in progress and the remainder have yet to be scanned and uploaded. Meanwhile, there are 13,045 sheets to be perused. Including Scalasaig.

There are also Admiralty Charts

And this is what Scalasaig on Colonsay looks like from the air courtesy of Bing Maps

Nice wee place, Scalasaig, I commend it to you all.