Ballachulish

Ballachulish Bridge & Beinn a Bheithir

Ballachulish is a slightly confusing place. And not just because it has a name that is difficult to spell correctly, or even consistently incorrectly. It's not unusual to find places that come in two halves. But Ballachulish comes in two halves plus another, larger, settlement two miles along the road to Glencoe.

View East from the Bridge South Ballachulish Ballachulish Church

The name comes from the Gaelic for village of the narrows, and the first settlement to bear the name lay where North Ballachulish is today. Its twin, on the south side of the loch, rapidly followed. Loch Leven narrows dramatically here and North and South Ballachulish grew up around the slipways from which a ferry crossed the loch from as early as 1730.

A vehicle ferry started to cross the narrows in 1912, but the service finally disappeared in 1975 when the bridge opened. With it disappeared the choice facing drivers of the sometimes long queues at busy periods or the fifteen mile detour via Kinlochleven.

Ballachulish Bridge

Slate Quarries

Loch Leven Hotel, North Ballachulish

Though the ferry has long gone, the slipways that served the ferry remain: by no means opposite one another. Also remaining are the hotels on either side that warmed cold passengers waiting for the ferry.

The steel truss bridge that opened here in 1975 fits nicely into its environment. Indeed, it comes as something of a surprise to find it is such a relatively recent addition to this part of the Western Highlands.

South Ballachulish largely comprises the slipway and the hotel. Close to the steps leading down from the bridge to the Oban road near the hotel is a memorial to James Stewart, hanged here in 1752 for the Appin Murder. This was the killing of Colin Campbell, an event used as the basis for Robert Lewis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped. Stewart's guilt remains in doubt, 250 years after his execution.

North Ballachulish is a little more developed and is home to an art gallery, lochside hotel and the slipway for the old ferry.

The largest settlement carrying the name of Ballachulish lies on the south side of Loch Leven, a mile or so west of the village of Glencoe. This started life as Laroch in the 1500s. In 1693 slate was first quarried here in the Ballachulish Slate Quarry (only a year after the Glencoe massacre took place nearby). By the early 1700s this had developed into a major slate quarrying operation which continued for over 250 years until 1955, when the quarry closed. The quarry's name of Ballachulish simply seems to have attached itself to the village over the years.

Ballachulish certainly made a lasting impression on Queen Victoria during a royal visit. Her diary reflects not just the slate quarrying but the lengths the residents went to in order to decorate the village for her visit.

The quarries at Ballachulish were also the terminus for a railway branch line that ran from Connel via Ballachulish Ferry and opened in 1903. This closed in 1966. Today it is still possible to see the disused quarries at the eastern end of Ballachulish. There's no mistaking what they are, but in the half century since they closed, nature has made a start at reclaiming what was once taken from it.