Harris, Leverburgh, Water Tower

Leverburgh (Obbe - An t-Òb, before 1920)

Watery settlement on the reef-ridden Sound of Harris, its abandoned, half-complete air far from picturesque, but significant as the legacy of the most ambitious industrial enterprise ever initiated by a Hebridean laird. Lord Leverhulme's principal motivation was an attempt to bring employment and a measure of prosperity to a community struggling to maintain a livelihood in the aftermath of the Clearances. His £250,000 scheme was to have transformed the straggling township into a significant herring port, and for a brief period 70 steam trawlers supplied fish-processing factories here, employing hundreds. But today, all that survives of Leverhulme's dream are a ferro-concrete water tower, circular battered water reservoir, and some foundations of the power house, coopering sheds, fisher girls' quarters and quayside buildings. All this, plus road layout, by D. Cattanach and B. P. Wall (Lever Bros engineer), c.1920. Also part of Leverhulme's legacy, c.1924 , is the school, built as a recreation hall (Hulme Hall), and some houses for managers and foremen built " of stone or concrete blocks with asbestos composition and slated roofs", as at Ferry Road. Families were offered a quarter acre plot and £250-worth of building materials to erect one of several approved designs. But plans to cut a canal through from the sea to the large sheltered "millpond" to create an inner harbour capable of accommodating a fleet of 200 boats remained unfulfilled, and Leverhulme's death in 1925 spelt the end of this extravagant but shortlived attempt to transform Harris's economy. Little today in gritty, scruffy Leverburgh pre-dates the 20th century. "Its architectural medley is now being completed by the erection of Swedish houses" wrote George Scott- Moncrieff in 1961 of the timber clad prefabs in Dunmore Crescent (a house type favoured by the Forestry Commission and seen throughout the Highlands). These had a precedent, since Leverhulme had imported some pre-fab wooden houses from Norway after discarding his first idea of building workers' houses of reinforced peat.

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