Architecture Notes

Event ID 655759

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Architecture Notes

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/655759

PHOTOGRAPHS: NMRS copies of watercolours by W. Heath c.1829-1832 in possession of Hon. James Morrison.

The village of Bowmore stands on a north-facing hillside on the E shore of Loch Indaal about 3.6km SW of Islay House.

It is a planned settlement of regular layout, founded in 1768 by Daniel Campbell of Shawfield and Islay as part of a scheme of estate reorganisation involving the removal of the old village of Kilarrow from the immediate vicinity of Islay House.(Statistical Account 1790) By 1793 one hundred and ten houses had been erected in the village, and gave accommodation for a total population of about 500. In 1891, the population stood at about 850, and a late 19th-century commentator complained that the village had 'been greatly disfigured by the medley character of its private houses, every builder having been allowed to please himself as to the material, shape and size of his structures'. (Ordnance Survey Gazetteer)

The axis of the layout is the wide Main Street which ascends southwards over a distance of about 300 m from the

pier (Building-operations on a quay at Bowmore were in progress in 1750, Islay Stent Bk) to the circular parish church at the head. It is intersected by streets running E and W, and the grid is completed by N-S access-lanes on the periphery of the original settlement. Behind the street-frontages the interior of the village is taken up by garden ground, and the enclosed fields beyond, particularly to the S, probably reflect some of the original divisions of the associated lots. A distillery founded in 1779 occupies the NW quarter of the village, and in some parts of Bowmore the original pattern of building-feus has either remained incomplete or been interrupted by later developments.

A range of two-storeyed semi-domestic warehouses, which stand at the E foot of Main Street close to the pier, probably constitutes the oldest surviving group of buildings in the village, possibly even preceding its formal inauguration in 1768. They are constructed of limewashed rubble masonry with external forestairs to the upper floors, and have plain coped chimney-stacks. (THe buildings have been much altered, especially on the ground floor, and at the date of survey the N unit was in course of restoration as a dwelling-house) The single- and two-storeyed houses in the village are otherwise mainly of plain three-bay frontages which, despite later modifications, possess some degree of uniformity but are clearly not of standard design even within the same streets.

In the streets running E-W, the frontages on Flora Street are about 9.9m in average length, and the corresponding

dimension of the larger terraced units on Shore Street is 12.7m. Detached buildings like Bowmore House, which

stands on the S side of School Street opposite the distillery, are also of this larger category, and in this instance the feu

also incorporates the site of an adjacent kitchen at the W and a range of now-ruinous ancillary buildings at the rear. (Feu contracts of 1769, 1777 and 1781, registered September 1814)

The frontages generally are harled or rendered, and the roofs are mostly gabled and slate-covered. The last of the

once-numerous thatched buildings was a rope-thatched single-storeyed cottage which stood at 62 Jamieson Street

until some time after 1965, and there was also at that date a pantile-roofed ancillary building attached to the rear of a

house in Shore Street. (In 1793 forty out of 110 houses in the village were thatched, fifty were slated and twenty were tiled. [Statistical Account 1794])

Visited August 1977

RCAHMS 1984