Tobermory

I've found what I think must be the second earliest (I'll come to the earliest later) picture of Tobermory I've ever seen.

It's a vignette on an 1847 Admiralty Chart of Tobermory Harbour showing the southern entrance to the harbour.

What caught my eye about it is, note how the buildings along the seafront stop half way along looking from left to right (south west to north east). Compare with the present day view from roughly the same angle where the buildings go all the way along:-

Photo credit dplatten

The chart the vignette appears on (pictured above) shows buildings along the whole length of the present sea front as far as Mishnish Pier instead of stopping where it says "Inn" at the long narrow pier half way along which is where the vignette shows the buildings stopping. This all suggests to me that the vignette was drawn many years before 1847 when the chart was drawn for reasons that are hinted at by Tobermory's history.

The buildings at the east end of Tobermory and Mishnish Pier which are missing from the vignett

The village was developed in the 1780s by the ponderously named "British Society for Extending the Fisheries and Improving the Sea Coasts of the United Kingdom". Incorporated by Act of Parliament and usually known as the British Fisheries Society (BFS) for short, it operated by buying land at sites it thought would make good fishing ports and leasing plots to fishermen and tradesmen associated with the fishing industry to build houses and fish curing sheds etc. The BFS also established Ullapool and Wick on the same basis.

Tobermory Bay in 1775 before development of the village by the BFS. Plan by Murdoch MacKenzie viewable on the National Libraries of Scotland websit

At Tobermory, then virtually a virgin site, the BFS bought 2,000 acres of land in two adjoining parcels - one at the west (inner, left hand) end of the bay from the Duke of Argyll and the other, at the east (outer, right hand) end, from Mishnish Estate. The dividing line between the two was at the long thin pier which projects south on the chart (the one opposite the clock tower and the Co-op - I don't know if it has a name locally).

It was only the first of these two parcels - the west one acquired from the Duke of Argyll - which was originally developed by the BFS in the 1780s. This is confirmed by the picture which I think must be the earliest of Tobermory (although I think it's more of an artist's impression of how the village would look rather than an actual "as built" view as I believe the vignette on the chart is).

Scan of Plate 2 in "The British Fisheries Society" 1786-1893 by Jean Dunlop

The rest of the buildings along the seafront - those to the east (right) on the land acquired from Mishnish Estate - were not developed until the 1820s. This most recognisably "Balamory" part of Tobermory (pictured below) was, in fact, a "Phase 2" of the village and it's no coincidence that it's this part that includes Mishnish Pier and the Mishnish Hotel (the yellow building).

Photo credit Yorkshire Girl

Although it became a thriving commercial centre, Tobermory was never particularly successful as a fishing village. For that reason, the BFS sold it in 1844 back to the two estates it had originally acquired the land from - Aros Estate to the south east (though no longer owned by the Duke of Argyll in the 1840s) and Mishnish Estate to the north west.

After various changes of ownership, Aros Estate - still including the west and original part of Tobermory - was bought by the Forestry Commission in 1971. It always strikes me as one of these ironies of history that land bought in the 1780s by a body incorporated by Act of Parliament for the purposes of fishing ended up being bought nearly 200 years later by a body incorporated by Act of Parliament for the purposes of forestry. I suspect the north of Mull ended up being more fertile territory for forestry than fishing but it's harder to judge which body brought more lasting long term benefits ...

Below is a map (taken from the excellent map viewer on the Forestry Commission's website) showing in green the land the FC still owns around the village as parts of Aros Estate. Many areas have been sold off but note the north east boundary at the old pier opposite the Co-op preserving to this day the historical dividing line between the two phases of development of Tobermory in the late 18th and early 19th centuries:-

[Boring technical note it's not complulsory to read - the map shows a lot of the centre of Tobermory shaded green as if the FC owned all the houses etc. This is more illusory than real. What the BFS sold in 1844 was the freehold (i.e. landlord's interest) of the house etc. plots held on long lease by the villagers. In the late 19th/early 20th century, when Aros Estate was owned by the Allan family, most of these leaseholds were converted to feus. A peculiarly Scottish institution, feus were, in effect, perpetual leases held for a ground rent known as feuduty (usually just a few pounds a year for a house). The freehold of a feu (the right to receive the feuduty) was called the "superiority" and the leaseholders were known as "feuars". What the FC acquired in 1971 was the superiorities of the village. Superiorities were abolished in 2004 (meaning the feuars became the freeholders) so in due course the FC will have to update the map to remove the parts they were only the superiors of] 

  

Hynish

At the end of the B8066 at the south west end of Tiree, you come across a group of early-Victorian buildings with an incongruously instutional look about them in the surrounding Hebridean crofting landscape:-

Looking like a cross between a prison camp and a work house, if this was in the Channel Islands, you could imagine they held some dark secret of the Nazi occupation but this is, in fact, Hynish, the shore base for the construction of the Skerryvore Lighthouse.

Built between 1838 and 1844 under the supervision of engineer Alan Stevenson (uncle of the author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson), Skerryvore is built of granite quarried on Mull which was brought to Hynish to be shaped into blocks before being shipped out to the reef 10 miles (16km) south west of Tiree and incorporated into the rising structure of the lighthouse.

Hynish and Skerryvore on the Scotland - West Coast admiralty chart

Skerryvore Lighthouse - photo credit Ian Cowe

I first learnt about Hynish in 1994 when I visited Tiree on holiday. The signal tower which communicated by semaphore with the workers on the rock is a museum about the construction of the lighthouse while the keepers' houses are now affordable homes for Tiree residents. The remainder of the buildings form the Hynish Centre run by the Hebridean Trust for holding conferences and courses etc.

Hynish Wet Dock - picture credit Clyde Cruising Club

But what I didn't know about Hynish until the other day is that the harbour there (pictured above) was a wet dock. I've seen it referred to as a dry dock but it was exactly the opposite - a wet dock - because it could be kept full of water when the tide was out by closing lock gates (which have since disappeared) across the mouth of the dock. You can see the grooves the gates were located in in the photo below.

Hynish by Niall Corbet

The point of it being a wet dock was that it was much easier to load boats with the heavy granite blocks for the lighthouse if they could be kept afloat at a constant level next to the pier rather than going up and down with the tide and drying out at low water.

Even more interesting is that the wet dock at Hynish didn't rely on a high tide to be filled up but was equipped with an onshore reservoir of fresh water to fill it. You can see the whole arrangement  clearly on the OS 25 inch map of 1878 when the wet dock was apparently still in operation:-

What always strikes me about these things is that Victorian engineers like Stevenson - with no GPS or internet or software and presumably just pencil and paper - had to think about stuff like the shore base as well as the lighthouse on the rock. The wet dock would have been quite an achievement on its own!

The reservoir with its associated dam and sluice are also still clearly visible on Google Earth:-

You can see them quite clearly on the ground as well:-

The point of this post is I think it's fascinating to discover examples of such quintessential Victorian engineering as a wet dock (albeit on a small scale) in such a remote location as Tiree. And in such a state of preservation. Also, how it's possible to go for a virtual look round the past and the present without leaving my seat here in the Azores courtesy of such resources as Google Earth and National Libraries of Scotland Maps. But if you are actually going to Tiree any time soon, do go up on that dam and take a few photos and add them to Canmore.

Extract from OS 1 inch sheet 44 Coll & Tiree

Another trawl through Flickr: The Outer Isles Mail

I've uncovered another absolute cracker of a photo in the course of another of my periodic sessions on Flickr

 That picture by Sandy Stevenson shows a car being craned off MacBrayne's MV Lochmor (1930) at Tarbert, Harris. It's interesting to contrast it with vehicles coming off a Calmac ship at a Hebridean port in the 21st century:-

MV Clansman at Castlebay by Michael McIntyre

I uploaded a picture to my own Flickr photostream the other night of a scan of a 1955 MacBrayne's brochure. What caught my eye was that it said - almost as an afterthought - "MOTOR CARS. These can be conveyed by prior arrangement on most steamer routes." How times have changed!

  
Going back to the picture of the Lochmor at Tarbert at the top, there's a detail in it that allows the photo to be dated quite closely. Note how the hull of the ship (the bit round the three round portholes at bottom left) is grey rather than the usual MacBrayne's black. That tells us the photo was taken in 1930 or 1931 when the Lochmor was brand new.

The reason is that the 1920s had seen MacBrayne's in financial difficulties culminating in their withdrawing their tender for the vital mail contract to the Western Isles in 1928. As nobody else had tendered either, that would be the equivalent today of nobody - not even Calmac - bidding for the subsidy to run the car ferry services to the islands. The government therefore brokered a solution whereby MacBrayne's was taken over from the MacBrayne family by a consortium between Coast Lines (a shipping company specialising in trade around the Irish Sea; it was eventually taken over by P&O in the early 70s) and the London Midland & Scottish Railway. This new management attempted a rebranding exercise (as we would call it today) of re-painting the fleet's hulls light grey but it didn't catch on and they reverted to the traditional black in 1931.

A grey hulled Lochmor at Kyle of Lochalsh in the early 30s

The Lochmor also called at Lochmaddy but sailed from Mallaig and Kyle of Lochalsh rather than Uig on a 24 hour circuit round Skye (clockwise and anti-clockwise on alternate days) known as "the Outer Isles Mail". It also included calls at Scalpay, Stockinish (Harris), Rodel (these last two being ferry calls), Lochboisdale, Canna, Rum and Eigg.

The Outer Isles Mail timetable in 1934 (click to enlarge)

The route of the Outer Isles Mail service

The Lochmor with traditional black hull at Lochmaddy

The Outer Isles Mail service ceased in 1964 when it was replaced by the new car ferry service running from Uig to just Tarbert and Lochmaddy. Scalpay and the Small Isles (Eigg, Rum & Canna) got their own dedicated services. The Lochmor was sold for further service in the Aegean. Her replacement on the new "Uig Triangle" service was the Hebrides (II) which served the route until 1985 and, as we're in a "then and now" mood, I'll finish with a picture of her followed by one of the current ferry to Tarbert and Lochmaddy, the Hebrides (III) both in the same position canting (turning) to approach the pier at Uig.

MV Hebrides (II) (1964) approaching Uig pier

MV Hebrides (III) (2001) at Uig - picture credit Alpha Deux Cents

Stornoway ferry

As mentioned before, I periodically go to Flickr and enter search terms such as "Mallaig", "Kyle of Lochalsh" and "MacBrayne" in the hope of uncovering some transport gem. The other day, I was rewarded with a couple of absolute crackers which between them tell a little bit of transport history in the Kyles and Western Isles.

That picture by Robert Chappell shows a car being hoisted off MacBrayne's MV Loch Seaforth. From 1947 to 1972, she was the ferry (as we would say nowadays; at the time they would have said "steamer" even though the Loch Seaforth wasn't a steamship) which served Stornoway, sailing daily from the railheads of Mallaig and Kyle of Lochalsh. Her sailings were designed around passengers joining her off trains from Glasgow and Inverness. Passengers driving from Glasgow to Lewis (a tiny minority in the 1950s) had to have their cars craned on and off as seen above. (Robert's picture is actually taken at Armadale on Skye: between her Stornoway sailings in the late 50s, the Loch Seaforth crossed from Mallaig for the conveyance of cars as an alternative to the car ferries to Skye at Kyle of Lochalsh. Exactly as today's Mallaig-Armadale ferry continues to provide an alternative to the bridge to Skye at Kyle.)

The second picture I found shows the next development - the first car ferry on the Stornoway run. George Woods' picture above shows the Loch Seaforth's successor from May 1972, the MV Iona, at Kyle of Lochalsh.

What makes George's picture so interesting is that the Iona sailing from Mallaig and Kyle was just a short term stopgap measure. The long term plan was to move the Stornoway sailings to Ullapool and this duly commenced in March 1973. It was one of the outermost ripples of the move from rail to road based transport which swept through Britain in the 1960s. There's no railway to Ullapool but it's much the most convenient port to Stornoway for the motorist.

To bring this story down to date, a contract has just been placed for the latest ferry to operate the Ullapool-Stornoway route:-

 An ugly looking brute (although I remember saying exactly the same when I saw the Iona for the first time in the 1970s). More details about the new Stornoway ferry on CMAL's website. It is not uncontroversial. As I understand it, much the better option to replace the aging (1995) existing vessel would have been to commission two smaller ships to shuttle back and forward giving greater frequency of service. But "two small" is more expensive than "one big" (particularly paying two crews) so considerations of affordability have prevailed over the preferred option.

I've digressed a bit from the original subject of discoveries on Flickr so to get us back on topic, I'll finish with another beauty from that source:-

The Loch Seaforth at Kyle by Colin Duncan

Inverness' Cromwellian Fort

I bet 99% of people driving along Lotland Street in Inverness seeing this grassy bank behind Roy Homes' car park think it's just a bund enclosing the oil tanks behind.

But in fact what they're looking at (if they notice it all) is a Scheduled Ancient Monument because this is all that remains of the ramparts of a fort built in the 1650s on the orders of Oliver Cromwell.

Like the fort at Fort William I wrote about a couple of years ago (can it be that long ago?), I'd no idea there was anything left to see of the fort at Inverness. But if it's not very well known to the general public (despite local clues such as this part of the town being called "Citadel"), it's well known to the conservation authorities as disclosed by the veritable forest of hatchings and markings over the map of Inverness in this area on the PASTMAP website (registration necessary but it's free).

The red bit is the grassy mound which is scheduled as an Ancient Monument

The historical context of the fort at Inverness is the same as the one at Fort William. Everyone's heard of the English Civil War in the 1640s when Parliament took up arms against King Charles I. The gripe was the king's high handed attitude to levying taxes. What's less well known is there was a also parallel civil war in Scotland in which the king's enemies - called the Covenanters - had a gripe about his religious policies. The long and short is that Oliver Cromwell got fed up with all of them, closed down Parliament, executed the king (1649) and invaded and conquered Scotland (1651). In Scotland, the clans had been particularly active on behalf of Charles so Cromwell decreed a fort at Inverness, a key location for control of the Highlands. (Note, incidentally, that Cromwellian forts didn't have names like William, Augustus, George etc. In the 17th century, Fort William was called simply Inverlochy.) 

Rotated 90 degrees clockwise to get it "north up". Note how the main entrance appears to have been a bridge from a gate-house on the opposite side of the River Ness.

Construction of the fort at Inverness began under the direction of Major-General Deane in May 1652 but it wasn't completed until 1658, having cost £80,000. It was built with stone from Inverness' Greyfriars and St Mary’s churches and the medieval priories of Beauly and Kinross. It also incorporated timber from neighbouring Strathglass as well as oak imported from England. Within the ramparts were a church, magazine, stores and accommodation for a thousand men.

Despite all this, the Inverness fort was demolished soon after the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, just two years after it had been completed. But it has nonetheless left its footprint, fading gradually as Inverness developed round about it but still just visible to the present day. There's a wealth of further information about the fort at Highland Council's Historic Environment Record here. Note particularly the 2001 report which contains a series of historical maps of Inverness showing the fort. One of them is the Ordnance Survey 1870 25 inch map below:-

Another of the old maps referenced in the report is John Home's 1774 map of Inverness which you can see in detail at the excellent Am Baile website.

The star shaped pattern of the fort was still visible in an aerial photo taken in 1950 which you can see on the National Libraries of Scotland website:-

And the footprint is still just visible on today's Google Earth with the land to the east and north (which was a grass aerodrome in the 1930s) now totally built over. On the GE extract below, the red X is the location of the rampart which is the grassy bank in the photo at the top.

Though never likely to qualify as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the vestigial remains of Inverness' Cromwellian fort are a good example of fascinating history to be found amongst the most mundane of surroundings. And in fact the fort is just a part of a bigger story inasmuch that history proved it was premature to have dismantled it in the 1660s. Only 30 years later, Inverness found itself once again in the cockpit of warfare over deposed Stuart monarchs in the shape of the Jacobite risings. This led to the town being re-fortified in the 18th century on the site of its medieval castle where the sheriff court now stands - this was the original Fort George (complimenting Fort William and Fort Augustus). It was blown up by the Jacobites in 1746 shortly before they were finally defeated at the Battle of Culloden and this led to the present Fort George being built 10 miles east. (I typed the last two sentences without checking my facts and I feel more postings on this subject coming on once I have ...)

I leave you with a final picture of the only other remaining vestige of the Cromwellian fort at Inverness - the clock tower on the not uncoincidentally named Cromwell Street. (It's immediately west (left) of the upside down Olympic pattern of oil tanks in the GE photo above.)

I gather there's some doubt about whether the clock tower was an original part of the 17th century fort (see for e.g. here and here) but it's a lot older than the oil tanks. I wonder if archaeologists will be puzzling over them when sifting the layers of civilisation 1,000 years from now ...

Croggan Pier

I've been published! Well not quite but I do have my name in print in a book that's just been published, namely, Alistair Deayton's West Highland Piers

Top - MacBrayne's cruise steamer King George V (1936-74) at Fort William; bottom - the Corran Ferry

My contribution was two from my postcard collection, namely, the north terminus of Kylesku ferry (page 85):-

... and the north terminus of the old Bonawe Ferry across Loch Etive (page 92):-

I like piers. They're places where you can watch boats and sometimes even get on one which is always a good thing.  If not, then you're often surrounded by water on three sides and can pretend you're on a boat. You can also go fishing. When I was young, I remember being invited to go "beach fishing" and thinking, "What's that all about - surely you can only go fishing from a pier?" As a child (late 60s, early 70s), we were more likely to say "Can we go to the pier?" than to the beach.

Armadale on Skye - a pier which ticks a lot of boxes

In the introduction to his book, Alistair makes the point that piers used to be a vital part of the transport infrastructure because, before the advent of the internal combustion engine and decent roads in the first few decades of the 20th century, many remote areas, even on the mainland, depended on delivery of goods by sea. This was summed up by an article I once read in the online archive of "the Scotsman" about transport problems to Gairloch in Wester Ross in (I think) the 1930s. The locals were campaigning, not for improvements to the road from Inverness, as you'd expect nowadays, but for improvements to the pier so that cargo steamers would not be prevented so often from calling due to low tide.

MacBrayne's cargo steamer SS Claymore (1881-1931) at Gairloch Pier

But unless they happened to coincide with a railhead, a fishing port (as at Gairloch) or a modern car ferry terminal (e.g. Uig on Skye), the majority of these piers were abandoned in the mid 20th century as the transport of goods was moved to the roads. Only a few of the rest have survived, often on islands now served by car ferries operating to slipways (e.g. Jura, Lismore & Gigha) where the old style pier has been retained in case of a load which can't come on the back of a vehicle. This load of electricity poles to replace ones felled in the December storms of 2011 was touch and go for getting to Lismore on the back of truck via a slipway:-

Anyway, one of my favourite abandoned "local piers" (although it's not in Alistair's book because I'm guessing there's a sequel to come called "Western Isles Piers") is the one at Croggan on the south shore of Loch Spelve in Mull.

 

 In such a very remote location, the pier seems incongruously imposing. There are just a handful of crofts at Croggan (now, of course, mostly holiday houses) although it was no doubt designed also to serve the needs of the village of Lochbuie a mile or two to the west which is too exposed to the prevailing south westerly winds to allow reliably regular calls by steamers.

Photo credit ceeyefaitch

 

Croggan - picture credit Graham Maxwell

I don't know anything about the history of the pier at Croggan, when or in what circumstances it was built. But with both having a little stone building at the pier head and concrete supports for the bridge out to the berthing head, Croggan looks very similar to the abandoned pier at Black Mill Bay on the island of Luing just across the Firth of Lorne from Mull. I'd guess they were both built around the same time as part of an early 20th century programme of providing remote communities in this part of Argyll with piers.

 

Black Mill Bay, Luing

The ship in the postcard view of Black Mill Bay pier above is MacBrayne's cargo steamer, SS Handa. She was sold out the fleet in 1917 which I think helps date Croggan Pier to before that year.

EDIT - also just noticed that the pier is marked on the 1897 edition of the Ordnance 6 inch map.

Anyway, this is all by way of a very long introduction to a series of photos of Croggan Pier in use which I was fasconated to see on the Ships of Calmac forum. They were taken by forum member Craig McDowall's grandfather who grew up in Croggan (his grandmother from Lochbuie although they all now live in the north of Mull) and with Craig's permission I reproduce them here and let them speak for themselves:-

 

  

In the first three pictures above, the ship is MacBrayne's MV Lochshiel. Built in 1929, she carried cargo from Glasgow, round the Mull of Kintyre (significant because previous ships on the route went through the Crinan Canal) to points on the Sound of Jura, Firth of Lorne, Loch Linnhe, Sound of Mull and as far north as Loch Sunart (including Glencripesdale). The Lochshiel was sold for scrap in 1952 when she was replaced by a later, post WW2 generation of cargo boats. It's one of these at the pier in the fourth photo above, I think the Loch Carron (1951).

I don't know exactly when Croggan Pier closed for business, but in Duckworth & Langmuir's "West Highland Steamers", I read that, from July 1953, "further road transport and cargo trans-shipment  was introduced so that Glasgow goods for Luing, Lismore and Croggan were conveyed via Oban." I don't know how that would have worked in practice, though - were goods for Croggan off-loaded at Oban, transferred there to the Mull mail steamer, then off-loaded again at Salen (the first pier on Mull up the Sound of Mull before Craignure Pier was built in 1963) and eventually taken by lorry to Croggan and Lochbuie? If so, I'm not sure how that fits with the fact that D&L tell us in the next sentence that goods for Bunessan and Fionnphort, further west on Mull, were to be conveyed by road from the cargo steamer at Tobermory. Anyway, I'm guessing the changes in 1953 spelt the end for Croggan Pier (and Black Mill Bay on Luing). Cargo services to the Western Isles finally ended in 1976 with all the islands by then being linked by ro-ro ferries.

Picture credit tobers