Glen Cannich extends westward from the village of the same name in the heart of Inverness-shire. In the 1920s part of it belonged to the Chisholm estate, where the gamekeeper was Archie Chisholm. It was a remote and beautiful place, a long trough between ranges of hills, unfrequented by many visitors except for a brief period late every summer when the estate owners and their friends came for the hunting and fishing. It was the custom for tradesmen to come up from Inverness in the spring to do maintenance and prepare the buildings for occupancy. In one particular spring, Archie’s wife, Margaret, said she would go along to open the lodge and check that the bothy where the tradesmen would stay was ready for their arrival. As she rounded a corner on the approach to the lodge she heard the sound of hammering, of boards being thrown down, of workmen talking, and, being a shy person, she turned back for home. When she told her husband the men had arrived, he said that was strange, they weren’t expected until the next day, and went along to check. He found the place to be absolutely deserted. Margaret Chisholm was to maintain for the rest of her life that the noises she heard were a premonition of the work to come, for the Mullardoch dam stands now where she had this uncanny experience. There are many strands to the story of the building of the hydro-electric schemes in the Highlands after the Second World War. Mrs Chisholm’s story typifies one strand and also shows how folklore thrives and still seeks to grace the more prosaic facts surrounding an historical event with an indication of their importance in the people’s story.
The founding of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board in 1943 and the subsequent construction of hydro-electric schemes and electrification of virtually all of the country north of the Highland Line was a major event in Highland history in the latter half of the twentieth century. A full account of the technical and political aspects of the great endeavour can be found in Peter Payne’s The Hydro, published in 1988. It is in many respects an official history, done by Professor Payne with full access to Board archives. The story in this book is more of a people’s history: it is very much how the momentous achievement of Highland electrification has been remembered by the men and women who worked on the schemes, and how it was recorded in local newspapers and other sources at the time. I have tried, therefore, to compliment Professor Payne’s account in The Hydro, but have repeated enough of the official story to provide the political and historical framework in which the coming of ‘the electric’, as it was termed in everyday speech, took place.
My own memory of the time when electricity reached the village in Caithness where I was born and raised is fragmentary: I was only four or five years old, but I can recall the sudden appearance of street lamps. We lived in a house where we used Tilley paraffin lamps for illumination and a peat-fired range for cooking; both were then standard fixtures in Highland homes.
The building of the hydro-electric schemes in the Highlands in the three decades after the Second World War – the Hydro Board’s major construction schemes came to an end in 1975 – is a story about rock and cement, frost, sweat and grease, and hard physical labour in a beautiful landscape. There is an heroic aspect to it, as nothing on such a scale had been attempted before; and the dams and tunnels came to symbolise far more than huge devices simply for the generation of electricity.
All the schemes came to be built in the belt of rugged mountain country that extends in a northward sweep from the Kintyre peninsula to the rolling vastness of Sutherland. The watershed dividing the burns and rivers that flow to the Atlantic from those that eventually disgorge into the North Sea lies close to the western side of the mainland. The Highlands are therefore scored by a series of long glens that lie with their heads within a few miles of the western seaboard but whose drainage is eastward. The catchment areas of the Tay, the Spey, the Findhorn, the Moriston, the Beauly, the Conon, the Shin and the other eastward-flowing rivers had all been mapped and surveyed by the end of the 1930s, and found ripe for exploitation. In 1921 the Water Power Resources Committee, chaired by Sir John Snell, estimated that the water power resources of Scotland, mostly in the Highlands, were capable of generating 1,880 million units per annum, or 217,965 kW. Another government committee, the Scottish Economic Committee (Hilleary Committee), examined the Highlands in 1938 and found a potential output of 1,972 million units per year.1 During the 1920s and the 1930s, young engineers out from the Central Belt on hillwalking trips noticed the potential of particular sites and filed away their knowledge for future use. In the eyes of the engineers the glens and straths nursed lochs begging to be dammed, cataracts asking to be harnessed. There would of course be obstacles to be overcome, human and natural, but the engineers were confident that, given enough men and material, they could do the job.
Geology presented problems. Most of the upland had a thin skin of soil and vegetation over unyielding, dense rock of tremendous age. The metamorphic schists and gneisses were also shot through in places with granite intrusions from long-dead volcanoes and faultlines where earth tremors were regularly detected; and the surface had been gouged by ice to leave deep U-shaped valleys, jumbled ridges of clay and boulders, and rounded corries. On top of that there was the climate, but this was ultimately a boon. From the point of view of the engineers, the mountain belt fronting the westerlies was blessed with a high rainfall. In fact, it was drenched, with hardly less than sixty inches a year anywhere and over 120 inches in some particularly sodden spots. There would be no shortage of water, as all the workforce remembered: ‘You’d stand on the scheme and you’d look up the hill and you’d see black spears and then you would look for the nearest bloody shelter because that was the rain coming and when it hit you, my God, it was hard.’2
Neither was the temperature always very comfortable. Snow lay from October to May on the higher ground and frost could strike in any month. Men up in the Affric hills working in topcoats would make a seventeen-mile bus journey down to Beauly and find the locals in their shirtsleeves, basking in a heatwave. And then, of course, there were the midgies, although the winds usually scurrying through the corries at least made them lie low most of the time.
This, then, is the story of the men who built the dams, tunnels, pipelines, power stations, and distribution lines; and of some of the consequences of their labours. I hope that I have not let any of them down in the telling and that they will forgive the errors.