Scottish Islands Explorer 40: Nov / Dec 2016

Oban
Oban
Roger Butler focuses on ‘the Gateway to the Isles’
Ask a child to sketch out an imaginary coastal
town, you might well receive something
that looked like Oban. A sheltered harbour would
be the centrepiece, with high mountains,
shimmering sunsets and tiers of solid stone houses.
A toy railway and a pier, tiny fishing boats bob in
the bay and gigantic ferries squeeze their way out
to sea. Seagulls fill the sky while tourists tuck into
hearty portions of freshly-cooked crab.
Everyone seems to like Oban. e name might
be derived from the Gaelic equivalent of ‘little bay’
but there’s nothing small about the present-day
harbour. ‘Gateway to the Isles’ is a well-used
strapline, though marketing teams can offer
alternatives. Currently the town is ‘Seafood
Capital of Scotland’, but in the years aer the
Second World War it was oen known as the
‘Charing Cross of the Highlands’.
Today, Oban remains as busy as ever and the
summertime traffic oen grinds to a halt along the
shop-lined esplanade. e view across the bay
looks west to the islands of Kerrera and Mull and
many visitors are unable to resist the temptation
to enjoy at least one boat trip. is might be a
short visit to a seal colony, an aernoon cruise over
to Lismore or a full-blown outing to Iona.
Prehistoric Times
For many decades, CalMac ferries have plied back
and forth and there’s always a tingle of excitement
when the tannoy announces departures to Barra,
Coll, Tiree or Colonsay. However, the area around
Oban is known to have been occupied in prehistoric
times and in 1888 a lake dwelling was
discovered by a marshy tract of ground at the south
end of town.
Six years later, a cave was discovered near the site
of what is now St Columba’s Cathedral. is
contained human skeletons and the remains of
various animals such as deer, oxen, pigs and otters.
Among the piles of fish bones and discarded shells
were ancient stone hammers and crude
implements fashioned from bone. Many centuries
passed before houses were finally established here.
By the 1790s thatched properties were appearing
around the ‘tolerable inn’ which Boswell
described in his tour of the Highlands in 1773. A
post office and customs house were established,
but Oban was still not much more than a simple
clachan and 20 years later the population had
reached just the 500 mark. By 1850 the growing
town - now a parliamentary burgh - was home to
around 1,500 people.
Respectable-looking
A reporter described ‘a village with a roadstead
containing a small complement of shipping boats
and a respectable-looking range of whitewashedhouses
fronting the harbour’. The Duke of
Argyll helped fund development, including a
school, and the population was almost 2,000 in
1861. Today, that figure has been multiplied by
ten times.
Oban became a good example of 18th Century
Scottish town planning, where buildings and
streets tended to be focused around a central
square. The heart of the town is still around
Argyll Square, near the railway station and main
ferry terminal, but steeply rising slopes limited
the grid-iron layouts which were conspicuously
laid out in many other towns during that period.
Prosperity arrived as trade and industry
flourished and the opening of the Crinan Canal
across the top of the Kintyre peninsula linked the
booming markets of the Firth of Clyde to the
Firth of Lorne. One report rather ambiguously
described Oban’s main imports as ‘miscellaneous
goods from Glasgow and Liverpool’, but could be
more specific when it came to exports: ‘pig-iron,
whisky, wool, fish, kelp and Easdale slates’.
16 SCOTTISH ISLANDS EXPLORER NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2016