Oban Winter Festival raises awareness of Dunollie as the taproot of the town

The programme created by the small and energetic band of volunteers for the first Oban Winter Festival – their seasonal gift to the town – has a secret weapon.

Upfront, it’s providing a busy and varied ten day programme of events for everyone, young and still young, residents and visitors and folk with all possible interests.

But behind the programme is another great strength – many of its events provide reasons for each of us to go and see places we’ve always meant to get around to  – but, when you live nearby, there’s always tomorrow.

Yesterday (Sunday 20th November 2011) we responded to two such prompts in the programme and hit  the historical Clan MacDougall complex at Dunollie and Atlantis Leisure Centre.

And the result?

There were many – learning not only about a particular past but coming to understand its living impact and its potential to be a key driver in the development of the town; and seeing a wonderfully numerous collection of fit folk from Oban diving on Atlantis and drawn to the synthetic ice rink in the marquee outside, there for the festival.

Dunollie

The notion to develop the complex that includes the ruined Dunollie Castle and the 1745 Dunollie House as a heritage centre is an inspired one.

Dunollie can be said to have underpinned the development of Oban. Had the 23rd MacDougall chief, Alexander, not finally chosen to stay out of the 1745 Jacobite rising, the emergent town of Oban would have felt the punitive force of the government. As it was, not only did this decision see the just-restored MacDougall estates remain with the clan chief but Oban got through the rising largely unimpeded.

This hard wired connection between the MacDougall clan and Oban means that Dunollie roots the town. It’s the touchstone to its position today. It will also be the point of entry to insights into Scottish folk and social history through the astonishing collection of Hope Macdougall, daughter, sister and aunt of Macdougall clan chiefs. The aim of the MacDougall Trust, formed when Hope MacDougall died in December 1998, is to see the collection on public display in its own museum – at Dunollie.

Dunollie guarded the area from its command post on the high rock bluff at the northern entrance to the bay and opposite the Isle of Kerrera (two above and below – directly above is Maiden Island). Alexander MacDougall spent three of his earliest years on Kerrera, in what would be hardship in anybody’s terms.

There were twenty two clan chiefs before Alexander and there have been eight since.

He was two years old when his family was dispossessed of its castle and lands – following his father, Iain Ciar’s, support for the first Jacobite rising, the 1715. His mother Mary, a Macdonald from Sleat on the Isle of Skye, brought up the large (15 children) family on Kerrera, in the twelve years of her husband’s exile. During this time he was mainly in France and Ireland, although he hid out in a cave on Kerrera for a while.

When Alexander was five, he was sent to Dumbarton to be brought up by a MacDougall clansman and when he was eighteen he went to Edinburgh to study law – but his earliest memories were of his family living in poverty, shorn of a father and having lost Dunollie because of his father’s Jacobite commitment. And Dunollie was garrisoned by government troops in 1719, the year after he went to Dumbarton.

Iain Ciar was pardoned in 1727 and came home determined to do all he could to get the family’s lands restored. He died in 1737 without this aim having been achieved, the same year Alexander, who became the 23rd chief, married Mary Campbell of Barcaldine.

Dunollie was restored to the MacDougalls in 1745, ironically a couple of weeks before the Young Pretender, Charles Stuart, raised his standard at Glenfinnan to summon the clans to rise again in the Jacobite cause. He gained immediate support from the respected and influential Cameron of Locheil and this persuaded some less certain clans also to answer the call.

Alexander MacDougall’s mother-in-law was a Cameron of Locheil and when you add that to the unwavering Jacobite commitment of both of his parents, it’s not hard to grasp what it might take to do anything other than join the rising.

But with the first hand and formative experience of the pain of dispossession, it is understandable that when Alexander had his decision to make in 1745, it was by no means a foregone conclusion.

His university education in Edinburgh – in the intellectual  excitement of The Enlightenment, had also fuelled his thinking with new ideas and perspectives. That too stood between him and an automatic decision to follow his father into the Jacobite campaign.

Conscious of place and people dependent upon him – and aware of what had happened to his family and himself when they were dependent on his father who lost everything for being on the losing side, Alexander came to his conclusion by a route that could not demonstrate more clearly the tensions within him.

He wrote his will three days after the raising of the Jacobite standard, as men do who prepare to go to war. Then he decided to stay at home.

His earlier intention became known, however, and although he did not join the rising, his movements were closely monitored by the suspicious government militia – which by then had moved from the rather rough Dunollie to Dunstaffnage Castle a little further north at the southern entrance to Loch Etive.

To exculpate himself, Alexander was required to name other Jacobite sympathisers, which he did. This saved the MacDougall estates from a second sequestration but left the clan’s 23rd Chief something of an outcast amongst his peers.

He set about building a home for his family, since the castle, whose roof had been removed in 1744, was uninhabitable.

He used stone from other buildings in the castle complex and added a two-storey house to the single storey remnant of what had been outbuildings to the home farm – the Laigh Biggin or low house.

This was the ’1745 house’, owing its existence to Alexander MacDuogall’s decision in 1745. It is the servants quarters here, at the rear of the building, that have first been readied for public use and were the first part of the house to be opened – on Thursday 18th November 2011, as part of this inaugural Oban Winter Festival.

At the moment, there is a stud wall separating the servants’ area from the main part of the house where there is still a lot of work to be done, with determined fundraising a running necessity.

When the next phase of work is completed, the stud wall will be breached and the entrance through a hidden door to the north wing will be revealed, giving five exhibition rooms to display the Hope MacDougall collection. An instinctive as well as a thinking collector, Hope MacDougall’s  lifework took her all over Scotland and, for this reason, when the ordered collection can be displayed, it will bring visitors from far beyond Oban.

For now, there is the kitchen – used for afternoon cream teas on days during the festival and for intimate events afterwards; an exhibition room which is the start of the gathering of the story of Dunollie and which has some objects on display; a small reading room on the first floor; and a small shop in the Laigh Biggin, showing small items made up in the recently discovered historic MacDougall tartan – bright and elegant.

In the ceiling of the passage from the back door to the kitchen are a peppering of awesome black hooks. These held bunches of vegetables. In the ceiling of the former pantry – now a very couth set of Ladies lavatories – are more of these hooks, only here they held the meats.

In the passage between kitchen and pantry there is a set of five bells, a Victorian addition with each linked from one of the five main reception rooms in the house, summoning the attentions of the servants.

Up the back stair to the first floor, the narrow passage to the staff bedrooms now holds large prints of photographs of the house and its lands when they were in family use.

The policies around the house include stone outbuildings on the loch side, gardens around the house with some spectacular old trees and delightful rolling grazing lands to the east, teasing the eye into small hills of deciduous woodland and plunging to the lochside across a narrow driveway that parallels the narrow modern road along the coast from Oban to the beach at Ganavan.

The main driveway from the house – and there is a large parking area beside it -  bisects a perfect curving shoreline. Breathtaking.

Back in 1593, Henry of Navarre, the legal heir to the kingdom of France – but a Huguenot, renounced his Protestantism saying, famously: ‘Paris is well worth a mass’ – and became the Catholic Henry IV of France.

Alexander MacDougall will have seen Dunollie as worth the renunciation of his family’s support for the Jacobite cause in what were reverberations of the religious wars that marked Europe for centuries and are not yet totally stilled.

Looking around Dunollie, it’s not hard to see why Alexander chose as he did.

He seems to have been a reasoned and rooted person, making a happy family life; traditionally sending his eldest son, Patrick, to be raised by clansfolk, the MacCulloch’s in Morvern; instituting improving farming practices; and, when he died in 1798, leaving behind him a 24th chief who announced: ‘Two principles I would lay down – moderate rents and keeping the land in good heart’.

Dunollie’s curator, Catherine Gillies – wearing a scarf in the historic MacDougall tartan – was leading guided walks around the policies yesterday afternoon, with a large number of people striding up to the house, anxious not to miss the opportunity.

Apart from the richness of experience Dunollie has to offer its visitors, its position on the northern flank of the town pulls people to the extremities, keeping the arteries of familiarity alive, as do the Cardingmill Bay visiting yachts facility and Stramash adventure at Dungallan on the opposite wing, with the vigorous Puffin Dive at the southern outpost of Gallanach.

Festival carriage drives at Dunollie

Yesterday, also as part of the Winter Festival, the Argyll Riding for the Disabled Association (RDA) was running carriage rides along the old estate driveway mentioned above.

The horse on carriage duty yesterday was wonderful – sure, steady, unflappable, obedient and quite beautiful, his velvetiness inviting touch. We saw superb tight turns in front of the tent, with the carriage swung round for the next trip down the drive.

The tent was a shelter against rain (it didn’t) and carried information on some inspiring people who have found that learning to drive a horse and carriage and being with horses has given them pleasure, skills and a very different quality of life.

An autistic girl who was lonely and isolated at school and who consequently lacked confidence and the vital self esteem that keeps people afloat, loves being with the horses and has markedly developed from the new skills and connections she has made and from the unspoken relationship of mutual trust with the horses.

There’s a sufferer from Multiple Sclerosis, already involved with the RDA, running gymkhanas and co-managing the stables, found it possible to continue her involvement and maintain the lifesryle that so supports her.

There’s a doughty Munro-bagger who contracted a brain infection in South Africa and there;s a former members of the WRENs who damaged her spine in a riding accident bringing her the enduring restrictions of rheumatoid arthritis.

And there was a little boy who has died, who loved the wind in his face in the back of the carriage, always wanted to go faster and who is pictured laughing his head off with delight during a drive.

All of these and many other people have benefited from this inspired charity, active in every possible way and ensuring that the lives of some of the most vulnerable retain genuine genuine wealth of experience. and personal development.

The image yesterday of the carriage driving at a gentle and stately pace back and forwards on the old drive beneath the tress above the lochside also conjured some of Dunollie’s own past times – a very well integrated as well as a thrilling addition to the festival programme.

Skating at Atlantis

Atlantis Leisure Centre is a magnificent resource for Oban. It’s an attractive building in the heart of the town, very efficiently run, with a strong business ethos and offering an extensive range of active opportunities for all ages and interests.

its collaboration with the Oban Winter Festival has seen its importation of  a temporary synthetic ice rink in a marquee -  on the tennis courtsright beside the centre. This is attracting a lot of excitement and energetic usage across the generations.Session last 25 minutes and skates are included in the ticket price.

This offers access to developing a new physical skill and it’s  a great fun communal adventure. It’s not going to be there for long, so join the throng and pick each other up.

And at the end of the day…

We’ve always said that Oban is the loveliest town on Scotland’s west coast.

After today, show us a town in the UK that can hope to get anywhere near it. The views from Dunollie show the town and its location in extensive fashion. You can only luxuriate in them and offer silent thanks for your luck in living in or within reach of this fabulous place.

This landscape also offers new little insights. Below the castle and between the shore and the landmark of Maiden Island, is a little shingle ‘slipway’ between rock furrows – that must have been in use for boat access when the castle, and maybe the 1745 house, were in MacDougall use.

And across the entrance to the bay, the northern crescent of Kerrera, MacDougall territory,  offers a mysterious welcome in the fading afternoon light. Did the young Alexander ever come there to look across the water at the dark castle opposite on its rocky height that his family had just lost?

• Donate to Dunollie – and give Oban a unique heritage facility.
• Donate to Argyll RDA – and give chances to people who can’t even dream of what’s possible.
• Use Atlantis Leisure Centre – like one’s own body, it’s a use it or lose it situation.
• Enjoy the inaugural 2011 Oban Winter Festival programme running to the 27th November and with a final day to relish.