Kishorn Mines Walk
Friday, March 16, 2012
The Friday Spring sunshine brought out a good crowd (12) to explore the mining history of Applecross and look at a few other sites around Kishorn on the way.
The Kishorn area may seem a long way away from Applecross, but it was until the 1840s a part of the much more extensive lands of the Mackenzies of Applecross, which reached as far east as the River Coulin. So mining for copper at Rassal, for example, would have been controlled and financed by Applecross. After Lord Leeds bought the estate from the Mackenzies, he divided it and sold the newly formed Lochcarron Estate to Sir John Stewart, or Stuart. It seems to have been Mrs Stuart who initiated and financed the more recent attempts at iron and copper extraction.
As we walked up through the Rassal ash woods (itself a National Nature Reserve) we could see evidence of Rassal having been a ‘wood pasture’, an open type of woodland where cattle were grazed and the flat terraces, cleared of stones, were used to grow crops. The trees would have provided fencing and other construction material. The name Rassal is Norse, linked to keeping horses. The copper mine above the wood is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, so we resisted the temptation to bring away souvenir crumbs of bright green copper ore scattered through the tailings at the entrance to the mine. The mine consists mostly of an open trench, 50m long and up to 5m deep, cut into the limestone to chase a single vein of a copper ore called Bornite. To the south are the remains of a couple of buildings where, presumably, the miners lived. The mine was certainly being mined before 1762 and around 1810 a visitor wrote “The copper at Kissern [Kishorn] is of the best quality, perhaps, of any ore of that metal found in Britain”
Back down at Kishorn we walked up the hill past a cairn containing a stone cist and originally revetted with large boulders around the edge of the stone pile, which probably dates to the Early Bronze Age, and an Iron Age fortified site which may have been a broch or dun although there is now very little to see. But the old township here, whose scattered remains can be seen all around, was known as Doune, while a little bit to the north was Lag an Duin, the hollow of the fort. This was obviously a heavily populated area until people gave way to sheep.
The most interesting mine at Kishorn, the Lower Sanachan, proved to consist of a tunnel dug directly into the hillside, which was excavated in the search for copper. It seems to have begun around 1903, and from 1904 to March 1906 was being run by a Liverpool company, the costs for labour & materials in 1904 alone being Ł787-15s-3d. It carried on for few years after this, but never found any copper. A local story suggests that Mrs Stuart was having an affair with one of the miners, so kept it going as long as she could. We shared wellies to wade through the shallow water to the end of the tunnel and see the last pick marks in the rock.
The two iron mines, at Upper Sanachan and Tornapress, proves slightly less interesting to explore, as the entrance to both shafts were flooded. These were extracting iron ore (Haematite) for a very short period from 1913 to 1914 when at the outbreak of war mining was suspended and never resumed. The Tornapress mine entrance was in a particularly difficult location at the side of the stream and we all wondered at the practicalities of removing the ore from the site. Various bits of machinery, including what looks like the frames of a basket, and a winch, suggest that the ore was swung across a small stream to the base of a constructed ramp then dragged up the slope using the winch. The story goes that occasionally piles of ore, waiting to be removed, were swept away downstream when the stream rose in spate.
We took the opportunity of having a group of willing volunteers to carry some ore back down the hill. This will be used in our iron smelting experiment in the summer.
After the mines we had a quick look at the sad ruins of Courthill House, home to Sir John Stuart and to Sir Charles James Murray who bought the estate in 1882. We all admitted that despite the number of times we’ve driven past, none of us had stopped to look at the house or the burial ground with the remains of an early mediaeval chapel dedicated to St Donnan and a carved cross-slab, or the moot hill Cnoc a’Mhoid, the place of justice which gave Courthill its name (and from where those found guilty were taken up to the gallows hill) Most intriguing was the ornate entranceway bearing the Murray coat of arms and a Gaelic inscription in ornate and tricky Arts and Crafts-style lettering. I’ve attempted to transcribe it, but I won’t try to translate:
Dhe Teasairg an Tigh. An teine:san Tan
Gach aonm ta gabhail tamh an so an nochd
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