Publication Account

Date 17 March 2020

Event ID 1094604

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1094604

The application of a large English fortune on a huge Scottish Estate.

In 1785 George Granville Leveson-Gower, with the courtesy title of Viscount Trentham, had married Elizabeth Sutherland, Countess of Sutherland in her own right. In 1803, on the detah of his father, he became the 2nd Marquis of Stafford. and inherited the Levenson fortune. Earlier in the saqme year he had inherited from his maternal uncle, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, the Bridgewater fortune. The marquis was created a Duke in 1833 and took the title of the Duke of Sutherland. It is he who is commemorated in the enormous statue on Ben Bhraggie above Golspie.

The acquisition of these fortunes appears to have initiated the construction of a lot of infrastructure on his wife's estates in Sutherland:

1805 The Sutherland Road Act

1808 Bridge over the Big Burn at Golspie

1810-14 Faskally coal mine, Brora

1810 Culmailly Canal - probbaly Marquis's influence rather than money

1810-11 Helmsdale Bridge

1812 Bonar Bridge

1813-16 Fleet Mound

Undated Other wayside hospices for travellers of which the Trentham Hotel, in the parish of Dornoch, is the most prominent.

In 1812 and 1816 the construction of the Bonar bridge and the Fleet Mound with the building of the Lovat bridge, Beauly (1811-14), Conon Bridgema d at Alness and Easter Fearn in 1817 provided a land route around the inlets of about 72 miles from Inverness to Golspie (day journey by horse) though the ferries remained in use by 'motor traffic' until the building of three bridges in the 20th century.

R Sutherland (ICEPHEW newsletter 162, undated)