Good news for Morvern has come in the news Continue reading
Tag Archives: MOrvern
Oban Lifeboat to aid of injured walker
Not the most obvious casualty for a lifeboat to launch to assist – Continue reading
Morvern gets breakaway postcode from Oban
Should Argyll be the next to get a breakaway – from Paisley? Continue reading
Death at Glensanda Quarry
In what is thought to have been an industrial accident, Continue reading
Homecoming Scotland 2009 gets a return of an unexpected kind – the stolen Glenfinnan Stone
The historic Glenfinnan Stone is a foot across and has a hole cut into it allegedly to support the standard of Bonnie Prince Charlie when he raised it at Glenfinnan on Monday 19 August 1745, launching the second Jacobite rebellion.
In 1989 the stone vanished from where it had always lain, on a mound near the monument at Glenfinnan at the head of Loch Shiel.
The stone and its disappearance was mentioned to presenter Ben Fogle in a episode of the BBC’s Countryfile programe by Iain Thornber, a local historian from Lochaline in Morvern, across from Argyll’s Isle of Mull and in the same land mass as Glenfinnan.
Two weeks after the transmission of the programme the BBC received a letter which they passed on to Iain Thorber. It was from a woman who had seen the show while on holiday in Skye but was herself from Hartlepool. She had the stone in her rockery there but had not known what it was or where it had come from.
It has emerged that the stone was taken from Glenfinnan and domesticated in a rockery somewhere in Scotland, from where it was passed on to the Hartlepool lady for her own rockery. After making contact with Iain Thornber when she found out about the stone on Countryfile, she has voluntarily returned it.
The West Highland Museum in Fort William, custodian of several Jacobite relics, will house the Glenfinnan Stone until, according to Iain Thornber, arrangements for its secure display in its own place can be made with the Roman Catholic Church which owns the Glenfinnan site.
The photograph of Genfinnan above is by Flaxton and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
If your ancestry is Scots, VisitScotland and the Forestry Commission want old family photographs
When you think about ‘the family tree’ there’s is after all a logic in Forestry Commission Scotland teaming up with VisitScotland in this initiative. During Homecoming Scotland 2009 the agencies want to put together a gallery of photographs from people world-wide with Scottish ancestry.
Today’s Scots abroad may be descendants of those displaced in the Scottish diaspora or they may be more recent economic migrants – but their photographs will be the heart of the exhibition which will be displayed on the edge of Argyll. It will show at the David Marshall Lodge at Aberfoyle in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. This includes a significant part of Argyll’s territory and the old Argyll Forest.
Forests are also central to the project. Forestry Commisskon Scotland will focus on photographs of those who worked in or lived in Scotland’s forests. And this is bound to include some startling curiosities. Remember that the people living on the treeless rocky islands of St Kilda out into the Atlantic, evacuated at thier own request in 1930, were relocated largely to work in the forests at Loch Aline in Morvern, then part of Argyll.
And since we’re into curiosities, there’s another Argyll link to St Kilda. In 1931 the St Kilda archipelago was sold to the Marquess of Bute, a keen ornithologist. He bequeathed the islands to The National Trust for Scotland in 1957.
Anyway, wherever you are in the world, if you have a family connection to Scotand, dig out your old photographs, scan them and email them to this project. The site and the project go live on 26th January 2009.
Ardtornish planter’s house restored
A former planter’s house made of corrugated iron and derelict for twenty-five years has been resotred for Ardtornish Estates by joiner and cabinet-maker, Chris Lorimer. The single-storey building is now back in use as a bunkhouse for walkers exploring the vast and remote landmass of Morvern. Corrugated iron buildings, a feature of the Highlands, are now recognised as a significant part of the area’s architectural history.
Waste time but have fun – ship-tracking website
If you need a distraction – and, be warned, this can become addictive – try a fantastic ship-tracking website. (You’ll find the link under the ‘Fun’ section in our Links directory, above right.) There’s a drop down map of UK sea areas at the right hand side. Choose your poison. Ship types are colour coded, their movements show as ‘tails’ and you choose how often you want the area you’re looking at to refresh – two minutes is the quickest. All the regular ferries can be seen, tracking their way around the Clyde waterway and out to the islands. The offshore oil industry makes Aberdeen a busy place on the east coast.
We’ve wasted time in the last week watching a destroyer – the Daring – obviously on exercise and dashing about like a mad thing, twisting and turning at speed, around Kilbrannan Sound, the Kyles of Bute and down the east side of Arran (where she is just now. Ahem!).
We’ve trailed the Harvest Caroline, the first boat to come into Furnace pier (MId Argyl) for a very long time. We saw her the night she left, snaking round the corner of Mull from the Sound of Lorn into the Sound of Mull on her way back north to Loch Hourn. And we’ve found her up around the Isles of Lewis and Harris since.
We watched the World Explorer Yacht, Kiring, a vsitor to Inveraray earlier in the season, tour the Clyde Coasts and nip over to Bangor in Northern Ireland.
The site picks up SAR aircraft too, and we’ve seen one streak over the Holy Loch on its way over Mull, probably going out Barra-way.
Then there are the huge ‘self-discharging cargo’ boats (yes – moving the cursor over a boat shape brings up its details) making their way between Glensanda Quarry in Morvern on Loch :Linnhe and the North Channel.
Remember the Claymore? The once-upon-a-time CalMac ferry plying Argyll waters? The ferry that ran the late and lamented Campbeltown to Ballycastle route for the three-years of its existence? The one that was sold for for the route – for £1 – by the then enterprise authority to the Argyll and Antrim Steam Packet Company, set up to operate the service? The one that was sold on by that company reputedly for £1 million when, like Vestas in Campbeltown today, they came to the end of the period of time they’d contracted to serve? Yes, that’s her. We knew she been sold on to a company operating her in the pacific but she came up out of the blue on this site. She’s running the ferry route between Gills Bay near Thurso out to St Margaret Hope in the Orkney islands.
Ayway – you get the picture. Hard to know when to stop.
The service is run by amateurs, same style as ham radio buffs. They each track a sea area around the UK and their data is wired in directly to the site. This voluntary setup means that some sea areas aren’t covered. Some buffs switch off the equipment when they go to bed. Some are late up in the morning. In each of these cases, ships suddenly stop dead in the water, frozen at their last known point of passage.
If you’re reading this, try it, like it, live in an area not currently covered and feel like giving tracking a whirl, contact the site managers and do us all a favour.