The Architecture of Improvement: The Planned Villages of the British Fisheries Society, 1786 - 1817

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Robert Mylne, Thomas Telford and thearchitecture of improvement: the plannedvillages of the British Fisheries Society, 1786–1817

DANIEL MAUDLIN

Urban History / Volume 34 / Issue 03 / December 2007, pp 453 - 480DOI: 10.1017/S0963926807004956, Published online: 07 December 2007

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0963926807004956

How to cite this article:DANIEL MAUDLIN (2007). Robert Mylne, Thomas Telford and the architecture ofimprovement: the planned villages of the British Fisheries Society, 1786–1817.Urban History, 34, pp 453-480 doi:10.1017/S0963926807004956

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Urban History, 34, 3 (2007) C© 2007 Cambridge University Press Printed in the United Kingdomdoi:10.1017/S0963926807004956

Robert Mylne, Thomas Telfordand the architecture ofimprovement: the plannedvillages of the British FisheriesSociety, 1786–1817D A N I E L M A U D L I N ∗

School of Architecture and Design, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, PL4 8AA

abstract: This article examines the architecture and design of the pioneeringplanned fishing villages established by the British Fisheries Society across theHighlands of Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. TheSociety established a utilitarian planning model which fundamentally influencedthe subsequent planned village boom that remains so evident in the historiclandscape of the Scottish Highlands today. The British Fisheries Society also made asignificant contribution to urban history with Thomas Telford’s innovative plan forits last development of Pulteneytown. Pulteneytown remains the most completeexample of Telford’s work as a town planner.

The British Fisheries Society was a national improvement scheme backedby major Highland landowners that, through the establishment of plannedfishing villages, was to provide permanent work and housing for the ruralpoor displaced by the widespread agricultural reforms that transformedthe Scottish Highland landscape through the eighteenth century.1 TheBritish Society for Extending the Fisheries and Improving the Sea Coastsof the Kingdom of Great Britain, to give it its full name, was a quasi-governmental body incorporated as a joint-stock company by Act ofParliament in July 1786. The Act followed a period of quick lobbying bythe Highland Society of London in response to the 1785 Fishery Act which,

∗ I would like to thank the National Archives of Scotland (NAS) and the Royal Commissionon the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland for permission to reproduce images.I would also like to thank the staff of Historic Scotland, Mull Museum, Ullapool Museum,Wick Heritage Centre, and the Wick Town Centre Heritage Initiative, Elizabeth Beaton,David Jones, John Frew and Jane Campbell.

1 The primary documentary sources for the British Fisheries Society are the British FisheriesSociety Papers (NAS/GD9) held by the National Archives of Scotland (gifted by the dukesof Argyll). A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Jean Dunlop’s pioneering accountof the political and economic history of the Society, The British Fisheries Society, 1786–1893 (Edinburgh, 1978). This paper is an architectural history and I direct anyone seekinga detailed account of the political and economic history of the British Fisheries Societytowards her excellent book, reissued by Birlinn under the John Donald imprint in 2005.

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through changes to the bounty regulations, permitted large offshore fishingbusses, which dominated the herring fishery, to buy directly from smallboats. Throughout the early modern period a succession of parliamentaryActs were passed by Scottish, English and, post-1707, British governmentsdetermined to encourage the expansion and promotion of the fisheriesto increase the national wealth. It was the British government’s ambitionto mount a large-scale, offshore herring fishery capable of rivalling theDutch.2 The geographer James R. Coull writes that

from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries the promotion of thefishery was seen as a proper field for government financial incentives, policy wasfor long dominated by the objective of increasing exports: this was done by givingexport bounties and by exempting from the heavy salt duties salt which was to beused for curing herring for export.3

However, despite its name, the British Fisheries Society was much moreclosely concerned with agricultural improvement and the management ofthe subsequent social and economic change within the Scottish Highlandsthan the national fisheries. The significance of the 1785 Fisheries Act forthe group of Highland landowners who founded the British FisheriesSociety was that by letting inshore boats sell directly to offshore bussesit provided a legislative opportunity for economic development in theHighlands as an inshore fleet of small boats made planned coastal villagesa real possibility.4 New fishing settlements were seen as a means ofregional development in the Highlands and the aims and activities of theBritish Fisheries Society were therefore part of the much longer processof transformation in the Scottish rural economy.5 The eighteenth centurysaw the economy and culture of the Scottish Highlands transformed fromthat of a pastoral society centred upon the social and economic structure ofthe clan system into an early modern, ‘improved’ commercial agriculturaleconomy defined by soaring land rents and the removal of traditionalsettlements and communities to make way for more profitable sheepwalks. This process permanently altered the physical appearance andsocial structure of the Highlands. One of the agents of this change wasthe establishment of planned villages.

The process of transformation, which began in the late seventeenthcentury, was driven by the gradual evolution of the traditional paternalisticrole of the clan chieftain into that of a commercial landlord.6 Agriculturalreforms were underway throughout the Highlands by the 1750s; however,early reforms were principally aimed at the established large tenants,the tacksmen, who had traditionally paid a low rent in lieu of military

2 J.R. Coull, The Sea Fisheries of Scotland: A Historical Geography (Edinburgh, 1996), 3.3 Ibid., 69.4 J. Dunlop, The British Fisheries Society, 1786–1893 (Edinburgh, 1978), 20–4.5 Coull, The Sea Fisheries of Scotland, 75.6 T.M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War (Manchester, 1994), 32; A. Macinnes, Clanship,

Commerce and the House of Stewart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996), 14.

Planned villages of the British Fisheries Society, 1786–1817 455

service, and other duties, to the clan chief. The settlements of ordinaryHighlanders were still by and large unaffected by the economic transitionunderway.7 In the mid-eighteenth century most of the Highlands were stillpeppered with thousands of traditional bailtean settlements (the typicalbailtean was a semi-permanent settlement of 10 to 20 dwellings clusteredclosely together in an irregular manner). Yet, by the 1760s and 1770s,bailtean were being removed to make way for high rent paying cattleand sheep ranching. By 1802, bailtean had been erased from Perthshire,Dumbarton-shire, Argyll and the entire West Highland coast, from Obanto Loch Broom: all had been placed ‘under sheep’.8 Faced with landenclosures, poverty and unprecedented population growth the period hasbeen described as ‘an alarming time for the common people, a time ofcommunal anxiety and insecurity’.9 In the nineteenth century the brutalityof forced Highland Clearances brought infamy to the process of enclosureand resettlement. However, in the later eighteenth century the Highlandlandlord did not seek to remove people entirely, only to less productiveand less profitable land, and many deplored the depopulating effect ofthe ‘evil of emigration’.10 The late eighteenth century is described by EricRichards as the ‘Classic Age’ of the Highland Clearances, when an attemptwas made to save and develop the Highlands and its population in a newmodern model prior to an admission of failure and the total capitulation tosheep in the nineteenth century.11 Planned villages were to be the centres ofnew non-agricultural industries, such as the herring fishery, part of a newtype of dual-economy estate functioning profitably alongside large-scalesheep ranching.12 In terms of settlement patterns, the contrast between theirregular cluster of the bailtean and the ordered geometry of the grid-planvillage could not be greater: the former very much of its place, the latterdesigned, ordered and imposed.

The Highland planned village movement

‘The entire history of the modern Highlands is pockmarked with brokenschemes for development, with dreams of economic growth, fishing,manufacturing, mining, villages and new rural enterprises, mainly dashed

7 Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War, 17.8 Ibid., 34.9 Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh,

2000), 108.10 Such was the resistance to depopulation and emigration that Scottish landowners lobbied

Henry Dundas, secretary of state for Scotland, to introduce a ban on emigration fromScottish ports in 1775, though the legislation had little practical effect. R.A. Dodgshon,From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands, c. 1493–1820(Edinburgh, 1998), 240.

11 Richards, Highland Clearances, 48.12 Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War, 37; A. Mackillop, More Fruitful than the Soil: Army, Empire

and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1830 (East Linton, 2000), 83.

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by the problems inherent in the region’s geographical disadvantages.’13

However, in the eighteenth century the planned village was viewed as the‘focus par excellence’ of the dual-economy estate.14 The geographer DavidTurnock has observed that, ‘like the model of agricultural improvementthe planned village formula offered security and advantage to all . . . withcareful promotion some of the projects were enormously successful anddeveloped into true urban communities but there were others which failedto gain any momentum and did not grow beyond the level of a smallrural settlement’.15 The planned village movement in the Highlands was aremarkable building boom for a region with only a handful of permanenttowns and villages at the beginning of the eighteenth century, particularlygiven that the majority of villages were founded in the brief period1780–1850. Across Scotland, Douglas Lockhart has estimated that over500 planned villages were founded during the long eighteenth century.16

In a separate study Lockhart has further estimated that at least 91 wereestablished in the Highland region.17 This figure does not include a further130 in the north-east region which contains considerable areas of theHighlands’ eastern fringe.

Early planned villages in the Highlands followed three distinct models.The first Highland planned villages of the Age of Improvement emerged inthe mid-eighteenth century. These were typical of the eighteenth-centurymodel villages established throughout Britain as part of wider estateenclosure and improvement schemes. The first was the duke of Perth’sgrid-plan settlement at Crieff, 1731, but the most celebrated is Inveraray,Argyll, the seat of the dukes of Argyll. The old village of Inveraray wastransplanted to the shore of Loch Fyne in 1751 from its former locationadjacent to Inveraray Castle. The new Inveraray was a typical model estatevillage built to express architecturally the taste and grandeur of the Houseof Argyll. The 1751 cruciform-plan was designed by John Adam, brotherand partner of Robert, and completed by the neo-classical architect RobertMylne for the fifth duke of Argyll, 1770–1800.18 The architectural eleganceof Inveraray has been described as ‘without equal among small Britishtowns’.19 The aesthetic imperative which defines Inveraray was typical ofthe British model village and can be compared to other aesthetically drivenexamples such as Lord Dorchester’s Milton Abbas, Dorset, 1773, designed

13 Richards, Highland Clearances, 43.14 A.J. Youngson, After the ‘45 (Edinburgh, 1973), 37.15 D. Turnock, The Making of the Scottish Rural Landscape (Aldershot, 1995), 229.16 D. Lockhart, ‘Planned villages in north east Scotland, 1750–1860’, in J. Frew and D. Jones

(eds.), The New Town Phenomenon: The Second Generation, St Andrews Studies in the Historyof Scottish Architecture and Design IV (St Andrews, 2000), 25.

17 D. Lockhart, ‘Planned village development in Scotland and Ireland, 1700–1800’, in T.M.Devine and D. Dickson (eds.), Ireland and Scotland 1600–1850 (Edinburgh, 1983), 133.

18 Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Inventoryof Argyll, 7 (Edinburgh, 1994), 440.

19 C. McWilliam, Scottish Townscape (London, 1975), 92.


by William Chambers (1723–96), or Harewood, Yorkshire, by John Carr(1723–1807), laid out in the 1760s.20

Through the 1750s and 1760s the grand architectural statement ofInveraray was countered by parallel developments on the eastern marginsof the Highlands where a different, utilitarian, village type emerged:industrial centres intended to be the catalysts for economic growth and thedevelopment of regional market economies.21 In the north-eastern countiesof Banff, Moray and Inverness-shire, a circle of improving landownersestablished villages not as personal architectural statements but as nascentcentres for an anticipated regional textile industry. These villages wereplain and practical places laid out on simple grid-plans on unimprovedmarginal land.22 The north-east village was a particularly utilitarianform of town planning, which Spiro Kostof describes as the ‘practicalmodel . . . factual, functional, cool, not in the least magical . . . the conceptthat motivates colonial towns and company towns’.23 The first plannedvillage in the north-east was New Keith, founded by the earl of Seafield, c.1750: a grid-plan village centred upon linen manufacturing.24 Perhapsthe most successful and enduring was Sir Grant of Grant’s grid-planGrantown-on-Spey, Inverness-shire, laid out by the north-east surveyorAlexander Taylor, 1767, which won a prize at the Highland Society ofEdinburgh.25 The geographer Ian Adams identifies the north-east groupof landowners and their shared pool of land surveyors as the influentialNorth-East School of surveying and planning in Scotland.26

At a national, British, level the establishment of villages in the Highlandsalso emerged as a matter of government policy in the 1750s. The firstnational programme for planned villages in the Highlands was establishedby the Annexed and Forfeited Estates Commission, 1752–84, in theaftermath of the Jacobite Rising, 1745–46. This was a shift in governmentpolicy in which ‘state sponsored terrorism gave way to state sponsoredimprovement’.27 The commissioners were tasked by the government withthe social and economic improvement of 13 of the largest Highland estatesforfeited to the state by rebel Jacobite clan chiefs.28 The post-Cullodenmentality behind the commission meant that the commissioners wereprincipally Scottish Whig non-Highland landowners, who served out of

20 R. Reid, The Georgian House and its Details (Bath, 1989), 75.21 Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stewart, 211.22 Lockhart, ‘Planned villages in north east Scotland’, 25–7.23 S. Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (London, 1991), 15.24 I.H. Adams, Peter May, Land Surveyor, 1749–1793 (Edinburgh, 1979), 12–37.25 NAS/GD248/242; H. Woolmer, ‘Grantown-on-Spey: an eighteenth century New Town’,

Town Planning Review, 41 (1970), 239. There were also many smaller villages such asJoseph Cumine of Auchry’s Cuminestown, Aberdeenshire, 1765; Urquhart, Morayshire;Longmanhill, Banffshire; Fetterangus, Longside; and New Deer, St Fergus and Mintlaw,Aberdeenshire. See Lockhart, ‘Planned villages in north east Scotland’, 30–1.

26 Adams, Peter May, Land Surveyor, 12–37.27 Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stewart, 217–19.28 R. Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander, 1745–1830 (East Linton, 1995), 23.

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duty to the national interest, both Scottish and British. The commissionerswere to have a ‘particular attention . . . to the enlargement, or new erectionof towns and villages’.29 Following the end of the Seven Years War, 1756–63,the commission’s first settlements were populated with disbanded troops.Appropriately, the commissioners called these settlements coloniae afterthe Roman veteran settlements established to pacify conquered territory.30

However, for the most part, the villages established by the commissionwere not a great success and it was decommissioned in 1784. Far fromsetting a civic example, the disbanded troops were found to be idle, violentand prone to drink and debt with a ‘wholly destructive’ influence uponregional development in the Highlands.31 The sites were often chosen fortheir strategic location, at key loch heads and glen passes such as KinlochRannoch and Callendar, not for the agricultural or industrial potential ofthe site. Despite the commission’s provision of housing settlers did not al-ways settle: at Strelitz Coupar Angus, for example, 69 houses were built butonly 9 settlers remained after 1764.32 The money wasted on house buildingwas a lasting lesson for those involved in the Highland planned villagemovement. Annette Smith neatly summarizes the Annexed Estates com-mission planned village programme as follows: ‘in its conception, the planof providing for disbanded soldiers and sailors, increasing the populationof the Highlands and Islands, importing necessary trades, and buildinghouses of a higher standard than was usual, all in one step, was a splendidone. In its implementation, little can be said in its favour.’33 Nonetheless,the commission played a ‘formative role in shaping the agenda for High-land improvement’ through the example set to Highland landowners.34

By the later eighteenth century the memory of Culloden had recededand the British government’s interests in the Highlands had principallyturned to military recruitment and the growing need for new naturalresources, whether slate, kelp, wool, hemp or fish. The loyalty and braveryof the new Highland regiments in the Seven Years War, 1756–63, hadbrought the Highland clansmen to the attention of the British Armyas a vast resource of excellent and expendable troops. The Highlandswere promoted by Whig polemicists, such as John Knox (1720–90), asan untapped natural resource which could supply the raw industrialmaterials and food produce required to maintain the factories and townsof the nascent Industrial Revolution in England and Lowland Scotland.It was a situation heightened by the British government’s economic and

29 NAS/E730/32. Papers of the Board of Commissioners of Annexed and Forfeited Estates,1771.

30 McWilliam, Scottish Townscape, 99; N. Allen, ‘Highland planned villages’, HighlandVernacular Building, SVBWG (Edinburgh, 1989), 28.

31 A. Smith, Jacobite Estates of the Forty-Five (Edinburgh, 1982), 145.32 Ibid., 148.33 Ibid., 154.34 NAS/RHP/2312; NAS/E777/313/290; McWilliam, Scottish Townscape, 99.


political pain induced by the loss of the American colonies in 1783.35

The government was therefore keen to support any private or publicimprovements in the Highlands that prevented emigration and increasedeconomic productivity.

The British Fisheries Society

Following the demise of the Annexed Estates Commission in 1784, theestablishment of the British Fisheries Society, 1786, was the next attempton a national level to create a network of planned villages throughoutthe Highlands. By 1786 the Society’s mandate for establishing plannedfishing villages was to increase economic productivity in the Highlandsand thereby to prevent emigration; it was not pacification. The compositionof the Society’s first Board of Directors reflects the change in nationalattitude towards the Highlands from one of suspicion to one of inclusion.The society’s founding Board of Directors comprised the inner circle of theScottish Whig political and landowning establishment; besides boastingJohn, fifth duke of Argyll (1723–1806) as chairman, the earl of Breadalbanewas deputy chairman and other board members included the marquis ofGraham, the earl of Moray, the earl of Abercorn and the earl Gower. To thisaugust group can be added several members of parliament associated withHighland landownership, Improvement and the Scottish Enlightenment,such as Sir John Sinclair, Sir James Grant of Grant, Sir Henry Beaufoy, SirGeorge Dempster, Sir Adam Fergusson and Sir William Pulteney.

Andrew Mackillop has termed this type of close ‘improving’ relationshipbetween Highland landowners and government that emerged in the latereighteenth century as ‘the patriotic partnership’.36 For the landowner thepatriotic partnership meant that estate improvement was not just a matterof personal profit but also a patriotic duty. Furthermore, it was also aduty to support and serve on government-sponsored bodies committed toHighland improvement such as the British Fisheries Society.37 Like mostlandowners in Britain, the typical Highland landowner was, if not directlya member of the government through a cabinet position, then usually themember of parliament for their constituency. They also sat on governmentcommissions relating to the Highlands and were involved in improvingsocieties such as the Highland Society of London, founded in 1778, alsochaired by the fifth duke of Argyll.38 In the context of the Highlands,the activities of the dukes of Argyll, in both public and private, werecentral to the cause of Improvement. The House of Argyll set the standard

35 Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stewart, 218–20; John Knox, A Discourseon the Expediency of Establishing Fishing Stations in the Highlands of Scotland, 1786 (NAS:GD9/1/1).

36 Mackillop, More Fruitful than the Soil, 190–5.37 Clyde, From Rebel to Hero, 22.38 Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stewart, 195.

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Figure 1: Map to show planned villages of the British Fisheries Society,Thomas Telford, Atlas to the Life of Thomas Telford (London, 1838), plate(modified detail) (National Library of Scotland).

with a programme of wide-ranging and innovative improvements totheir Inveraray estates, such as the resetting of tenancies towards theamalgamation of small farms and the establishment of the new town ofInveraray. They also exerted considerable political influence through afavoured position with successive Whig governments. It is therefore notsurprising that amongst his various improving activities the fifth duke ofArgyll was the first chairman of the British Fisheries Society.

The British Fisheries Society established four villages along the coastlineof the Scottish Highlands (Figure 1). Ullapool, Loch Broom, Wester Rossand Tobermory, Isle of Mull, were founded in 1788, Lochbay, Isle of Skye,


Figure 2: Tobermory, Isle of Mull, 1978 (Crown Copyright: RCAHMS).

1790, and Pulteneytown, Wick, Caithness, 1808. Tobermory and LochBroom both had established reputations amongst the Scottish fishing fleetfor good harbours with safe anchorage.39 Loch Broom was also famedfor the size of its herring shoals and the Annexed Estates Commissionhad previously considered establishing a village there. The contractsfor the purchase of both sites were exchanged on 28 February 1788.40

The natural harbours and town plans of Tobermory and Ullapool canbe seen in photographs of the two villages (Figures 2 and 3). Followingthe commencement of works at Tobermory and Ullapool, 1,000 acres atLochbay, Isle of Skye, were purchased in December 1790.41 Lochbay wasconsidered ‘one of the first situations for a seaport town in Europe’ butdespite grand designs the settlement was the Society’s great failure.42

The Society’s final and most successful venture was the developmentof the New Town and harbour of Pulteneytown, from 1808, adjacent tothe historic burgh of Wick, Caithness (Figure 4).43 Pulteneytown, first

39 NAS/GD9/3/49.40 NAS/GD9/3/28–30.41 Dunlop, The British Fisheries Society, 89.42 NAS/GD9/3/32.43 NAS/GD9/3/200.

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Figure 3: Ullapool, Loch Broom (Crown Copyright: RCAHMS).

Figure 4: Pulteneytown, Wick, Caithness, 1991 (Crown Copyright:RCAHMS).


suggested by Thomas Telford, was a change in strategy for the Society, fromthe establishment of entirely new settlements to the strategic developmentof an existing fishing town.44

The planned villages of the British Fisheries Society

From a central office in London the British Fisheries Society establishedand maintained a standard building programme at all its settlements.Once the purchase of land was agreed at each settlement a town planwas commissioned and then laid out by a surveyor and the Society’sagent on site. The Society then built three key public works: a harbour, aninn and a storehouse. Building contracts were advertised in the Scottishpress, with all contracts and works approved and reviewed by the Boardof Directors.45 Besides the public works, the Society adopted a standardpolicy for all its settlements regarding the domestic architecture of thesettlers. The Society stipulated that all settlers were to build houses at theirown expense but according to strict building regulations. In return settlerswere offered long leases on favourable terms. This policy was adoptedon the advice of one of the Society’s directors, the north-east landowner,and founder of Grantown-on-Spey, Sir James Grant of Grant, who advisedthat, ‘[The Society] should interfere as little as possible with building. Itwill inevitably bring them into a great deal of useless expense . . . those[houses] that are provided will not be taken near so much care for or somuch enjoyed as those which they [the tenants] build for themselves’46 –a lesson learnt from the experience of the Annexed Estates Commission.

Several studies have considered the buildings of the British FisheriesSociety’s settlements within their different regional contexts, notably thework of Elizabeth Beaton, Jean Munro, Geoffrey Stell and the inventoryvolumes produced by the Royal Commission on Ancient and HistoricMonuments of Scotland.47 However, the architectural works and town

44 Survey and Report on the Coasts and Central Highlands of Scotland. Made by the Command ofthe Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury, in the Autumn of 1802,Thomas Telford, civil engineer, Edin. FRS. Cited in S. Smiles, The Life of Thomas Telford bySmiles (London, 1867), 144.

45 NAS/GD9/3/20; Mull Museum Archive (MMA); Edinburgh Evening Courant, 20 Feb. and6 Mar. 1787; Edinburgh Evening Courant, Caledonian Mercury and Glasgow Mercury, Feb. andMar. 1788.

46 NAS/GD9/3/95. Sir James Grant of Grant in a letter to the British Fisheries Society.Further information regarding the improving works of Sir James at Grantown-on-Speycan be found in Woolmer, ‘Grantown-on-Spey’, 238–45.

47 E. Beaton, ‘Building practices in Loch Broom and Gairloch parishes’, in J.R. Baldwin (ed.),People and Settlements in North West Ross (Galloway, 1994), 159–93; J. Munro, ‘Ullapooland the British Fisheries Society’, in Baldwin (ed.), People and Settlements in North WestRoss, 244–70; E. Beaton and G. Stell, ‘Local building traditions in Ross and Cromarty’, inD. Omand (ed.), The Ross and Cromarty Book (Golspie, 1984), 207; E. Beaton, Caithness: AnArchitectural Guide (Edinburgh, 1996), 36–44; J. Munro, ‘Pulteneytown and the plannedvillages of Caithness’, in J.R. Baldwin (ed.), Caithness: A Cultural Crossroads (Edinburgh,1982); RCAHMS, Inventory of Argyll, 3 (Edinburgh, 1980), 236; A. Whitaker, ‘A walk aroundTobermory’, Oban Times (1988), 20.

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planning of the British Fisheries Society have not been consideredcollectively as a distinct historic and architectural group. The Society’svillages were planned, designed and managed centrally by a Board ofDirectors in London, including the appointment of architects, surveyorsand building contractors. The Board’s centralized control enabled aconsistent and architecturally coherent programme of works to beimplemented across all the settlements irrespective of their regionalgeographic locations. The imposition of a standardized settlement patternand uniform architectural character across the region by the BritishFisheries Society was a significant developmental factor in the emergingurban form of planned villages throughout the Highlands through the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Taken as a distinct architectural group the Society’s town planningand architectural works can be divided into two chronological periodseach with their own architectural character. This dual character directlyrelates to changes on the Board of Directors and individual directorspreferred architects and surveyors. The first design period, 1786–90,encompassed the establishment of the first two settlements of Tobermoryand Ullapool and was dominated by John, fifth duke of Argyll.48 The dukewas the principal patron of the architect Robert Mylne (1733–1811) andMylne’s austere neo-classical style is very much in evidence in the designof the Society’s inns and storehouses. During the same period Mylnewas responsible for improvements at the Inveraray estate and designednumerous estate buildings, such as the circular-plan Maam Steading,Glenshira, 1787–89.49

Another important figure in this first period was James Maxwell(1757–1829), the fifth duke of Argyll’s chamberlain on Mull and theBritish Fisheries Society’s first agent at Tobermory. Educated at GlasgowUniversity and previously employed by the commissioner of ArgyllEstates in Edinburgh, Maxwell was the sort of modern professionalpreferred by the dukes of Argyll.50 It was Maxwell who, with no trainingas a surveyor or architect, was eventually responsible for the design ofthe town plan and several of the public buildings at Tobermory. Theemployment of the North-East School surveyor and former AnnexedEstates Commission employee, David Aitken, for the survey and townplan of Ullapool, reflects the Society’s close links with the wider Scottishlandowning establishment. Overall, the first period of the Society’sactivities can be interpreted as a model of the patriotic partnership atwork. Influenced by the architectural style of Mylne and the planningmodel of the early industrial villages of the north-east, the urban design of

48 The fifth duke was chairman of the Society until 1800 but was relatively inactive after 1790following the completion of the first two settlements.

49 H.M. Colvin, Autobiographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840, 3rd edn (London,1995), 684.

50 J. Currie, Mull: The Island and its People (Edinburgh, 2000), 189.


this period is characterized by a plain, often austere, classicism well suitedto the rational and efficient pursuit of industry.

The second architectural period of the Society’s activities, 1790–1817,encompassed the establishment of the latter two settlements of Lochbayand Pulteneytown and was dominated by Sir William Pulteney (1729–1805). Pulteney was appointed a director of the Society in 1790 andchairman in 1800, when he succeeded the fifth duke of Argyll and assumedcontrol of the Society’s architectural patronage. Pulteney was the principalpatron of the architect and civil engineer Thomas Telford (1757–1834)whose contemporary style and engineering skill characterize Lochbayand Pulteneytown. Pulteney was the Whig member of parliament forShrewsbury, 1768–1805, and husband to Lady Bath, heiress of the fourthearl of Bath, which made Sir William one of the richest commoners inBritain. Like his protege, Pulteney was born in the Scottish Borders and hadclose links with the Scottish Enlightenment (he was one of Adam Smith’spall-bearers).51 Through Pulteney’s influence Telford came to dominate allaspects of the design process at Lochbay and Pulteneytown.

Town planning

The British Fisheries Society’s first two settlements, Tobermory andUllapool, were laid out on grid-plans, the archetypal planning modelof the eighteenth-century estate village or company town.52 However,the Society’s immediate design source was Sir James Grant of Grantwho suggested that ‘it may be proper at the first establishment to lineout the intended town on a regular plan according to the characteristicsituation of the ground that the streets may be regular and convenient’.53

The town plan of Tobermory was drawn up by James Maxwell followingthe duke of Argyll’s rejection of a rather confused radial-plan submittedby a Campbeltown surveyor, George Langlands.54 Maxwell’s deceptivelysimple plan of 1790 placed the town’s core public buildings on the harbourfront along the town wharf below the site’s steep bank (Figure 5). Thisarrangement included the storehouse and customs house, which werelocated on the edge of the Society’s land and together formed a small U-shaped yard open to the seaward side. Above the bank Maxwell laid out ahierarchical, grid-plan of rectangular blocks aligned in two columns threeblocks deep. This formed a street system of three streets and a central cross-street. The front two blocks on Argyle Terrace were further subdivided intofive settlers’ plots, three facing the sea and six plots facing inland on toBreadalblane Street. A parallel service lane separated the garden plotsof the two streets. Another two blocks enclosed Breadalbane Street on

51 Smiles, The Life of Thomas Telford, 101.52 Kostof, The City Shaped, 240.53 NAS/GD9/3/95; Woolmer, ‘Grantown-on-Spey’, 239.54 NAS/GD9/3/38; NAS/GD9/4/213; MMA/3/2/7.

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Figure 5: James Maxwell, Sketch Attempting to Show the Design for a Portand Village which Has Been Projected and Partially Executed at the BritishSociety’s Station of Tobermory in Mull, 1790) (Crown Copyright:RCAHMS).

the landward side, this time divided into seven plots. Therefore, movinginland from the harbour, each block consisted of one more plot than theone before it. As the landward plots decreased in size their rental valuedecreased correspondingly.55

Ullapool was laid out to a simpler grid-plan by the surveyor DavidAitken in 1789. David Aitken (active 1763–1804) had previously worked forthe Annexed Estates Commission, as well as numerous private landownersin Ross and Cromarty and Inverness-shire. Aitken had trained under thenorth-east surveyor Alexander Sangster, who trained under John Forbes

55 MMA/3/2/2; RCAHMS, Inventory of Argyll, 3 (Edinburgh, 1980), 236.


Figure 6: Donald Macleod of Geanies, Sketch of David Aitken’s Plan ofUllapool, 1789, depicting the builders’ divergence from the laid out streetline (National Archives of Scotland).

with the best-known surveyor of the North-East School, Peter May.56 Theseassociations put Aitken at the heart of the North-East School of surveyors.David Aitken’s town plan for Ullapool has been lost but a sketch of theplan was made by Donald Macleod of Geanies, Sheriff of Ross-shire,who inspected the village in 1789 on behalf of the Society.57 Macleod ofGeanies’ sketch shows that the plan was intended to be a regular grid,as at Tobermory, with a similar adaptation to the practicalities of the site(Figure 6). The main street, Shore Street, marked ‘C.C.’, runs parallel to theshore and features a terrace of housing and public buildings. As the bankalong the foreshore was smaller than at Tobermory, the rising ground wasincorporated into the rear gardens, or kail yards, of the building plots onShore Street. Argyle Street, immediately above the bank, marked ‘D.D.’,runs parallel. These two parallel streets are intersected at the mid-point by56 Adams, Peter May, Land Surveyor, 18. Aitken rejected May’s plan for Ullapool drawn up

for the Annexed Estates Commission (NAS/RHP/3400), A Survey and Design for a Villageat Ullapool, Peter May for the Annexed Estates Commission, 1756.

57 NAS/GD9/3/616.

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a central cross-street named Quay Street, marked ‘E.E.’, which runs downto the town pier. Potential expansion of the grid was restricted to the westby the mouth of the Ullapool River but to the east the grid could be, andlater was, expanded by a further block and cross-street, Ladysmith Street.As the sketch shows, Shore Street was laid out parallel to the shore, notparallel with Argyle Street as intended by Aitken, upsetting the uniformityof the grid-plan blocks. This was the lasting result of an error by one of theearly building contractors at Ullapool, Robert Melville, who ignored thetown plan when building the stores and herring-houses.58

The Society’s links with the north-east through Sir James Grant of Grantand David Aitken are evident in the utilitarian planning and architectureof Ullapool and Tobermory. The high public profile of the Societysubsequently ensured that Ullapool and Tobermory became the designtemplate for the proliferation of planned villages founded in the Highlandsthrough to the mid-nineteenth century. Of the thirty-five eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Highland planned villages listed in NicAllen’s Gazetteer of Highland Planned Villages, only three, Grantown-on-Spey, 1769, Portree, 1763, and Lochboisdale, 1786, pre-date Ullapooland Tobermory.59 All of those that post-date Ullapool and Tobermorywere laid out on the standard British Fisheries Society grid-plan. In termsof function, twenty-one were established as fishing villages, whilst theremaining twelve were intended as centres for textile manufacturing.60 Thedual purpose of all these Highland planned villages was to turn a profitthrough the industrial exploitation of natural resources and to provideemployment for estate subtenants, thereby preventing emigration. Thespecific focus of that industry, whether the herring fishery, slate quarryingor the manufacture of linen, was a matter of opportunity. To the twenty-first-century visitor to the Scottish Highlands the straight terraces of thetypical planned village appear bleak and contrast unfavourably withthe perceived romance of the Highlands. This has much to do with ourromantic image of the Highlands inherited from the nineteenth century,which ignored the true, predominantly eighteenth-century, industrialcharacter of the built environment in the Highlands.

Thomas Telford’s, largely unexecuted, 1790, plan for the Society’s thirdsettlement at Lochbay, Isle of Skye, marked a radical departure fromthe industrial grid-plan villages of the Society’s first phase of activity.In contrast to the imposed grid-plan, Telford’s plan for Lochbay is asophisticated scheme based upon a system of interlocking crescents andsquares which engage with the natural topography of the site (Figure 7).The two main focal points of the plan are the church square and the market58 NAS/GD9/3/617.59 Allen, ‘Highland planned villages’, 40–9.60 Other examples: Plockton, Lochalsh, Ross-shire, founded by Mackenzie of Seaforth, 1801,

plan by William Cumming; Poolewe, Gairloch, Ross-shire, founded by Mackenzie ofGairloch, 1808; Golspie, Sutherland, duke of Sutherland, plan by David Wilson, 1805;and Helmsdale, Sutherland, duke of Sutherland, plan by William Forbes, 1816.


Figure 7: Thomas Telford, The General Plan of Lochbay in the Island of Sky,1790 (National Archives of Scotland).

square. In contrast to the early settlements, the two squares offer a focusfor civic life inland, away from the sea and the fishery. In justification ofhis rejection of a standard grid-plan drawn up for the site by the north-eastsurveyor, James Chapman, Telford gave the following description of hisplan for Lochbay:

The bottom of the rising ground with the middle street for a centre the market ismade of a semi circle shape with street of the same surrounding it; this form ischosen in order to render the market place warmer, to help the ascent of the streetsthat communicate with the higher ground and to prevent a current of air from thestreets above. The streets of the higher ground are laid out on the same principlesof gaining easy ascent and preventing cross drafts of air for which purpose thereis a row of houses which defend the ends of each of the streets. The large reversedcrescent is made to suit the form of the ground, and to get the easiest possibleascent from the lower to the higher ground. On the top of the rising ground in thecentre of a lozenge is the church.61

Telford describes the scheme solely in practical terms of climate andgeography with no reference to the contemporary, fashionable nature of61 NAS/GD9/3/448; NAS/GD9/3/553.

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the design and its novelty in the context of the industrial Highland plannedvillage.62 Of course, by the late eighteenth century, crescents and squareswere no longer considered a radical invention, even on the small scaleof the model estate village, but the British Fisheries Society villages wereremote industrial settlements not model estate villages built to be admired.It is frustrating that Telford makes no reference to his design influences,only his intent, in either his correspondence or later biographical writings.

It can be inferred from Telford’s diverse national work schedule duringthis period that he took his inspiration from markedly similar street formshe encountered on his travels elsewhere in Britain. For example, thecrescent terraces and unified elevations with terminating pavilion wingsin the proposal for Lochbay are reminiscent of Robert Adam’s LowtherVillage, 1766, which Telford visited when working in Cumbria in 1789.63

As an avid follower of contemporary architecture, it is also likely thatTelford had a second-hand familiarity with John Wood the Younger’swidely celebrated Royal Crescent, Bath, completed in 1775, though hedid not personally go to Bath until 1792 when he worked as a surveyorat Sir William Pulteney’s Bathwick estate.64 A familiarity with the plansand elevations of Georgian Bath would explain the strong similaritiesbetween Lochbay’s proposed lozenge-shaped church square and ThomasBaldwin’s, Laura Place, 1788–92, and its semicircular colonnaded marketsquare with Baldwin’s Cross, Bath, 1786.65 However, Telford’s deploymentof the crescent as an enclosed street with its void filled by the semicircularcentral market-place was an innovation. The crescent in this period was stillonly employed as an open form and Telford’s proposal for the ‘crescent-street’ had no British precedent.66

Following the high costs which mounted up at Ullapool, the directors ofthe Society were unwilling to invest money in Lochbay and Telford’s planremained largely undeveloped. Pulteneytown, therefore, was Telford’sgreatest contribution to the British Fisheries Society and to urban planningin Scotland. Pulteneytown was the Society’s final venture and differedfrom the previous settlements as it is a New Town adjunct to the historicburgh of Wick not a pioneer settlement. Telford drew up a preliminarytown plan in 1807, which featured a large shallow crescent facing awayfrom the sea, similar to Peter Nicholson’s 1806 plan for the ferry port

62 T. Telford, Atlas to the Life of Thomas Telford by Himself (London, 1838). None of Telford’ssubsequent biographies shed any light upon Telford’s urban design and design influences.Smiles, The Life of Thomas Telford; Alexander Gibbs, The Story of Telford (London, 1935); andL.T.C. Rolt, Thomas Telford (London, 1958). It has to be concluded that neither Telford inlater life nor his biographers considered his town planning to be of much significancewhen set against his great civil engineering works.

63 D. King, The Complete Works of Robert and James Adam (Oxford, 1991), 385. Planned villagesincorporating crescents and semicircles had also been attempted in Scotland, such as LordGarlies’ crescent-plan for Garliestown, Wigtownshire, 1760.

64 Smiles, The Life of Thomas Telford, 113.65 D. Stilman, English Neo-Classical Architecture (London, 1988), 236.66 K. Downes, The Georgian Cities of Britain (Oxford, 1979), 120.


Figure 8: Thomas Telford, initial scheme for Pulteneytown, 1807(National Archives of Scotland).

of Ardrossan, Ayrshire, which Telford had visited (Figure 8). However,Telford substantially remodelled the plan for the final version of 1810.67

The town plan of Pulteneytown is essentially a simple cross-plan runningroughly east–west with a central open square, Argyll Square. Telfordenhanced the scheme by designing the central square as a chamferedrectangle (Figure 4). Argyll Square is bisected lengthwise by the east–west axis of Grant Street and Dempster Street. The square is also flankedby enclosed angular, or canted, crescents, Breadalbane Terrace and BrownStreet. All the residential streets were named after directors of the Society.

As with Lochbay, Telford explained his fashionable departure fromthe industrial grid-plan established by the Society purely in terms ofgeography and climate, ‘one great objective in forming the new plan wasto exclude the north wind. At present the wind blows right across theflat evenly but it will hit the wall of the crescent and be forced downa side street.’68 Telford’s presentation of a fashionable and aestheticallyconsidered plan to the practical and money-minded Directors of theBritish Fisheries Society in language which extols only its practical benefitsis a fascinating example of the civil engineer’s self-presentation andunderstanding of his clients.

As with Telford’s proposed scheme for Lochbay there are strong formalsimilarities between the urban spaces of Pulteneytown and Thomas

67 NAS/GD9/7/264.68 NAS/GD9/14/128/9/11/10.

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Baldwin’s scheme for the Bathwick estate, Bath. The chamfered rectangle ofTelford’s Argyll Square is very close to the chamfered rectangle of ThomasBaldwin’s Sydney Gardens, Bath, 1788–92.69 In contrast to the Lochbayscheme, the probability of Bath having had a direct influence upon Telfordis high as he had worked as a surveyor at Bathwick since 1792 and hadoverseen the completion of the scheme following Baldwin’s dismissal ascity surveyor.70 And, Telford was impressed with what he had seen at Bath:

Modern Bath has been created by a Mr. Wood, an Architect, a man of very superiortalents to whom, if I will, I hope do justice . . . I know of no instance in Ancientor Modern History of the conjunction of so many favourable circumstances . . . farexcell’d the Bath of Diocletian or any of the Roman Works.71

Telford’s use of the fashionable urban forms of the crescent and squarein the context of a planned industrial settlement in the Highlands – andselling it to practically minded clients – was a unique contribution toScottish urban history. It also demonstrates that in his work for the BritishFisheries Society though his designs may have been largely imitative theirsocial application was innovative by providing enclosed civic spaces forindustrial workers away from the centre of industry. Perhaps of greatestsignificance in terms of urban design was Telford’s use of zoning to separ-ate work from leisure: the clear division of Pulteneytown into a residentialzone and an industrial zone each with a distinct architectural character.The genteel urbanity of the residential zone’s crescents and squaresjuxtaposes with a strict geometric grid-plan in the separate industrial zone.Telford’s architectural zoning has no eighteenth-century British precedentand should be more widely recognized. The industrial zone, known asLower Pulteneytown, was laid out on ground close to the harbour andplanned as a grid of nineteen plots grouped into four rectangular blocks,each block comprising two plots facing the harbour and four plots facingthose of the next parallel block. The grid, and the correspondingly austerewarehouses and depots, were built according to strict building regulations,which emphasized the functional and industrial nature of the zone. Theindustrial aesthetic was further emphasized by the original street names:Salt Row, Herring Row and Cask Row.72 The repetitive geometry ofLower Pulteneytown was a forerunner of Telford’s unrealized LondonDocks scheme for a monumental warehouse and embankment complexon the Thames, 1800, and pre-empted his later schemes for GloucesterDocks, 1826, and St Katherine’s Docks, 1827–28, built ‘to rival the LondonDock Company and the West India Docks’.73 Pulteneytown is the mostinnovative example of eighteenth-century town planning in northern

69 Colvin, Biographical Dictionary, 97.70 Smiles, The Life of Thomas Telford, 113.71 Thomas Telford, letter to Andrew Little, 10 Mar. 1793. Cited in Rolt, Thomas Telford, 24–5.72 The industrial theme was lost when later changed to Saltoune Terrace, Telford St, and Burn

St.73 Thomas Telford, Thomas Telford by Himself (London, 1838), 115–20.


Scotland and the most complete example of Telford’s work as a townplanner. The historic significance of Pulteneytown was recognized byHistoric Scotland when designated ‘Group Category A’ in 2002.

Harbours

The Society’s harbour developments are matters of civil engineering notarchitectural history; however, the capital investment in harbour workswas considerably greater than any amount invested in architecture orplanning (Telford’s creative town planning at Lochbay and Pulteneytownwere only accepted by the Board of Directors as they cost no more todesign or lay-out than a basic grid). For example, Robert Mylne’s elegantneo-classical inn at Tobermory cost £792 whereas the harbour works cost£8,000, whilst the harbour works at Pulteneytown cost over £10,000 againstno financial investment in buildings.

More than any architectural work, the completion of the harbour was theprimary factor in the eventual success or failure of a settlement. The 700ftbreastwork at Tobermory, quickly well built by Stevenson’s of Oban, 1791,allowed the settlement to develop its fishery and its status as a trading portimmediately (Figure 2).74 In contrast, the harbour works at Ullapool werepoorly constructed by the contractors Melville and Miller, and requiredexpensive ongoing alterations immediately from completion. By the early1800s Ullapool had declined into poverty as larger vessels could not use theharbour, which cut off the village from the offshore herring busses uponwhich an inshore fleet depended (Figure 3).75 Despite a harbour schemedrawn up by Sir John Ronnie and Thomas Telford in the early 1790s, theharbour at Lochbay was not actually completed until 1802.76 The largenumbers that were initially willing to settle at Lochbay eventually emig-rated to North America, citing the Society’s unwillingness to commenceworks at Lochbay that led to their decision to emigrate.77 In contrast,Telford’s massive double-harbour complex at Pulteneytown, 1807–13, wasthe principal cause of the settlement’s success, providing the infrastructurefor an existing town and fishery to expand (Figure 4). Telford’s firstbiographer, Samuel Smiles, wrote in the mid-nineteenth century:

Wick is now, we believe, the greatest fishing station in the world. The place hasincreased from a little poverty-stricken village to a large and thriving town . . . The

74 NAS/GD9/59; NAS/GD9/248/29/4/89; NAS/GD9/334/16/11/91.75 NAS/GD9/3/183; NAS/GD9/8/119. Robert Melville was a bankrupt fishing agent from

Dunbar, East Lothian, who persuaded the Board of Directors to grant him the majority ofthe contracts for Ullapool. Melville employed James Miller, a minor Edinburgh architect, toproduce the plans for his various contracted buildings at Ullapool. Anon., Plan of Harbourand Breakwater, 1854 (NAS/RHP/4286).

76 NAS/GD9/10, 45; NAS/GD9/1/164; NAS/GD9/21/28.5.92; NAS/GD9/9/13; NAS/GD9/22/9.5.01. William Mackenzie, Sketch of the Pier at Stein in the Island of Skye, 1807(NAS/RHP/11800).

77 NAS/GD9/21/18.7.91.

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bay is at times frequented by upwards of a thousand fishing-boats and the take ofherring in some years amounts to more than a hundred thousand barrels.78

Pulteneytown harbour was funded by the British Fisheries Society andthe Commission for Highland Roads and Bridges. This joint enterprise wasborn out of Telford’s highly influential Survey and Report on the Coasts andCentral Highlands of Scotland, produced for the Treasury in 1802, in whichhe recommended the construction of harbours along the northern coastlineof Scotland. Pulteneytown harbour was the British Fisheries Society’s lastproject and the first harbour project by the Highland Roads and BridgesCommission, marking the transition to the next phase of the patrioticpartnership in the Highlands, in which the emphasis shifted to governmentinfrastructure schemes for canals, roads, bridges and harbours not plannedvillages, which were left to private landowners. From 1806 to 1821, theHighland Road and Bridges Commission was prolific in the constructionof harbours and piers in northern Scotland.79

Inns

In 1789 the fifth duke of Argyll wrote to his factor, James Maxwell,regarding the works at Tobermory. He stressed that the inn was ‘a buildingthat ought to be very particularly studied and attended to . . . strangerswill of course set the edge of their criticism upon the Inn in the firstplace’.80 This was a deliberate design strategy previously employed bythe dukes of Argyll at Inveraray. The Argyll Arms Hotel, Inveraray,Argyll, 1751–55, was built by William Douglas to an amended plan byJohn Adam.81 At three-storeys high and nine-symmetrical-bays wide, itis the inn on a grand scale, described by Samuel Johnson as ‘not onlycommodious but magnificent’.82 The inn at a newly established plannedvillage was not just a functional building it was an architectural landmark,a statement of respectability, comfort and modernity, a deliberate andspecific cultural indicator that the village, however remote, was an outpostof British society. The inn was intended as a place for the accommodationof travelling gentlemen, not the use of the village residents. Accordingly,the inn was the only building in which the Board of Directors expressed

78 Smiles, The Life of Thomas Telford, 154.79 Telford, ‘Harbours, wharfs and piers’, in Telford, Thomas Telford by Himself;

RCAMHS/NMRS/XSD/158/1. Other examples of Highland Road and BridgeCommission harbours include: Avoch Harbour, Ballintraed Harbour, Banff Harbour,Burgh-Head Harbour, Channery Point Ferry Pier, Corran Ferry Pier, Cullen Harbour,Dornie Ferry, East Tarbet Harbour, Feoline Harbour, Fortrose Harbour, FraserburghHarbour, Gordon Harbour, Inverfarigaig Landing Pier, Invergordon Ferry Pier, KirkwallHarbour, Kyle Ferry Pier, Nairn Harbour, Peterhead Harbour, Portmahomack Harbour,Portree Harbour, Small Isles Harbour, St Catherine’s Ferry Pier and Tobermory HarbourPier.

80 NAS/GD9/3/144.81 RCAHMS, Inventory of Argyll, 7 (Edinburgh, 1994), 443.82 Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (London, 1775), 140.


Figure 9: Robert Mylne, Front of Inn to the Harbour, Tobermory Inn,1790–91 (Crown Copyright: RCAHMS).

an interest in appearance beyond the uniform late eighteenth-centurycommercial classicism implied by the phrase much-used in the period:‘neat and regular’. Accordingly Robert Mylne’s work for the Society wasalmost entirely focused upon the design of inns. Robert Mylne was acontemporary of Robert Adam and a fellow Scottish emigre residentin London. Mylne is known for his innovative, early career design forBlackfriars Bridge, London, and a handful of country house commissions,such as Pitlour House, Fife, 1787, executed in a severely restrained neo-classical style reminiscent of Ledoux.83 Much of Mylne’s practice wasdevoted to infrastructure improvement schemes (canals, river navigations,roads, bridges) notably for the fifth duke of Argyll at Inveraray.

The Tobermory Inn, 1790–91, was Mylne’s first and principal designfor the Society; illustrated in Mylne’s plan and elevation, the inn wasan archetypal post-Palladian, Improvement-era small-scale house: a plainbut well-proportioned two-storey, three-bay classical building flanked bysingle-storey pavilion wings (Figure 9). The pavilions were ornamentedwith blind arched-niches and ball-finials. Small-scale houses of this typewere widely built throughout rural Britain, disseminated to regional

83 D. Maudlin, ‘Robert Mylne at Pitlour House’, Architectural Heritage, 12 (2001), 27–37.

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craftsmen through architectural pattern books such as the Rudiments ofArchitecture, published in Edinburgh, 1773.84 Laudale House, for example,was built c. 1770 for John Campbell of Ardslidgish, an improvingtacksman-cum-tenant farmer of the improving fifth duke of Argyll.Laudale House is located just across the Sound of Mull from Tobermoryon the Morvern peninsula and is one of the finest improved farmhousesin Scotland.85

An inn of identical design was planned for Ullapool. An initial plandrawn up by the contractor, Roderick Morrison, outlined a two-storey,three-bay building, ‘built of stone and lime, roofed with slate . . . and twowings one for the kitchens and servants the other as a byre and hay loft’.86

Morrison’s plans were sent to Mylne who produced ‘a new elevationand section of the Inn . . . only enlarging the Inn by addition of a sunkstorey and drawing it’s wings closer up to the body’.87 Completed beforethe inn at Tobermory in 1790, the inn, which was heavily altered in theearly twentieth century, was considered by Macleod of Geanies to be ‘anexcellent one, but the Reporter fears will come to a much greater expensethan the situation can afford any equal return from it’.88 Telford surveyedthe building in 1790 and concurred that ‘there seems to be an excellent innand offices at Ullapool, too good perhaps for the probable resort to thatplace’.89

At Lochbay only a temporary inn was built during the Society’s periodof ownership; the present building dates from the 1840s. The lack of alandmark British Fisheries Society inn at Lochbay is symptomatic of thegeneral lack of development at the site. The Pulteneytown Inn, designedby Thomas Telford, stands on a prominent position overlooking themain harbour. The Round House, as it is known locally, was built by alocal contractor, George Burn, in 1808.90 The intended Pulteneytown Inndemonstrates that, as with the town plan, Telford liked to experimentwith contemporary trends in architecture. The fashionable Picturesque-style of the early nineteenth century, disseminated by a new generationof architectural books, such as Robert Lugar’s The Country Gentleman’sArchitect, 1807, is evident in features such as the hipped roof with over-sailing eaves, central roof-ridge chimneystacks and advanced, bowedwindow bays. Telford considered the completed building ‘an example of

84 NAS/GD9/3/553; NAS/GD9/4/248; NAS/GD9/162; RCAHMS, Inventory of Argyll, 3(Edinburgh, 1980), 237. An 1812 sketch of the harbour front at Tobermory by WilliamDaniel shows the inn completed according to Mylne’s design. However, the inn wassubsequently extended and latterly converted into a supermarket.

85 P. Gaskell, Morvern Transformed: A Highland Parish in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,1968), 244; D. Maudlin, ‘Tradition and change: a study of Argyll tacksmen’s houses inMorvern’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 133 (Edinburgh, 2004), 1–16.

86 NAS/SRO/GD9/4/76.87 NAS/GD9/3/140–7.88 NAS/GD9/3/593; NAS/SRO/GD9/3/627.89 NAS/GD9/3/144.90 NAS/GD9/289/21.5.08.


neatness’.91 However, on completion Burn decided to make the landmarkbuilding his own house thus depriving Pulteneytown of a quality inn,although many small private whisky-shops and cook-houses sprang uparound the harbour to meet demand.

Storehouses

A storehouse for the storage of equipment and materials relating to thefishery such as nets, salt and barrels was the third of the British FisheriesSociety’s three core public works. Essentially, the warehouses erected bythe Society were plain functional buildings typical of eighteenth-centurycommercial classicism, and similar to the bonded warehouses of Scottishports such as Leith, Edinburgh and the Port of Glasgow: well-ordered, two-to three-storey, stone-built and slate-roofed, buildings of regular elevationand rectangular-plan.92 Again, the Rudiments of Architecture includes adesign for this ordinary, functional building type (Design XX). Similarexamples can also be found at many of the smaller Caithness fishingstations that sprang up in response to the success of Pulteneytown, suchas Lybster, Staxigo and Clyth.

The size and quantity of storehouses built by the British Fisheries Societyvaried considerably from one settlement to the next. The first storehouse togo up was the three-storey King’s Warehouse at Tobermory in 1789.93 Thisbuilding was designed and built by contractors Richards and Rodgers ofPerth following alterations by Robert Mylne, who considered the originalplans for a four-storey building ‘much too lofty for that climate’.94 JamesMaxwell’s 1791 sketch of the harbour shows a regular, gabled, three-storey building with a segmental-arched door to centre similar to thatillustrated in the Rudiments of Architecture (Figure 10).95 The sketch alsoshows the Tobermory Customs House and Lodgings, 1789–91, flanking thestorehouse to form a U-shape complex facing the wharf. The symmetricaltwo-storey buildings with hipped roofs were a revised version by Maxwellof an elegant but costly design by Mylne.96 The U-plan arrangementcreated a small public space for official and commercial transactions.

In contrast to the regular scheme at Tobermory, the presence of twocompeting contractors at Ullapool resulted in a straggling street-line ofmismatched stores and curing houses along the shore. The principalbuilding along the shore remains the three-storey Great Storehouse witha first-storey forestair, built by William Cowie of Tain, 1789–90, markedL on Geanies’ sketch map. A smaller storehouse for salt and casks had

91 NAS/GD9/289/14/05/08.92 Several of the merchants and curers that took up leases at Pulteneytown were from Leith.93 NAS/GD9/4/113.94 NAS/GD9/3/177.95 NAS/GD9/3/441.96 NAS/GD9/3/57; NAS/GD9/3/553.

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Figure 10: James Maxwell, sketch of the town of Tobermory, 1790(Crown Copyright: RCAHMS).

been previously completed in 1788 by Melville and Miller of Dunbar androofed with pan-tiles shipped from Aberdeen. Geanies’ sketch shows howMelville’s poor alignment of the storehouse, marked I, with Aitken’s streetplan forced Cowie to build the Great Storehouse with an asymmetricalfloor plan.97 These buildings were supplemented with a further three-storey curing house and a large workshop with a pyramidal roof, both byMelville and Miller.

A small, single-storey storehouse designed by Thomas Telford wasbuilt at Lochbay in 1795 but it soon fell into disrepair. In contrast, theindustrial archaeologist John Hume has commented that ‘the finest groupof curing depots [in the Highlands and Islands] is at Pulteneytown’.98 Thestore and curing houses of Pulteneytown’s industrial zone were built byprivate investors. The uniformity of materials, construction and designwas controlled by building regulations stipulated by Telford. Plots wereinitially sold at roup auction in 1808 with 11 taken; by 1817 all 20 plots weretaken. Ever fashionable, the repeated blocks of storehouses built underthese regulations relate Telford’s Lower Pulteneytown to the contemporaryarchitectural trend for ‘relentless repetition and obsessive geometry . . . ofheroic geometry’ in large building complexes such as docks, prisons,barracks or asylums.99

97 NAS/GD9/3/607.98 J. Hume, The Industrial Archaeology of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1967), 33.99 M. Girouard, The English Town (London, 1990), 94.


Domestic architecture

The design and construction of settlers’ houses at Tobermory and Ullapoolwere controlled by building regulations designed to ensure uniformity ofmaterials and design. The Society’s strict building regulations ensured thatthe same design principles of regularity and order that governed the townplan and public buildings of each settlement would prevail in the settlers’houses, but at no cost to the Society.100 Both villages still predominantlycomprise uniform straight terraces of stone-built, slate-roofed, single- ortwo-storey, three-bay symmetrical cottages. Telford initiated a change ofstrategy at Lochbay, providing two elevations for the proposed MacleodTerrace, which was to have been built along the main shorefront. Bothdesigns were for unified Palladian facades as pioneered by John Woodin Bath, Queen’s Square, 1736, and Grand Circus, 1754 (Figure 7).101 Asinitiated by John Wood in Bath the continuous facade was intended toallow the individual property owner or builder, who bore the cost ofbuilding, to design the internal plan as they saw fit whilst maintainingthe overall architectural unity of the row. ‘Elevation No. 1’ was for athree-storey central block flanked by pedimented pavilions linked byplain single-storey terracing. ‘Elevation No. 2’ was designed on the sameprinciple but arranged for two-storey terraces.102 Again, the similarity ofthese elevations with Robert Adam’s Lowther Village, Cumbria, 1766, isnotable.103 The flaw in Telford’s scheme was that the intended occupantswere neither the wealthy seasonal residents of Bath nor the recipients ofa landowner’s largesse as in the case of a model estate village such asLowther. Later at Pulteneytown, Telford achieved a workable synthesis ofthe continuous facade and the Society’s self-build regulation by removingthe hierarchical Palladian element and prescribing the same plain andsymmetrical, two-storey, three-bay elevation for all houses.104

Conclusion

The early planned villages of the British Fisheries Society had animpact upon the urban development of the Scottish Highlands far outof proportion to their small number demonstrating the ability of anational body to impose remotely a consistent and, more or less, uniform‘modern’ planning and design model upon distant and unconnected areasirrespective of regional building and settlement traditions. A high profileand influential national body’s adoption of Robert Mylne’s restrainedneo-classical architectural style and the industrial planned village model

100 D. Maudlin, ‘Regulating the vernacular: the impact of building regulations in theeighteenth century planned village’, Vernacular Architecture, 35 (2004), 40–9

101 Colvin, Biographical Dictionary, 1072–5.102 NAS/GD9/100/1/7/91.103 King, Complete Works of Robert and James Adam, 385.104 NAS/RHP/11798.

480 Urban History

developed in the north-east of Scotland set both the aesthetic and operativeagendas of the subsequent Highland planned village boom in the lateeighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. The planned villages of the BritishFisheries Society and their successors had little success in establishinga sustainable dual economy in the Scottish Highlands. But in terms ofthe built environment the Highland planned village totally supersededthe traditional bailtean as the typical Highland settlement pattern andcontinues to define the character of the Highland built environmenttoday. In contrast, Thomas Telford’s later innovative planning for theBritish Fisheries Society at Lochbay and Pulteneytown was of little widerinfluence. However, Pulteneytown was the Society’s singular successbecoming the greatest fishing port in Britain in the nineteenth centuryand Telford’s town plan is today recognized as the most original andarchitecturally significant example of Georgian town planning in the northof Scotland.

The Architecture of Improvement: The Planned Villages of the British Fisheries Society, 1786 - 1817

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