Man’s achievements of long ago
FOR ANYONE interested in man’s achievements, there can be no finer sight than some of the great engineering feats undertaken by our Victorian and Edwardian forebears.
They may not have been on the same scale as the Cruachan Power Station or the great aluminium works in Lochaber, but one has to marvel and admire what was accomplished with little more than determination, ingenuity and sheer brute force.
In 1867, a three and a half ton cast-iron shaft arrived at the head of Loch Sunart by sailing vessel from Greenock destined for the 38-foot water wheel of an ore crusher at the famous Strontian lead mines. Lifting such a heavy, awkward, object out of the ship’s hold without being able to come alongside a pier was no mean feat. In fact many cynical bystanders said it could not be done and that it would have to go back from whence it came. Not to be beaten, the mine manager, aptly called Mr Bright, had the ship beached at Ardnastang and a section cut out of one of her sides through which the shaft was levered onto the shore.
This, however, was child’s play to what was to follow, as it had to be taken more than a steep 1,200-foot high shoulder of Ben Resipol and down the other side to the Corrantee mine, a distance of over three miles. A track had recently been built to Corrantee but it was too steep and narrow for a horse. There was only one solution and that was to pull it to its destination by hand. Mr Bright had the shaft clad in wood and fitted with trams so that it looked like a gigantic roller measuring eight feet wide and six feet in diameter. About 150 local men were summoned, the majority to pull and the remainder to steer and control their precious load down the other side; strong ropes were attached and off they set accompanied by a piper.
Mr Bright, like all skilful generals, knowing that an army fights best on its stomach, had carts with barrels of beer, whisky and food following along behind which, according to an eye witness, ‘ was given out when they were disposed to flag in their endeavours’. Ten hours later, after a great deal of effort, the shaft was delivered. A local correspondent recorded, ‘it was a beautiful day, and that it was a very curious sight to see the long string of men winding slowly up the brae, and occasionally stopping, and spreading themselves out on either side of the road, as they rested from their exertions’. The shaft has gone, cut up and removed for scrap, but much of the wheel pit is still to be seen - a monument to a hard day in the life of a Highland village.
When George Herbert Strutt, a cotton magnate from Makeney in Derbyshire, bought the 24,000-acre Kingairloch Estate in 1902, he embarked on a series of improvements of a scale not seen before or since. He enlarged the old mansion-house, built miles of pony paths, erected tastefully designed cottages, a dairy, and a walled garden. He planned to put a road along the coast to Glensanda but the estimate was too high; instead he built an enormous concrete dam in Glengalmadale from which water could be released in dry weather into the Galma River to encourage salmon and sea trout to run up from Loch Linnhe through an elaborate fish-pass.
The dam, measuring 400 feet long and 18 feet high, forming a loch of about 14 acres, was a major accomplishment. Sixty men, mostly from Strontian, were employed in its construction which was completed in July 1908 claiming the life of one of them. The men were billeted in a corrugated-iron camp from which they walked home over the hills every weekend - a distance of eight miles. Building the dam and all the associated works meant putting up hundreds of feet of shuttering, importing thousands of tons of concrete which had to be mixed by hand, excavating and moving vast quantities of sand, peat and gravel along a light railway line in horse drawn trolleys.
In the end the project was not a success. The consultants miscalculated the volume of water the surrounding hills would produce in relation to the size of the overflow. The outcome was that much of the earthworks were washed away in the first spate. Writing to a neighbouring landowner who was considering building her own dam, Mr Strutt replied, ‘In October one day my son caught seven sea trout and rose others, so they had evidently overcome their fear of the fish-pass and it gives some hope for the future, but it will take a good many sea trout to justify the expenditure of some £ 5,500’. (£ 3 million today in income value). Looking at the superb engineering drawings, correspondence and photographs which still exist, it is evident that the consultants did their best with the equipment available to them at the time but it was not enough.
Iain Thornber iain.thornber@btinternet.com