Note
Date 29 June 2022
Event ID 1157265
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Note
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1157265
NH01NE 1 NH 05338 18345
This 19th century shepherd’s cottage, now a bothy, is situated on the N side of Fionngleann, a high and remote pass that connects Glen Licht to the W and Glen Affric to the E along a former drovers route (Haldane 1952, 79). The cottage, at least four unroofed buildings, an area of improved pasture (centred NH 0539 1830) and an area of peat cutting (centred NH 0542 1818) are visible on vertical aerial photographs. A 1995 survey by Wordsworth Archaeological Services (Highland HER No. SHG21209) identified up to seven buildings of 19th and 20th century date at Camban, but did not find evidence for the cruck-framed building previously listed (Stell 1981, 84).
Six roofed buildings and an improved area of ground are depicted on the 1st edition of the OS 6-inch map (Inverness-shire, sheet l and lxix, 1875). The entry in the contemporary OS Name Book described Camban as ‘a shepherd’s house…upon the property of Chisholm of Chisholm’ (Inverness-shire, No. 48, p.8).
On the night of the 1881 census Camban was occupied by shepherd Alexander McRae (56) with his wife Catherine (56), son Duncan (29), a fox-hunter, daughter Margaret (17), granddaughter Catherine (5) and a third cousin Donald McLennan, also a shepherd. The last tenant, named Paterson, moved to Alltbeithe in mid-Glen Affric by 1920 (Allan 2017, 89). The building was first renovated by the Mountain Bothies Association in 1969 in memory of two climbers, Philip Tranter (d.1966) and Alistair Park (d.1965). A renovation in 2008 was undertaken in memory of Liz Innes (Allan 2017, 89; Tranter, nd).
A roofed building annotated ‘Camban Bothy’, an unroofed building, an enclosure and two livestock pens are depicted on the current edition of the OS (GIS) Mastermap.
Information from HES Archaeological Survey (D M Bratt) 10 June 2021
(Allan 2017, 89)
