Recording Your Heritage Online
Event ID 564772
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Recording Your Heritage Online
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/564772
Kyleakin (Caol Acain) (Norse:Haakon's Sound or Narrows) Former ferry village, the lifeblood of which has been ebbing away beneath a parade of heritage lamposts since the Skye Bridge effectively cut it off. Not that it ever amounted to much more than a pleasant settlement around a pier, with a couple of churches and a handful of houses and hotels. Certainly, Kyleakin is a far cry from Lord Macdonald's grand vision for a metropolis here, for which he proposed the name New Liverpool. James Gillespie Graham, commissioned in 1811 , designed a crescent-shaped town of elegant spires and terraces embracing a port 'for the convenience of vessels frequenting this great thoroughfare of navigation'. But building work reached a standstill, and by 1829 only four principal houses had been constructed, leaving their builders bankrupt; '… few persons of capital or respectability… declared a Report on the Macdonald Estate in 1830, 'could think of building in so remote a place as Kyleakin either for business or pleasure …'. By 1845 the best Kyleakin could boast was a dozen good slated houses, a few shops and a well-kept inn. Later, plans for a Skye railhead here also proved abortive. The Free Church, J. Pond Macdonald, 1896-7, is cottagey gothic with red ridge tiles, now shorn of its timber bellcote. The Kings Arms Hotel has J. Gillespie Graham's inn of c.1812 -20 at its core - visible today from the rear, where part of a terrace is reminiscent of those at Stein and Dornie.
[In 1263 King Haakon anchored in Kyle Akin with 100 ships before sailing south through Kyle Rhea en route for the Battle of Largs, where he was defeated by Alexander III.]
[Georgian Planned villages in the Highlands were conceived as centres of commerce and industry rather than rural paternalism. Nic Allen has contrasted the "urban absurdity"of Georgian terraces and crescents straggling across the peat hags of Skye' with the 'absurdity of the rural idyll - cottages ornees and Gothyke dairies - which we associate with the planned estate villages of the south'.]
Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
