Lochfyne Powder Works
Date 1996
Event ID 1115950
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1115950
Lochfyne Powder Works
NN00SW 14
Lochfyne Powder Works is situated 200m to the NW of the village of Furnace on the W side of the road from Inveraray to Lochgilphead. The mills were all water-powered, drawing water at a weir on the Leacann Water 1100m to the N. The buildings were built mostly of random rubble, with local pink granite quoins and margins, but several of the earlier (pre-1970) structures are built entirely from pink granite, Some of the later buildings, which appeared between 1870 and 1883, were probably improvements following the takeover by John Hall and Son. All are roofless, and are in varying states of ruin.
The site of the works is roughly triangular, extending 400m from N to S and from W to E to a maximum of 200m. Although previously wooded for safety reasons (with the exception of an open, flat central area), the trees have since been cleared, leaving only a small portion of the woodland in the N quarter of the site. In this area, a dam collected water from a lade in a small pond, dispatching it both SW into the lade feeding mills in the S portion of the works and the SE into a second lade leading to a range of six incorporating mills 30m away, and onto to more mills on the E side of the works.
The range of six incorporating mills (NR0226 0054) is the finest and most complete structure on the site. Built after 1870, it comprises a row of six open-fronted, rubble-built mill chambers, each driven by under floor shafting in a vaulted chamber (2.0m in width and 2.6m in depth) running under the entire length of the range. The floors of the two mills at the N end of the range remain intact, revealing an aperture 1.0m passing through the vault, which is lined with 26 courses of red plastic clay hand-moulded bricks. Each of the square apertures is surrounded by a circular kerb of 1.25m in radius, resting on top of the extrados of the vault. No evidence of drive shaft fixtures remains in the vaulted channel, which also functioned as a tail-race with an arched entrance at the N end. There is also nothing remaining of the power source, which may have been either a waterwheel of (more probably) a turbine situated at the N end of the range.
The six mills combine to form a windowless rectangular gabled block 37.5m in length and 6.7m in width, with walls measuring almost 1.0m in thickness but open on the W side.
Each mill chamber is about 5.2m in width, 5.7m in depth and 3.5m in height (to the wall head), and had plastered walls with scarcements indicating the possible position of an upper floor of gallery above the pan mills. It is also probable that these new incorporating mills replaced earlier mills elsewhere in the works.
Visited by RCAHMS (MKO) 1996.
