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Recording Your Heritage Online
Event ID 563716
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Recording Your Heritage Online
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/563716
Corran
An excellent survival of a small fishing village beside the alder-fringed mouth of the Arnisdale, Corran is shown as a settlement on Roy's map of 1750. By 1836, a population of some 600 fishing folk was recorded, but the fishing was in decline and emigration had already begun. In his Survey and Report of 1803, Telford suggested that government sponsored fishing villages should take as their model the principles laid down and practised so successfully here, and in 1887 Alexander Ross praised Hugh Stevenson of the Oban family of masons/entrepreneurial building contractors (working in Oban in the 1780s-90s) for having 'established and practised so successfully a fishing settlement at Arnisdale'. This probably referred to Corran, whose principal feature today is a trio of thick-walled singlestorey whitewashed terraces (some cottages later heightened), laid out in linear plan above the tidal river estuary. They replaced the row along the shoreline shown in the photograph below of c.1890. A row of 13 (originally more) partly derelict cattle byres with shared cobbled lane and drainage ditch runs up the slope at right angles. Slightly angled along the beach is a matching row of 11 drystone sheds/fishing stores, their thatched roofs now replaced with tin. Improvements in the 1890s by Robert Birkbeck (owner of Arnisdale and Kinlochhourn from 1890) probably included re-roofing the cottages in slate. The former post office survives from the original village layout.
[The British Fisheries Society earmarked but did not pursue a development here in the 1780s - 'Though Loch Urn has a capital herring fisher, it has no other recommendation as a proper station for a town. The hills rise to a great height on both sides, and all intercourse with the inland country is nearly cut off ...'.]
Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
