St Catherines revisited: the Hotel

In 2018 I wrote a post about the St Catherines ferry which used to cross Loch Fyne from Inveraray to the village of that name on the Cowal shore: only ever a passenger ferry, it closed in 1963. There's a lot more information about the ferry in Walter Weyndling's 1996 book Ferry Tales of Argyll & the Isles which you can read here (free but registration required). 

The point of this post, though, is to talk about the inn at St Catherines which stood at the top of the ferry pier as seen in the 1930s postcard above. I'm fascinated by travel in the Highlands in the 18th and 19th centuries before the era of rail and the motor car and when it was still a pretty arduous business. A central feature of travel in these days was the wayside inn for the reception of weary travellers. One such was the inn at St Catherines, particularly important to the traveller arriving after the last ferry across to Inveraray for the night had left. And in periods of bad weather, the ferry - a sailing vessel at St Catherine's before 1827 - might not run the following day either necessitating an extended stay.

Boating on Loch Fyne in blustery conditions by J M W Turner. This is the west side of the loch a mile or two south of Inveraray so it's not the St Catherines ferry but may give an impression of what it could be like! Picture credit: The Met

Scottish inns didn't have a brilliant reputation 250 years ago, though, and I'm always interested to read descriptions of them. The other day, I came across one of the St Catherines Inn written as long ago as 1773 and it comes out rather well. It was written by an 18 year old girl called Anne MacVicar (better known as 'Mrs Grant of Laggan' because she subsequently married a Mr Grant who was the Minister of the Parish of Laggan). She was travelling with her parents from Glasgow to Fort Augustus where her father was going to take up the post of barrack master. The second day of the journey began at Luss and they stopped at Tarbet or Arrochar (Anne candidly admits she can't remember the name of the place but from context it must be one of those two) for breakfast. There they were joined by a fellow traveller, a rather objectionable student travelling home from college she nicknamed Smelfungus. The following is an extract from the letter Anne wrote to her friend Harriet she was leaving behind in Glasgow:

Why, after tiring you and myself with such a detail [how obnoxious Smelfungus had been at breakfast], should I tell you of the horrors of Glencroe, through which we travelled in a dismal rainy day? In one particular, I dare say, I agreed with the stranger [Smelfungus], for I really thought dinner [i.e. lunch] the most interesting event of this day's journey, not merely as a repast, but the manner of it was so novel. There was a little inn, thatched, and humbler than any of the former; we came very cold to it; we found a well-swept clay floor, and an enlivening blaze of peats and brushwood, two windows looking out upon the lake we were to cross [Loch Fyne], and a primitive old couple, whose fresh complexion made you wonder at their silver hairs. All the apparatus of fishing and hunting were suspended from the roof; I thought myself in Ithaca, though Homer does not speak of peats or trout, and far less of grouse. The people showed an alacrity in welcoming us, and a concern about our being wet and cold, that could not have been assumed. I never took such a sudden liking to people so far out of my own way. I suppose we are charmed with cheerfulness and sensibility in old people, because we do not expect it; and with unservile courtesy in the lower class, for the same reason. "How populous, how vital is the grave!" says your favourite Young; "How populous, how vital are the glens!" I should be tempted to say here: but after the "stupendous solitude," through which we had just passed, the blazing hearth and kindly host had peculiar attractions.

Shall I tell you of our dinner? Never before did I blot paper with such a detail; but it is instructive to know how cheaply we may be pleased. On a clean table of two fir deals we had as clean a cloth; trout new from the lake, eggs fresh as our student's heart could wish; kippered salmon, fine new-made butter and barley-cakes, which we preferred to the loaf we had brought with us. Smelfungus began to mutter about the cookery of our trouts; I pronounced them very well drest, out of pure spite; for by this time I could not endure him, from the pains he took to mortify the good people, and to show us he had been used to lodge and dine better. I feasted, and was quite entranced, thinking how you would enjoy all that I enjoyed. Dear Harriet, how my heart longs for you, when I think how yours is made to share all my wild pleasures!

The boat was crossing with other passengers over the ferry, which is very wide. We were forced to wait its arrival two hours — to me very short ones; one of them I have given to you, for I could never tell you all this when the warm feeling of the minute had worn off. I have kept my promise of being minute, most religiously; there is merit in it. For you I have forsaken Smelfungus, who is yonder walking on the Loch side, in all the surly dignity of displeasure. I am going to tea, and will put him in good humour, with questions about his college. 

What a pleasant teadrinking! The old landlord knew all my father's uncles, and the good woman was so pleased with my interest in her household economy! It produced a venison ham, sacred to favourites, and every other good thing she had; every one was pleased, and Smelfungus himself became, "As mild and patient as the female dove, When first her golden couplets are disclosed." And here I conclude this long letter to begin another at Inverary. Innocent, beloved, and amiable, what more can I wish you, that will not risk a share of your happiness? Adieu, Beloved! A.M.

St Catherines Inn and ferry, 1826

Anne began her next letter to Harriet almost as soon as she’d arrived at Inveraray. She recorded:

Such a day as we had after crossing the ferry! such torrents! Our carriage stood us in good stead, when we left the boat, in which, indeed, we got completely wet. But, alas! for the unsheltered head of Smelfungus, and for the new hat he was so careful of. Wet and weary, late and dreary, we arrived; and yet I was not depressed. 

The MacVicars were travelling by coach which is remarkable by itself. Not so much that they could afford to travel by coach but that there were roads over which one could travel: that was absolutely not to be taken for granted in Argyll in the 1770s. But the military road to Inveraray over the Rest and Be Thankful, built 24 years earlier in 1749, must have been passable by coaches: that was not to be taken for granted either considering the military roads had been designed for marching soldiers rather than middle class families in coaches (many stretches of the military roads were realigned in the first quarter of the 19th century to make them more suitable for wheeled traffic). Anyway, does that last quotation from Anne's letter infer that the coach crossed the ferry from St Catherines to Inveraray with them? We know that wheeled traffic could cross on sail powered ferries as seen in the picture below ...

... but that was just to cross the half mile between Kyle of Lochalsh and Kyleakin. I sort of 'hae ma doots' that carrying a coach a mile and a half across Loch Fyne would be feasible. What I think was more likely was that the coach was sent round to Inveraray by road to await the MacVicars when they got off the ferry. Although as going round the head of the loch is only an extra 6 miles compared with the two hours they had to wait for the ferry, and then - what? - 30 minutes minimum? - to cross the loch in a sailing vessel, I'm not sure why they didn't go with the coach. The ferry really catered for travellers arriving at St Catherines from the south rather than the east.

The head of Loch Fyne in 1820 as seen in Lumsden’s Steamboat Companion

On the map above, the military road from the Rest and be Thankful the MacVicars travelled along in 1773 is the one pointing to the right edge of the map. There was a road branching off it along the south side of Loch Fyne to St. Catherines and Strachur but for some reason it’s not marked. The two roads pointing to the bottom edge of the map, to Ardentinny and Lochgoilhead, hadn’t been built in 1773 but once they had, in 1809-10, the quickest and most comfortable route from Glasgow to Inveraray (and from there to Oban and points north) became by steamboat to Lochgoilhead and coach to St. Catherines. In these days, the longer the part of your journey you could accomplish by steamboat along the sheltered waters of a firth or sea loch and the shorter by road, the better - especially when the road involved “the horrors of Glencroe”, as Anne MacVicar put it (Glen Croe is the approach to the Rest from the east. I've included a map marked with all the various locations at the end of this post).

Advert in the Glasgow Herald, 1866. John Campbell was the tenant of the St Catherines Inn

If I’m not making a very good job so far of this post being about the inn rather than the ferry, it could be justified as emphasis that the inn was as significant a stop on the journey to Oban by steamer, coach and ferry in the 18th and 19th centuries as the Green Welly Stop at Tyndrum is on the journey today by car! Anyway, to the inn, but first we need to introduce the estate it formed part of. 

As well as the inn, St Catherines Estate included the ferry rights across to Inveraray; a farm of about 600 acres with stocking for 400 sheep and 4 milk cows; and two houses (one for the tenant of the shooting rights). And I’m sorry but we haven’t escaped the ferry yet! What I meant there by the estate including the ferry rights was that the right to operate a ferry at a convenient crossing point was a proprietary right. Usually it belonged to the owner of the land on one side but sometimes it belonged jointly to the owners on either side. Whoever the owner was, he usually let them to someone who actually operated the boats and collected (and kept) the fares paid by the passengers. But whatever the arrangements, the significance of ferry rights at a particular crossing being proprietary was that nobody else except the proprietor (or his tenant) could set up a rival service at the same crossing: that would be a trespass against which the proprietor (or tenant) could obtain an interdict (Scottish word for injunction: see this post for an instance of exactly that happening). Now, in my previous post about St Catherine’s, I said that the ferry rights there belonged to Inveraray town council but I’ve since discovered that’s not quite right. In fact, they belonged jointly to Inveraray and St Catherine’s Estate but under a strange arrangement whereby Inveraray only had the right to carry passengers east across the loch but not the other way and St Catherine’s Estate vice versa. This appears in the news cuttings below:-

Report of a meeting of Inveraray Town Council in 1881. Note in the third and fourth last lines that what was let by public roup (auction), for the princely sum of £30 (about £3,000 today), was the "(Inveraray side)" of the ferry.

Advert by St Catherines Estate for the let of the inn and ferry rights making it clear only east to west traffic is included. I don’t know what they meant by a ‘chartered ferry’ - it’s not a term of art of Scots Law

A dafter way of arranging a ferry it’s hard to imagine but reading between the lines of the various accounts I think that what happened in practice was this: Inveraray pro-actively sought out tenants to operate the ferry as a public service while St Catherine’s reactively permitted the Inveraray tenant to pick up return passengers at their side in exchange for a toll of so much per passenger. (Walter Weyndling’s book I linked to above, refers to 6d, 5d and 3d per passenger at different times.) So when St Catherine’s Estate were advertising for a tenant of their east to west ferry rights in the advert above, I don’t believe they were actually looking for somebody with a boat. Rather, they were farming their right to the tolls from Inveraray's tenant operator: “What fixed amount per year will you offer us to receive the variable amount of tolls received in the year?” That was common practice with any variable income stream in these days.

Approximate boundaries of St Catherine's Estate

Anyway, back to St Catherines Estate, ‘the two merkland of Kilcatrine’ was held as a feu (perpetual lease) from the Earls (later Dukes) of Argyll: part of the feuduty (ground rent) was to ferry the Earls and their retinue across the loch to Inveraray free of charge. A ‘merkland’ was a piece of land anciently valued at a merk (two thirds of a pound Scots) for rental and taxation purposes and it was called Kilcatrine - Gaelic for ‘church of St. Catherine’ - after a chapel of that name there built by Sir Duncan Campbell of Lochawe, 1st Lord Campbell and ancestor of the Earls and Dukes of Argyll, in the middle of the 15th century: its ruin is still just visible in the trees behind the houses to the south of the inn (see here).

In the 17th century, the feu of Kilcatrine was held by a family called MacKerras (Gaelic for Fergusson) until 1695 when they sold it to James Campbell, baillie (Scottish word for magistrate) and later provost (ditto for mayor) of Inveraray. He passed it to his brother Patrick and it remained with his descendants for another three generations. It would have been these Campbells, I think, who anglicised the name of the estate to St Catherines: it appears as such in the Land Tax Roll of 1751. One of them, I can't tell which exactly but described as "weak and fickle" by the Duke of Argyll's factor (steward) made himself obnoxious to the duke, his feudal superior, the following year (1752) by refusing to surrender his feu or even agree terms for access to the quarry on the estate for stone to build Inveraray Castle. A deal was eventually done, though, and much of the distinctive greenish grey stone the castle is built of was quarried at St Catherines.

Inveraray Castle. Phot credit: dan

The last Campbell laird of St Catherines, the 5th, was Captain Patrick Campbell. In 1849, he commissioned a 'feuing plan' from cartographer Thomas Carfrae to develop the lower parts of the estate along the seaside as a housing estate. Although this plan is referred to at Historic Environment Scotland's Trove.scot website (here), it's not available to view online, sadly, so here's a link to another feuing plan, at Toward, to give you the picture. Feus (plots) would have been sold (strictly speaking let on perpetual ground lease but often at a peppercorn feuduty (groundrent)) to rich middle class Glaswegians to build elegant Victorian villas as their weekend residences on: think of the outskirts of towns like Dunoon and Rothesay and around the Holy Loch etc. Nothing ever came of the feuing of St Catherine's, though, and I strongly suspect the reason was distance from Glasgow: the key to a successful feuing plan was rapid access to the city by steamship and upper Loch Fyne is just a bit too far. 

Captain Campbell sold the estate to Patrick Forbes, an Edinburgh lawyer, about the middle of the 19th century and when he (Forbes) died in 1875, it was sold to the 8th Duke of Argyll (1847-1900). On the death of the 9th Duke in 1914, St Catherines passed to his widow, Princess Louise, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, for her life: when she died in 1939, the estate passed back to the 10th Duke (1914-49, nephew of the 9th Duke). 

Princess Louise, Dowager Duchess of Argyll in 1915

Of course, His Grace and Her Royal Highness didn’t cook breakfast and make beds at their inn at St. Catherines themselves. They let that privilege to tenants. We've already met John Campbell who was the tenant of the inn in the 1860s and drove the coach to Lochgoilhead to catch the steamer to Glasgow. James MacDonald was the tenant in 1875 and he was succeeded by Donald Sutherland in 1879. He was also the tenant of the farm. It was common for inns to have farms attached to them in the 19th and early 20th centuries to provide food for the table and fodder for the guests' horses and, in fact, all the tenants of the St Catherines Inn were also the tenants of the farm until the Second World War. In 1898 John MacIntyre became tenant. 

The fortunes of the inn had declined somewhat since the opening of the railway to Dalmally (for Inveraray) in 1877 and then Oban in 1880 which had taken much of the traffic from the steamer and coach route via Lochgoilhead and St Catherines but the next tenant, Allan MacDonald, a butcher from Lochgoilhead who took over in 1909, turned things around by taking advantage of the emerging transport technology of the 20th century: the motor car. In 1931, the Oban Times noted that Allan had made St Catherine’s “one of the best patronised hotels on the Glasgow to Dunoon road”. No car ferry to Dunoon in these days and note how it’s now being referred to as a hotel rather than an inn. The valuation roll records a petrol pump at the i… sorry, hotel in 1935 and you can see it if you look closely at the postcard at the top of this post (click to enlarge). Previously, in 1925, the MacDonalds had expanded their empire when Allan’s son Peter took the tenancy of the Creggans Inn four miles down the road at Strachur and henceforth the two establishments were run in conjunction with each other. Nor was it the case that the MacDonalds were hoteliers first and farmers second: their names regularly appeared in the reports of sales at local livestock markets and it’s significant in this regard that, when Peter MacDonald gave up the Creggans in 1931, it was take a tenancy, not of another hotel, but of a farm.

The St Catherine’s Hotel was gutted by fire in April 1934 and it’s a testament to Allan MacDonald’s drive that he had it immediately rebuilt in time for that year’s season. Looking at the postcard above, I’m going to guess that glass verandah along the front was part of the 1934 rebuild. It looks very similar to the one along the front of the Creggans (see here) which is probably not a coincidence. 

Allan MacDonald died the following year (1935) and was succeeded by his son James. He transferred the tenancy of the hotel to his brother in law, Duncan Munro, in 1946. In 1951, he (Duncan) bought the whole of the St Catherine’s Estate from the 11th Duke of Argyll (1949-73: he of the scandalous 1960s divorce case). It’s emblematic of the continuity of the history of the place and also of the conservatism of Scottish conveyancing lawyers that, in the deed of conveyance by the Duke to Duncan Munro, the property was still described as “the two merkland of Kilcatrine commonly called Saint Katherines” (with a K). Argyll had advertised the estate at offers over £12,000 (about £330,000 in today’s prices) but I don’t know what Duncan Munro paid for it. 

Advert in the Oban Times, September 1951: British Newspaper Archive

In 1968, now in partnership with his sons Duncan, Junior and Allan, Duncan Munro sold the hotel to a William and Sheila Somerville from Lower Kilmardinny Farm in Bearsden. Now, without access to a full Registers of Scotland ‘search sheet’ (which is quite expensive), I can’t give chapter and verse on the ownership thereafter. Changes of ownership of things like hotels and farms were no longer being reported quite as religiously by the Oban Times as they had been in previous decades but a Lewis Laurie was recorded as living at St Catherines Hotel in 1970 and his name appeared as the contact in an advert advertising the hotel for sale in 1989. He skipped the hotel’s team in a curling competition amongst local licensed traders in 1991 (won by the Cairndow Inn) but whether Mr Laurie was the owner or manager on behalf of the Somervilles or subsequent owners (or both of these things at different times), I don’t know. 

A Sheena Dowse was reported being the owner in 1994. A John Roger applied for the licence in 1998 and that’s the last reference to the St Catherines Hotel trading as such I could find. I think it shut some time in the early 2000s - it was unoccupied in 2003 - and was bought by local property developer Archie McArthur about the same time. In 2004, he lodged a planning application to redevelop the building but before we look at that, a quick look at the rest of the estate: it’s mostly been sold off - the largest part, the hill ground of the farm was sold for forestry, don’t know when exactly, but it belongs today to Gresham House Forestry Fund (see here (paid subscription required) and here) - although Duncan Munro, Junior’s son, another Duncan, still owns a house (Alt na Craig) and the freehold of the static caravan park which is operated by the same company as operates the parks at Drimsynie and Loch Eck etc. In many ways, the caravan park is a sort of 20th century reimagining of the feuing plan, now made possible by faster connection to Glasgow by motor car.

St Catherine's caravan park looking south west over Loch Fyne. The pier from which the ferry used to run to Inveraray can be seen. Photo credit: Google Maps

Archie McArthur’s 2004 planning application for the hotel was for development of a “tourist complex comprising conversion and alterations to former inn to provide 10 holiday units, licensed bar/restaurant (public house licence) and shop, erection of detached dwellinghouse for key worker [i.e. manager], storage building, 24 parking spaces and biological treatment plant.”  Unfortunately, this didn’t find favour with the planning department. Some of the correspondence (but not the plans, unfortunately) is preserved here and this meeting gives a flavour of the issues: apart from being ‘over developed’ (planning speak for trying to cram too much into too small a site), the main problem seems to have been the health and safety implications of parking and access off the busy A815 road in a 60mph zone. It seems that no compromise could be found, the planning application was withdrawn in 2005 and there matters were left for the best part of the next 20 years with the hotel empty, boarded up and decaying away. Mr McArthur put it on the market in 2021-22 at £225,000 but there were no takers.

St Catherine's Hotel in 2022: Google Streetview

Turning to the building itself, it’s a Category C listed building. Its citation as such (here) says it was built in 1756. In the 1920s, workmen repairing the hotel unearthed a stone bearing the date 1745. It bears a strong resemblance to the nearby Cairndow Inn which is probably not coincidental. Until it stopped trading around 2000, there was a sign over the door of the St Catherine's Hotel (picture of that here) claiming it had been granted a charter as a wayfarer’s tavern in 1460. I suspect that’s a conflation of the foundation of the chapel in the 1460s with a gloss in a 1925 article in the Oban Times (here: paid subscription required) speculating that the founder, Lord Campbell, would have kept a house and stable at St Catherine’s for his use while en route to Kilmun (on the Holy Loch) where he’d also founded a church. There’s nothing at all improbable in there having been an inn at St Catherine’s prior to the mid 18th century but I’m sceptical of anything very formal as early as the 15th century. The point here is, though, that the building that stands today is the one Anne MacVicar and her parents dined in in 1773 - you have to picture it with a thatched roof, though.

I said “the building that stands today” - but not for much longer. Absent the prospect of a ‘tourist complex’, in 2024 Archie McArthur obtained a budget for the best that could be done with the former St Catherine’s Hotel: a four bedroom house in the main block and two three bed houses in the single storey wing to the south (right in the photos). That produced a net loss of £600,000 to the developer so he applied for permission to demolish it and this was granted. The demolition hadn’t happened as at June 2025 and I don’t know whether it’s happened yet as I write this in January 2026.

It’s ironic that the thing that saved the St Catherine’s Inn in the first quarter of the 20th century - motor traffic - was responsible for its demise in the first quarter of the 21st. I wonder what future revolution in travel will bring about the demise of the Green Welly Stop 100 years from now?

As usual, if anyone can correct me on the ownership or other aspects of the history or can update on the demolition, do leave a comment.