by flyfifer » Sat Oct 10, 2020 6:03 pm
For what it's worth my reading about Rannoch yielded this.
Kinloch Rannoch
For many hundreds of years, this tiny and remote hamlet was home to a few people who lived a poverty-stricken existence. There were no made roads or bridges in the area.
There was however a drove road from Kinloch Rannoch to Loch Tulla.
In the 1700s soldiers barracked on Loch Rannoch spent a large part of their time trying to apprehend bands of Highlanders who stole cattle and had hidden quantities of arms.
The soldiers met with little support from the locals, and the reputation of the “Rannoch thieves” spread far and wide.
Wade's road and bridge building programme of the 1730s improved communication and access to the area.
The Jacobite defeat of 1745 brought about significant changes.
Estates had been seized from the clan chieftains, who had supported the Jacobite cause, following the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
James Small, formerly an Ensign in Lord Loudoun's Regiment, was appointed by the "Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates" to run the Rannoch estates.
Kinloch Rannoch was enlarged and settled, under the direction of James Small.
The population was mainly soldiers discharged from the army but also displaced Highlanders.
Small was supported by a local schoolmaster Dugald Buchanan and his wife.
Small brought in joiners, masons, wheelwrights, cobblers and smiths to teach their trades to the locals.
Dugald Buchanan was a schoolmaster and Gaelic poet and is commemorated by the large monument in the square in Kinloch Rannoch.
Buchanan worked with James Stuart, minister of Killin, on translating Bible passages into Scottish Gaelic.
Rannoch Station
Prior to the railway and the naming of a piece of railway infrastructure Rannoch Station there was no identifiable place that required a name.
There was a drove road about three miles east of where the station is, at Loch Eigheach, which headed past Loch Ossian north west to Spean Bridge.
This is part of the Road to the Isles.
About six miles east, of where the station is, there was also a drove road from Bridge of Gaur running south west to Loch Tulla.
Very near where the station is, on the west side of Loch Laidon, a drove road made its way west past Black Corrie's Lodge to the Kingshouse Hotel in Glencoe.
It is perhaps easier to think of these routes in reverse and their termination near Loch Rannoch with its "road" links east towards Crieff and the great cattle market.
None of the routes passed through the specific place that is now named Rannoch Station.
I have emailed SRPS to see if they can illuminate the reason Rannoch Station exists.
