Argyll Curiosities E-Book

Marian Pallister

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 302

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The great travellers of the 17th century – Martin, Penant, Johnson et al – used the word 'curiosity' to mean many different things. They labelled as 'curiosities' people, plants, legends, historical facts and geological certainties. This book follows their example in a 21st century journey around Argyll and its islands. It is difficult to find an area of Argyll which is not curious in some way: archaeology, geography, geology and genealogy have all served to mark out this western fringe of Scotland as unique. Discarding those curiosities which it is all too easy to find on any journey through the county, Marian Pallister has looked extensively into places, people and events which are curiously layered, and has created a book that is overflowing with enchanting 'curiosities' and local histories.

Leseprobe

ARGYLL CURIOSITIES

ARGYLL CURIOSITIES

Marian Pallister

This edition published in 2018 byBirlinn Origin, an imprint ofBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2007 by Birlinn Ltd

Copyright © Marian Pallister 2007

The moral right of Marian Pallister to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 91247 602 2eBook ISBN: 978 1 78885 098 8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Mercat Press in Adobe GaramondPrinted and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

To Ken

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1    Stone

  2    The Laird, his Lady and the Lead Mines

  3    Ministers

  4    Trams, Tunnels and Trains

  5    Family Follies

  6    Slated

  7    Columba and a Lost Cache

  8    Sepulchral Statements

  9    Caves and Curses

10    A Place of Pilgrimage

11    An Elegant Relief

12    Perfidious Kintyre

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am hugely indebted to former archivist for Argyll and Bute, Murdo MacDonald, and to Jackie Davenport and Marina Campbell in the Lochgilphead archives office for all their help.

I would also like to thank Dr Crinan Alexander of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; Dr Derek Alexander of the National Trust for Scotland; Argyll and Bute library staff at Campbeltown and Oban; Alison Arden of the Oban Times; Brian Balmain, Chairman of Bute Victorian Company; Belfast Public Libraries; Maureen Bell for access to her collection of photographs; Jenny Campbell; Dun Laoghaire library staff; the Glens of Antrim Historical Society; John Haddington; Aidan Hart for kind permission to use his icon of St Columba from his website: www.aidanharticons.com; Rob Hunter for his photographic contribution; the MacKenzie Collection, Scottish Slate Islands Heritage Trust; Euan McLaughlin, Island of Luing; Ian Marshall; Sarah Moore of the Hebridean Trust; the National Library of Scotland; the Newcomen Society; the library of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers; Professor Roland A. Paxton, School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University; Derek Prescott of Lochgoilhead for access to documents; the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for supplying illustrations and information; Tackle and Books, Tobermory; Ronald Tognieri of Campbeltown; Ivan Young and the Grampian Speleological Society for information and photographs; Jack Murray of Michigan, USA, for kind permission to access his family website; the late Duncan McArthur of Peninver; and Muriel and Jim Adam, Edinburgh.

INTRODUCTION

When Martin Martin set off at the turn of the eighteenth century on his journeyings to discover the ‘Curiosities of Art and Nature’ in the Western Isles of Scotland, many people were already travelling abroad on the Grand Tour. Indeed, Martin himself had gone to university in Leiden after studying for an MA at Edinburgh in 1681, and he was no stranger to the sights of Europe.

Even then, despite decades of dispute in Britain and sporadic wars in Europe, there were many accounts being written about France, Italy and Switzerland; but when Martin undertook to put the Western Isles under the microscope, his was the first book about this part of Scotland. In the preface to his 1703 publication he chided those who saw nothing of worth on their own doorstep and instead travelled to more exotic locations.

‘The Modern Itch after Knowledge of Foreign Places is so prevalent,’ he wrote, ‘that the generality of Mankind bestow little thought or time upon the Place of their Nativity; it is become Customary for those of Quality to Travel young into Foreign Countries, whilst they are absolutely strangers at home; and many of them when they return, are only loaded with the superficial Knowledge, as the bare Names of Famous Libraries, Stately Edifices, Fine Statues, Curious Paintings, late Fashions, new Dishes, new Tunes, new Dances, Painted Beauties and the like.’

And yet, as he discovered, the Western Isles were a cornucopia of curiosities, and the accounts which he gave of them were not simply of interest to ‘those of Quality’ who had the time and the ability to read for their own edification, but were of great value to the community of which he wrote. Almost two centuries later, when members of the Napier Commission read his account of the Western Isles in their investigations into the conditions of Scotland’s crofters, they found it most helpful. Martin explained the working relationship between crofters and traditional lairds, most of whom had long since disappeared, leaving the land in the custody of many who sought only profit and eschewed moral responsibility.

The world has changed almost beyond recognition since Martin Martin undertook his journey, and indeed since the Napier Commission deliberated on the state of the late Victorian crofter more than a century ago. And yet, human nature remains the same. We are still more inclined to go off to foreign places than to study our native lands. A cheap flight to Prague, a weekend in New York, or a holiday gîte in the Dordogne bring knowledge of interesting architecture, curious paintings or new recipes – or just a chance to indulge in ‘new tunes, new dances, painted beauties, and the like’ – but often at the expense of discovering the fascinating curiosities which lie on our doorsteps.

Only parts of Argyll came under Martin Martin’s scrutiny and the intrepid travellers who followed in his footsteps – Johnson and Boswell, Thomas Pennant, Lord Teignmouth and Lord Cockburn among them – did not always look into situations but rather at them. Martin Martin asked the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions, while tourists like Johnson were more inclined to complain about the beds, and Lord Teignmouth had a touch of ‘let them eat cake’ in his attitude. Visiting Colonsay in the late eighteenth century the latter scratched his head in disbelief that despite a grant of between £10 and £12 from the laird to build chimneyed fireplaces, people still insisted on setting their fire in the middle of the floor so that the children – and chickens and calves – could coorie round it.

Argyll – both its islands and its mainland, stretching from the frontiers of Lochaber to the tip of Kintyre – was and remains a county of curiosities. Curious people, curious situations, curious circumstances; curious customs, buildings, beliefs and botany.

There has never been an era in which curiosities in this western extremity of Scotland have not been turned up. Its very geology is singular, and the expert can place to within yards where a pebble or a boulder originated. Argyll’s shape is like no other in these islands; its peninsulas and mountain ranges marked out territories for the people who found their way here nine thousand years ago. Its caves provided vast shelters as big as any mansion built in the nineteenth century, and archaeological studies of those around Oban have proved vital in the study of Mesolithic incomers to Argyll.

We should perhaps not be overcritical of the Church of Scotland minister who in the 1792 Statistical Account of Kilmartin wrote that there was nothing of interest in the glen in which his church sat. This glen is now on the international archaeological map as a highly important site, but who can blame a man who daily tripped over standing stones, cists, cairns and the rock art of a previous civilisation for not seeing the wood for the trees? Curiosities are what daily life is made of in Argyll. I walk a hundred yards from my back door and see sheep seeking out the warmth of the sun on boulders carved with millennia-old cup-and-ring marks. I cross the road to a churchyard where medieval grave slabs are so abundant that they are almost an embarrassment. There are wild orchids, some extremely rare, in nearby meadows. As a community, we objected to plans for an industrial installation because its proposed site is the home of rare dragonflies and martins. Goldfinches fight with bullfinches at my bird feeder. This is the norm, so where do we look for curiosity value?

There are many who have had curious ideas about changing the face of Argyll; why did someone want a motorway to Glasgow; a 3-mile-long runway across Crinan Moss, an important wetland site that harbours rare insects; and a nuclear power station at Crinan Harbour? There are many who have sought to enhance Argyll with curious architectural, educational and industrial plans; Argyll has often resisted even when the authorities said, ‘yes’. There are many who have used its geography and speleology under curious circumstances to try to achieve their own ends – and many curious circumstances have conspired to change the course of history.

The aggression of the Norsemen, the fractiousness of the medieval clan leaders, the factionalism of the British Civil Wars of the seventeenth century; the fervour of the Pretenders’ uprisings and the subsequent repressions all provided curious situations for curious deeds. In the calm and, for some, prosperity of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, engineers, architects and philanthropic men of genius and vision had their own curious take on how Argyll should be shaped. But Argyll has always had a mind of its own: its mountains, mists and seas – or the supernatural beings who inhabit them – have always had a curious knack of making sure that man does not get too high an opinion of himself or think that he can impose on the spirit and landscape of this ancient land.

There are many obvious curiosities in Argyll, and I hope that people will not be too disappointed to find that these have not been my choices. In looking beyond the obvious, I found Argyll all too generous in offering situations, plans, people and events which, in the words of Alice, got ‘curiouser and curiouser’. I hope that I have asked the same ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions which Martin Martin posed as he made his journey around the Western Isles, and that the answers – given generously by the documents of the past and the people of the present – put Argyll’s curiosities into a context which invites readers to explore further, and not simply to go off looking for fine statues, stately edifices and painted beauties elsewhere.

1STONE

A few miles south of Inveraray the A83 drops down to the shore of Loch Fyne before climbing again through the village of Lochgair. On the shore side, at the tricky corner which takes travellers into the village, a white wall stands either side of an iron gate. On the left of the gate a sign announces that this is the Loch Gair Scottish Hydro Electricity project. Water tumbles down to this station from Loch Glashan, a man-made loch high in the hills west of the road. On the right side of the gate the white wall is curiously punctuated by an asymmetrical arch, and a plaque is also set into the wall’s whitewashed rendering. The bend in the road, marked by a plethora of speed-restriction signs, is severe enough and sudden enough to prevent most modern travellers from stopping to read the plaque and trace the curve of the dark stone arch. And so the arch remains little more than an eyebrow raised at distracted motorists.

The Glashan arch at Loch Gair Power Station.

Yet this ancient stone may hold the secret of one of Mid Argyll’s most curious building projects – a project which tradition says invoked the Temple of Jerusalem and the Devil. Written records introduce a drowned settlement and a garrulous young builder’s mate into the equation.

The stone itself is evidence of a time when the Earth was young and in a state of upheaval. The Mid Argyll and Cowal volume of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland describes the geology of the area as a variety of sandstones, shales and limestone ‘metamorphosed by the mountain-building movements of the Caledonian period’ into quarzites, schists and phyllites, and marbles. In subsequent ages, there were igneous intrusions into this mix. Quartz-porphyry sills of the Lower Red Sandstone period (495–440 million years ago) are present towards the northern end of Loch Fyne at Furnace and Crarae, where they have been extensively quarried over the millennia. The quarry at Furnace, to the north of Lochgair, is now the only known source of porphyry in Scotland and its stone has a variable grey or pink colour because of the iron oxide minerals it contains.

In the nineteenth century Furnace and Crarae were major suppliers of paving stone for Glasgow, but the stone found on Loch Fyne’s shores has had many uses throughout the millennia. Once man had begun to lay his footprints in Mid Argyll, this western shore of Loch Fyne provided stone for many different needs. Some four thousand years before the birth of Christ the early inhabitants who settled around what we know today as Crarae and Lochgair were already farming, and while their agricultural methods may have been simple, their culture was complex. They quarried the local stone to create elaborate burial cairns, and by about 1400 BC, on the shore at the area which became Brainport, a sophisticated observatory was designed using slabs of rock to plot out the position of the sun at the summer solstice. Derek Alexander, archaeologist for the National Trust for Scotland, which now owns Crarae Gardens, has reported the remains of a Neolithic chambered cairn in the lower garden, a Bronze Age cairn nearby, and a medieval burial ground marked by stone monuments.

From the early sixth century AD onwards, Christian missionary monks came over from Ireland and their followers hewed stone from the Loch Fyne quarries to build chapels and monasteries. A chapel site and burial ground lie some 40 metres from the older chambered cairn. This was Killevin chapel, perhaps named for St Éibhinn, a woman associated with the Celtic St Bride. A massive cross shaft from the eighth or ninth century has been found on the site of Killevin in the confines of today’s Crarae Gardens, but the masons who for generations dressed the stone quarried on the shores of Loch Fyne also seem to have been responsible for work far beyond the area of their local quarries. The medieval chapel at Kilmory on the seaboard of the Craignish peninsula to the north-west of Crarae, for example, bears evidence of stone taken from the Fyneside quarries. There is also growing evidence that the quarrymen’s skills were commissioned by the ruling family on Loch Aweside when a church was planned above Fincharn Castle.

Fincharn Castle itself has a role to play in this curious tale, because, like all castles, it was owned by people of wide-reaching power and influence. Loch Awe and Loch Fyne were both formed by glaciers, which left behind them convenient routes of travel. Loch Awe runs from west to east and Loch Fyne from north to south, and from prehistoric times each provided easy passage in rough country. Several passes across the hills between them linked the two important waterways. Where there are such super-highways, people have always used them for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. Some will settle along the edges and some will try to control them. In the case of Loch Awe and Loch Fyne, the traffic comprised cattle and monks, princes and brigands. Monks and hermits from the earliest Christian times came here and Columba himself was active in the area: just a few miles to the west of both lochs is Dunadd fort, where in AD 574 the Celtic saint anointed the first Christian king in the isles of Britain. As the next millennium dawned, the power in Scotland had moved east, but there were still important families controlling Mid Argyll – an area then known as Glassary. In what is considered to be the oldest existing charter of property in Argyll, King Alexander II granted Fyncharne and substantial lands to Gillascop MacGilchrist in 1240.

The Fyncharne property – later known as Fionncharn and then Fincharn – was then held by Master Ralph of Dundee and descendants of John and Gilbert of Glassary. In 1346 it was united with the former property of Ewen, Gillascop MacGilchrist’s brother, making a powerful estate known as the barony or lordship of Glassary. Sometimes referred to as Castle of Glassary, Fyncharne’s lands were regranted to Gilbert of Glassary by a royal charter of 1374. This allowed Gilbert’s daughter to succeed to the property. As she had married Alexander Scrymgeour, the hereditary constable of Dundee and standard-bearer of Scotland, these Argyll lands were now in the hands of one of the most powerful families in Scotland – and would remain so until 1668. During the tenure of this powerful family, buildings were commissioned to reflect their position in the area. Churches were erected at Craignish, Killevin and Kilneuair, which marked the boundaries of the large parish over which the Scrymgeours held sway, and they were all similar in their stylish design.

The word Kilneuair (Cill an Iubhair) means ‘chapel of the yew trees’, an echo of the fusion which saw Christianity sympathetically embrace the native Argyll worship of nature. Although the name was first recorded in 1394, a chapel had probably been established on this site overlooking Loch Awe and the strategic position of Fincharn Castle several centuries before the decision to build a grander church was taken in the late 1200s. The early chapel was probably the Columban site known as Cella Diuni. This new church at the south-west end of Loch Awe was, however, to be the seat of ecclesiastical power in the area of Glassary, just as Fincharn Castle was the seat of secular power.

Kilneuair was in a strategic position, standing at the start of one of the two main hill routes between Loch Awe and Loch Fyne, and by the time of the royal charter Kilneuair was a developing settlement. In the course of the centuries following the 1240 charter, a great cattle market called A’margadh Dhu – the ‘black’ (Dhu) presumably referring to the colour of the cattle rather than the more modern connotation of ‘black market’ – developed there as its hill route became the favoured drove road for traffic coming from Islay and Jura en route to the Lowlands via Auchindrain. Despite this, when the Kilneuair church was proposed, there may have been some surprise and even dissension at its usurpation of the status of the earlier church at Killevin. Perhaps still greater surprise and dissension were expressed when, as the New Statistical Account of 1844 recalls, it was decided that this new church should be built in the manner of the Temple of Jerusalem, ‘without a hammer being laid on a stone at the site of it’.

Solomon, the man who realised the plans for the Temple of Jerusalem, employed 80,000 stonecutters in hills at sufficient distance from Jerusalem that the noise of their hammers wouldn’t be heard at the site of the holy building. The stone was transported by 70,000 carriers from the quarries to the temple, and 3,300 foremen supervised the operation, according to the First Book of Kings, Chapter V. In the following chapter, the Bible tells us that ‘only finished stones cut at the quarry were used, so that no hammer or axe or any iron tool was heard in the House while it was being built’. The stones were ready to be put in place when they arrived on site.

According to the Rev. Colin Smith of Inveraray, who drew up a history of the area for the Rev. Dugald Campbell of Glassary to include in the New Statistical Account of 1844, the stone for the medieval church at Kilneuair was found and dressed ‘at a quarry close to Killevin on Fyneside’. Tradition, Mr Campbell submitted, held that ‘on a particular day duly appointed, people attended in such numbers as to form one close rank from Killevin to Kilneuair, a distance of twelve miles, and that each stone, as raised at the quarry or hewing station, was handed from one man to another along the whole rank until it was fixed by the last of them in its place at the building’.

While kings David and Solomon may have had the power to employ tens of thousands to carry out the holy project of raising the huge temple which was eventually consecrated at Jerusalem in 953 BC, the idea of a human chain being formed across the hills between Loch Fyne and Loch Awe to transport every stone of a new chapel is somewhat more curious. Could the medieval rulers of the lands of Kilmichael have persuaded so many men to hand boulder after boulder across this rough Argyll terrain? Was it a day in July with midges driving them mad? Was it a day in October, with soft rain from the Atlantic seeping through their clothes? Or did the gales sweep across the Leacann Moor while the stones tore at the men’s hands until they bled? The Temple of Jerusalem – admittedly built on a much grander scale – took seven years to complete; tradition claims that the stones were carried from Killevin to Kilneuair in a day.

Large portions of the walls of the church which is said to have resulted from that curious day’s work are now crumbling and overgrown. Yew trees may have given Kilneuair its name, but a mongrel tangle of trees and bushes has pushed up into its nave, while plantations of conifers have swamped the site of the Black Market and parts of the track over the hills along which the men are said to have heaved the cut stones. Kilneuair is now an elegant little ruin hiding in the trees above Loch Awe; the crumbling Fincharn Castle below it a reminder of the power that once emanated from this remote western fringe.

Despite two subsequent periods of construction, there is still evidence of that first bold building. The chancel and the eastern half of the north wall date from the thirteenth century and are built of well-coursed rubble masonry which incorporates rounded boulders – was it these which were carried over the hills? The west half of the north wall is late medieval and there is a medieval epidiorite font which was re-erected in the building in 1916 and maintains a brave battle against the undergrowth. The south wall was rebuilt in the sixteenth century using thin slabs of local schist. In this part there are sandstone dressings and some of moulded epidiorite.

Kilneuair’s medieval epidiorite font.

Also known as the Church of Columba in Glassary, the little ruin is surrounded by the grave slabs of the great and the good of the area – and of those whose names have become legend because of the essential roles they played in the everyday life of Loch Aweside. Three medieval tapered grave slabs decorated with armed figures, dragonheads, plants and a Latin cross ought to be rescued from encroaching nature. A slab bearing the MacPhedran name – the family who ferried people across Loch Awe from the 1300s and paid 10 shillings, barley, oats, cheese and a sheep to the Campbell family for the privilege of holding the charter to ferry – is one of the few still legible in the churchyard. To the west of the church is a pretty little fairy-tale building with narrow pointed windows. This burial enclosure is not, however, the medieval edifice it appears to be: it belongs to the late eighteenth century.

By the sixteenth century, when the south wall was being repaired, power in the area was shifting. The Campbells, who had granted a charter to the MacPhedrans, were steadily taking over the land, and Kilmichael Glassary had replaced Kilneuair as the most important church in the sprawling parish by 1563. Even so, the New Statistical Account says that the church remained a place of veneration long after it ceased to be a place of worship. Local people were convinced that the walls were haunted either by the spirits of saints or of the dead who were ‘unemancipated from purgatory’. Even Auld Nick is said to have lurked around the church. The story related by the Rev. Dugald Campbell in the New Statistical Account says that a local tailor, who was something of a betting man, was so sure that the spirits were nothing more than superstitious nonsense that he offered to sit in the church at midnight and sew a pair of trews. He had no sooner sat cross-legged to start stitching by the light of his torch than a sepulchral voice called out and he saw a huge hand coming out of the graves. The voice spoke in the tailor’s own tongue – the Gaelic – and said, ‘Am faic thu a chrog mhor liath so a thailleir?’ (‘Seest thou this huge hoary hand, tailor?’) The tailor bravely replied that he could see the hand but he would carry on sewing. The voice demanded, ‘Am faic thu an ceann mor liath so a thailleir?’ (‘Seest thou this large grey head, tailor?’) Back came the tailor’s response that he could see the head but would carry on sewing. The Devil – for that is who the New Statistical Account records was addressing the tailor – continued to make different parts of his skeleton appear. When the bony frame was complete, the tailor decided it was time to go. As he fled, according to Dugald Campbell, ‘the bony hand that was stretched out to seize him struck, and left its impression on the wall’. Although the mark is impossible to see in the twenty-first century without imagination and goodwill towards the legend, there are those who until recent times have claimed to trace on the sandstone block on the inside of the eastern jamb of the nave door a five-toed print known as the Devil’s Hand.

Such curious legends surrounding one small, ancient building. How could the stones for an entire church have been transported across 12 such hostile miles? Why should the Devil choose to haunt such a remote building or the spirits of the dead remain in the church’s stones? Loch Awe had its own sources of boulder and there could have been no need for rubble masonry to be passed from hand to hand across a wild moor. And yet, the curious nature of the Fyneside stone, its like found nowhere else in Scotland according to one geologist, has continued to exert its power down the ages. Some six hundred years after the construction of the Kilneuair church, the good citizens of Glasgow were so impressed by the stone to be found on Loch Fyneside that they had it transported by boat to enhance their roads as the city grew in stature and wealth. They did not, however, know the local legends which imbued the stone with supernatural powers. And they certainly could not have forseen that when their burgers took that a day-trip to Crarae quarry on 26 September 1886 to witness the stones’ excavation, it would end in tragedy.

The wooden-scaffolded exterior wall of Kilneuair Chapel, a ruin which holds many legends.

This strange twist in the curious tale of the Loch Fyne stones is almost as bizarre as that of the tailor, the trews and Auld Nick, but this time there were witnesses and the whole sorry business was recorded not only in the Scottish newspapers but throughout the British press. At that time, Crarae Quarry – surely not the same one from which the Kilneuair stones were said to have come – was leased by Messrs William Sim and Faill, paving stone contractors. The paving stones they produced were being acquired by the Police and Statute Labour Committee of Glasgow Town Council, and to celebrate fifty years of the committee’s existence, an outing to the quarry was planned. Members of the committee, councillors and other dignitaries sailed on the steamer Lord of the Isles. The steamer did a daily trip from Greenock to Inveraray and on this occasion was commandeered by the council so that they could view what was termed a ‘monster blast’ at the Crarae quarry.

The headline in the Oban Times of Saturday 2 October, reads:

FRIGHTFUL DISASTER AT LOCHFYNE

Beneath it, readers were told that on the previous Saturday seven people were ‘thrown into eternity’ and ‘60 temporarily overcome by the issue of sulphurous gas from the chinks and boulders of 80,000 tons of granite which had been exploded a short time before by nearly seven tons of gunpowder’.

This ‘monster blast’ was not laid on especially for the entertainment of Glasgow Town Council. For a number of years the proprietors had successfully organised summer explosions at Crarae and at Furnace, and they had been found to be a good way of getting the rock for the pavements of Glasgow and other cities. These blasts were obviously something of a spectacle and were considered to be such a good day out that they filled the Lord of the Isles every time a blast was advertised. In fact, there had been such a blast as recently as 7 July. On this particular sunny Saturday, one of the last holidays of the season according to the Oban Times, nearly two hundred people joined the steamer at Princes Pier in Greenock and many more went on board at the stops along the way. The crowds were entertained by the steamer’s orchestra until, at Crarae, a bell was rung and the steamer stopped at the jetty there. The newspaper reported that ‘All was silent, all were, with bated breath, eagerly watching the painted disc or large bull’s eye upon the quarry face, for that point of the rock was the place to be exploded. Three whistles from the steamer’s horn was the signal for the men to fire the mine.’

Crarae quarry, where a monster blast brought disastrous results.

The result was spectacular. The noise of the explosion echoed around the hills, the dust rose and rocks began to tumble into the bowl of the quarry. At this point, around a hundred passengers disembarked and the steamer then left to take the rest of the passengers on to Inveraray. Of the party which rushed forward to see the rock fall, many were members of Glasgow Town Council, but there were also reporters from newspapers all around the British Isles and a number of women and children. The quarryman shouted ‘Hello there! Don’t go near the quarry – sulphurous gas!’, but the Oban Times reported that no one heeded the warning. Was it given in Gaelic, the language of Mid Argyll of the day? Or was it given in a strange English accent? Many quarry workers were itinerant and their dialects could have been difficult to understand. Or was it simply that this was too good a show to miss and the crowd therefore suffered from selective deafness? Whatever made them ignore the warning, soon people were suffering from much worse. Cries of ‘Help! Help! I’m choking’ came from the quarry. Over forty people collapsed, first onto their hands and knees and then rolling over ‘like dead persons onto rough broken crags’. Of course, the people left outside the quarry then rushed in to help and they, too, were overcome.

There was sulphurous hydrogen oozing out in volumes, according to the Oban Times reporter. For most, the effects did not last long, and forty people regained consciousness and were dragged to the beach. For seven people the fumes were too powerful and they died either at the quarry or later in hospital.

Those who lost their lives were Councillor Thomas Duncan, who had a letterpress business in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow; Mr Matthew Waddell, the proprietor of one of Glasgow’s largest restaurants, at 60 Union Street; Mr James Shaw, son of Bailie Shaw, a Glasgow accountant; Mr Peter Stevenson, of Forest Road, Glasgow, who was an optician in Edinburgh; Mr Steel, a well-known electro-plater from Belfast; Mr John Small, an elderly blacksmith from Ayrshire; and Bailie John Young of St Vincent Crescent, Glasgow, who had been a member of the council for twenty years and had been invited to witness the blast with the Statute Labour Committee. It was not simply a day out for Bailie Young: he had been charged as a representative of his fellow citizens with ‘examining the granite stones which were to be placed on the Glasgow streets’. Although he survived the journey back to Greenock, he died the following morning in Greenock Infirmary.

The journalists who joined the Lord of the Isles found themselves part of the main story of the day. Some, like Mr Harvey of The Scotsman and Mr Temple, chief reporter of the Glasgow Mail, were overcome by the fumes. Mr Temple fell into a pool of stagnant water and was only saved ‘with difficulty’ by Councillor Simons and his business partner Mr Arch. Near the spot where Mr Temple fell was the poignant sight of a dead dog, and there were bloodstains from hands and heads on the rocks all around. When the Lord of the Isles hoved into view from Inveraray, the remaining passengers were met by the shocking sight of bodies and bloodied men, women and children, some staggering drunkenly as they came to from the effects of the gases.

Most of the councillors had been overcome by the fumes, hats had been lost in the quarry and all were filthy. Two doctors – Wilson and Nelson – had been among the passengers who were overcome, but they now helped to take the dead and injured on board the steamer. Dr Campbell, the Inveraray doctor who had been on his rounds at Crarae, also went on board to help. Telegrams were handed in at Tighnabruaich and Rothesay to ask for two ambulance wagons to meet the boat and for funeral undertakers Messrs Wylie and Lochhead to arrange to take the bodies from Greenock to Glasgow.

The news, therefore, went ahead of the arrival of the Lord of the Isles and her sorry cargo. A huge crowd was waiting at Princes Pier and there was a struggle to get Bailie Young, Councillor J. H. Martin, Mr Harvey, and a reporter, Mr David Young, to the Greenock hospital. The story was in the evening papers before the survivors’ train reached St Enoch’s railway station and huge crowds met them when they reached Glasgow. The Rev. Mr Stewart, who was Matthew Waddell’s minister, had been asked to break the news to Mrs Waddell and the family, but Bailie Campbell had already done so. Mr Waddell had also been a personal friend of Mr Steel, so both families experienced a double loss.

The focus of concern lay in the city, yet a number of people from Crarae had also been overcome by the fumes. It did not seem to occur to anyone to take them on board the steamer to be treated at Greenock Infirmary, but fortunately they recovered. A report that three shepherds up in the hills behind Crarae had also been affected by the blast was said by the Oban Times to be ‘incorrect’.

This ‘monster blast’ was the last at the Crarae quarry; work was not resumed. On Tuesday, 28 September, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Explosives, Colonel A. Ford, and Argyllshire’s chief constable began an investigation into the disaster and a report was delivered to the Secretary of State for the Home Department the following year. The content of that report did not, of course, suggest that there were malevolent spirits within the boulders which crashed to the quarry floor that September weekend in 1886: there was a scientific reason for the deaths of seven people and the poisoning of so many more. But perhaps another explanation might have been given by the people of Kilneuair, who believed the boulders in the walls of their church – transported as they had been across the moors from Crarae – were haunted by souls unreleased from Purgatory.