Polphail: Argyll’s Most Recent Lost Village

The idea of lost villages in Argyll conjures visions of the clearances, of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, of windswept tumbledown steadings, of the displaced and dispossessed. Philippa Elliott’s online photo exhibit of Polphail published on this site today shows a deserted, deteriorating village, but one which was never even inhabited and was built in the 20th century.

Commissioned to house the workforce needed to construct oil platforms on Loch Fyne at Portavadie in the 1970s, Energy Minister Tony Benn‘s vision of revitalising the sleepy west coast economy with oil money didn’t materialise and the site never went into production. The village, nearly complete, was left, and today is home to sheep, cows, midges and a sense of desolation which must echo that left in settlements all over Scotland after the original clearances.

Philippa says, “I found myself returning to the site again and again, fascinated by this lost village with its seventies urban architecture set in all the wild beauty of the West Coast.”

Polphail is the first in a series of online exhibits which ForArgyll will host in the Music & Arts section of the site.

Photographer’s website: Philippa Elliott Photography

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