Recording Your Heritage Online

Event ID 564385

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Recording Your Heritage Online

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/564385

Recording Your Heritage Online

Kinlochleven Pioneering hydroelectricity plant and (now demolished) aluminium smelter, with good survival of early company housing, dwarfed by the Mamore hills at the head of Loch Leven. Opened in 1909, it is now obsolete to its original function, but an ambitious programme of phased regeneration has established part of the site as an outdoor tourism and small business centre. There was an inn here in the 18th century (where Pennant breakfasted on minced stag), and, by about 1900, two lodges - Kinlochmore and Kinlochbeg. In 1904 an Act of Parliament established the Loch Leven Water and Electric Power Co, which merged with the North British Aluminium Co Ltd. (set up in 1894) and built the Aluminium Works, 1905-9. Operated by the largest British hydroelectric power station of its day, works consisted of a large factory block containing rows of 76 smelters (closed in 2000 and now demolished), a warehouse, carbon works and laboratory. The power house, with a dramatic long perspective of 10 pelton wheel turbines by Escherwyss of Zurich and an 11 th of similar design, is still in situ and, as such, almost unique. The water supply was fed by the Blackwater Reservoir four miles away, its mass concrete dam by engineers Thomas Meik & Sons, 1904-9, 1 km wide - the largest in Europe at that time. The carbon silos/bunkers, vast arcaded rubble blocks incorporating structures of early reinforced concrete by T. Meik & Sons and A. H. Roberts, were converted in 2002 by Bruce & Neil Architects for the Kinlochleven Land Development Trust as an outdoor activity/interpretation centre and micro brewery. Most of the rest of the carbon factory was demolished in 1989.

A harbour was constructed and the factory linked to the pier by an electric railway. Model village housing for over 3,000 workers and navvies was built to replace the tin and wooden shacks that gave Kinlochleven the air of a goldrush town in its early days, albeit one only accessible by boat or foot (there was no road along the south shore of Loch Leven until c.1918). The company village provided shops, village hall, recreational facilities and simple churches of all denominations in an attempt to make life for the workers more appealing. Leven Road has the earliest model housing, completed c.1910, probably by Meik & Sons, its harled brick and slated terraced houses with segmental arched windows, half-timbered gables and brightly painted shop fronts (including a bank, with unusual red brick exterior) straight from the suburbs of an English town. Ranged picturesquely along Garbhein Road on the eastern edge of the village is more substantial housing built for the management - five Arts & Crafts houses designed by A. A. H. Scott, built by McLaughlin & Harvey, c.1906-1908. These include Garbhein House at the top, built for the manager, notable for its unaltered interior; Edenmhor for the chief chemist, and Tigh-na- Bruaich for the chief engineer. The development spread north of the Leven in the 1920s, where a pocket of mostly gabled pairs characterises Kinlochmore. The only 19th-century survivals are a few estate dwellings such as Kinlochmore Cottage and Rose Cottage above. Mamore Lodge Hotel, J. G. Falconer, late 19th century Shooting lodge perched way up on a mountain ledge, later becoming the residence of the manager of the aluminium works. Various wings, canted and generously fenestrated to take advantage of the views, are topped off with a restless frill of bracketted eaves in an incongruous cottagey manner.

[The North British Aluminium Company was set up in 1894 with Lord Kelvin as technical adviser.]

Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk