Lochaber

For other uses, see Lochaber (disambiguation).

District of Lochaber 1975 to 1996

Highland council area shown as one of the council areas of Scotland

Lochaber (Scottish Gaelic Loch Abar) is one of the 16 ward management areas of the Highland Council of Scotland and one of eight former local government districts of the two-tier Highland region. There are also earlier senses of Lochaber as a district within the county of Inverness (Inverness-shire), as a district within the county of Argyll and as simply a district of Scotland. All senses of Lochaber refer to an area in the west of the Scottish Highlands.

The ward management area is one of five comprising the Highland Council's Ross, Skye and Lochaber corporate management area, which is one of three Highland Council corporate management areas. The Ross, Skye and Lochaber area consists of six out of the 22 wards of the council area and the Lochaber area consists of two wards, the Caol and Mallaig ward, which elects three councillors, and the Fort William and Ardnamurchan ward, which elects four councillors. Each of the other wards of the corporate area is a separate ward management area.

There is also a Ross, Skye and Lochaber constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (at Westminster), but its boundaries are not exactly those of the council corporate management area. The constituency was created in 2005 with boundaries based on those of wards in use during the period 1999 to 2007.

History of local government

As statutory local government areas, the Highland region and its districts were created in 1975, under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, and abolished in 1996. The 1973 legislation abolished local government counties and burghs throughout Scotland and created a new system of nine two-tier regions and three islands council areas. Each region consisted of a number of districts and the islands areas were created as unitary council areas.

The Lochaber district of the Highland region was created by merging the Ardnamurchan district and the Ballachulish and Kinlochleven electoral divisions of the former county of Argyll with the burgh of Fort William and the district of Lochaber of the former county of Inverness. Therefore the boundaries of the district included North Lorne, Glen Coe, Nether Lochaber, the western part of the Rannoch Moor, the Road to the Isles, Moidart, Ardgour, Morvern, Sunart, Ardnamurchan, and the Small Isles (Rùm, Eigg, Muck and Canna).

The 1994 legislation abolished regions and districts and established a system of 32 unitary council areas covering the whole of Scotland, and all of the Highland districts were merged into the new unitary Highland council area.

In 1996 the new Highland Council adopted the areas of the former districts as council management areas, and created area committees to represent them. The Lochaber management area then consisted of eight out of the 72 wards of the council area, each electing one councillor by the first past the post system of election. In 1999 ward boundaries were redrawn to create 80 new wards. Management area boundaries were not redrawn, however, and therefore area committees ceased to represent exactly the areas for which they were named and made decisions. The Lochaber committee continued to have eight members. The area manager throughout this period (1996 - 2007) was John Hutchison.

Ward boundaries were redrawn again this year, 2007, under the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004, and the council abolished its eight management areas in favour of three new corporate management areas and 16 new ward management areas. Each of the 22 new wards elects three or four councillors by the single transferable vote system, a system designed to produce a form of proportional representation, and the total number of councillors remains the same. Various ward management areas, including the Locahaber area, cover more than one ward.

Lochaber used to be known as Abria.

Map of Scotland showing the historic district of Lochaber

Hydroelectric scheme

The Lochaber hydroelectric scheme was a power generation project constructed in the western Scottish Highlands after the First World War. Like its predecessor at Kinlochleven, it was intended to provide electricity for aluminium production, this time at Fort William, a little further north. The scheme was initially designed by engineer Charles Meik but after his death in 1923, the scheme’s realisation was left to William Halcrow, by then a partner in the firm originally founded by Meik’s father Thomas Meik.

The project was finally sanctioned by Parliament in 1921, but construction did not start until 1924; the aluminium smelter was established in 1929 and took about 95% of the 82,000 kW of power generated.

The scheme harnessed the headwaters of the Rivers Treig and Spean and the floodwaters of the River Spey (plus a further eleven burns along the way). The Laggan Dam (213 m long and 55 m high) contained the flow of the Spean in a reservoir (Loch Laggan). A 4 km tunnel then linked this body of water with another reservoir (Loch Treig) contained by the Treig dam. From here, the main tunnel, until 1970 the longest water-carrying tunnel in the world, an enormous 24 km (15 miles) long and 5 m in diameter, was driven around the Ben Nevis massif. From the western mountainside, down five massive steel pipes, the water rushed towards the turbines in the power house at the smelting plant.

Further reading

• Scrambles in Lochaber, Noel Williams. Cicerone ISBN 978 1 85284 234 5

Howat, Patrick, The Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway, Northern Books from Famedram, ISBN 0-905489-43-8, now out of print

See also

• Lochaber axe
• Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway