The invisible lives behind a ‘Graveyard of the Unknown’
The lost people buried high on a Highland hillside are remembered in a new book of Scotland’s wild histories, says Alison Campsie
The concrete headstones to these forgotten souls sit high on a grassy knoll overlooking the reservoir that they died building. There are 22 stones but most are simply marked “unknown”.
Darkey Cunningham, John Mcfadden and John Mckenzie are among the small number who have their life and death marked by name at Blackwater Dam Navvie’s Graveyard near Kinlochleven.
Perhaps surprisingly too, one woman – Mrs Riley, who died in 1909 – is also remembered at the cemetery which was built for those who didn’t survive the massive project to build a hydroelectric scheme for the aluminium smelting industry.
For author Patrick Baker, this Graveyard of the Unknown, as it known locally, perfectly reflects the anonymity of the itinerant workforce that descended here in the early 20th century, those who slipped invisibly around the country in a bid to forge a living.
Baker visited the dam and cemetery for his latest book The Unremembered Places, Exploring Scotland’s Wild Stories, and reached the graveyard on the fourth attempt of trying. He said: “There is this huge feature in the landscape that has a much bigger back story.
“It is really an untold story of the thousands of people who worked there, the Scottish and Irish navvies who worked in really brutal conditions. It was a world of anonymity and it is the counterpoint to this big industrial development in the landscape. I thought it was important to tell that story, the human aspect.”
Up to 3,000 people are known to have been employed for the job by the British Aluminium Company, who between 1905 and 1909 built the Blackwater Reservoir to create the massive load of electricity required to smelt the metal.
The workers encampment below the dam was documented as a lawless, dangerous place, with some men becoming trapped in the mountains by snow as they tried to reach the Kingshouse Inn – one skeleton found decades later had a bottle still in its hand.
Baker was partly inspired to visit the Blackwater Dam by the novel Children of the Dead End, by Patrick Mcgill, an Irishman who worked at the construction site when just a teenager.
He wrote of the squalor of the encampment, the “muddle of shacks that looked like they had dropped out of the sky”.
It was also where “all manner of quarrels were settled with fists” and where drinking and gambling were only distractions from the savagery of building a reservoir using only hand tools.
Of the graveyard, Mcgill wrote: “A few went there from the last shift with the red muck still on their trousers and their long, unshaven beards still on their faces.”
After reaching the graveyard, Baker wrote of his experience in The Unremembered Places.
Baker added: “The graveyard sits on a prominent knoll facing the dam where the people who are buried there worked so you have this synchronisation between two points in the landscape. Both had become irrevocably linked, as if to say, ‘this is why you came here, and this is why you remain’.”
While the majority of stones are marked “Unknown”, someone cared enough to carve them carefully, Baker added: “When you see the incredible time that has been taken to make the inscription, it really brings back this human spirit to this almost dystopian, lawless and incredibly tough place to live.
“I struggled to find any information on these people and I think that makes sense when you think about this huge itinerant workforce. People were overlooked. They didn’t have any bearing or being. They were unaccounted for in life and unacknowledged in history. I wanted to tell that story.”
The Unremembered Places, Exploring Scotland’s Wild Histories, by Patrick Baker is published by Birlinn and is available now, £14.99.