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Publication Account
Date 1975
Event ID 1192166
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1192166
The excellence of the anchorage in Oban Bay was first recognised by a Renfrew company which established a trading station there in the first quarter of the 18th century. The development of the town was stimulated by the construction of a custom-house c. 1760 (Pococke, Tours, 71. This building, which was demolished to make way for the railway in 1880, is shown m an early photograph reproduced in Black, A D, Oban of Yesterday (n.d., c. 1969), 11), and by the enterprise of the brothers Hugh and John Stevenson who, in the last quarter of the century, established a distillery and a ship-building yard and were widely employed as masons.
Until the beginning of the 19th century the expansion of the town was most rapid in the area owned by the Duke of Argyll, S and W of the Black Lynn. A plan of 1803 (Argyll MSS, Inverary Castle, Map Cabinet, drawer 5) shows that by that date considerable numbers of slated houses had been built at the NE ends of Shore Street and Albany Street, and on the S side of Argyll Square. Campbell of Dunstaffnage, proprietor of the area N of the Black Lynn, commissioned a 'plan of an intended village' from George Langlands in 1791 (a copy made by Alexander Langlands in 1811 is in SRO, GD 112/10/6), but the first feus were not granted until c. 1804, and the main development of this part of the town occurred after it had been purchased by Charles Campbell of Combie c. 1809 (Pls. 76, 77A). The plan adopted was a simple grid-pattern based on a principal N-S thoroughfare, George Street, but the execution of the E section of this plan was hindered by the existence of the distillery and by the irregular nature of the terrain (cf. Robert Stevenson’s plan of 1846, Oban Burgh Museum (Pl. 76). The buildings of this period, as shown in early photographs (Black op. cit. 9, 17), were simple two- and three-storeyed structures; some still survive, although much altered, in George Street.
Oban was erected into a burgh of barony by the Duke of Argyll and Campbell of Combie in 1820, after an earlier charter of 1811 had been set aside, and in the following year a church, now rebuilt, was erected at the S end of Combie Street. The ownership of the S and N parts of the town were transferred respectively to Robert Campbell of Sonachan in 1821 and to the 2nd Marquess of Breadalbane in 1837 (Ibid passim; Faichney, Oban, 70-93; Shedden, Lorn, 201-51; Stat. Acct. xi (1794), 132-5; Groome, Ordnance Gazetteer, 1251-4; NSA, vii (Argyll), 532-3).
RCAHMS 1975
