John R Hume explores the history of the village and church of Kinlochleven.

THERE are two Loch Levens (or Lochs Leven) in Scotland. The more celebrated one is in Kinross, and is famous among fly-fishermen for its brown trout, and among the historically-minded for the imprisonment in 1568 of Mary, Queen of Scots in an island castle, from which she escaped with the help of a devoted young lad.

The other Loch Leven is much less well-known, but is notable for its mountain scenery. It is a sea-loch, opening off Loch Linnhe close to Ballachulish. At its head is the village of Kinlochleven, created in its present form in the early 20th century by the British Aluminium Company to house workers in the company’s new aluminiumsmelting works.

When it was built, the village straddled the boundary between the counties of Inverness-shire and Argyll; it is now wholly within the Lochaber area of the Highlands and Islands Council Area. It seems odd to find rows of houses like those to be found in the Lowlands of Scotland in such a romantic Highland setting.

At the time of the first mapping of the area, by the Rev Timothy Pont in about 1600, there were small villages on either side of the boundary, Kinlochmore on the north and Kinlochbeg on the south, both on the track which led from the south to what became Fort William. In the early 1780s a new road through Glencoe bypassed the villages, which thus became backwaters, with no road communication with the outside world. They remained little more than hamlets until the beginning of the 20th century.

At that time aluminium metal was relatively new. In 1896 a new company, the British Aluminium Company opened its first works, at Foyers on the south shore of Loch Ness. This was very successful, and led the company to look for a suitable site to build a larger and more accessible works.

The company was attracted to the Kinlochleven area by its high rainfall and the availability of a suitable site for a large reservoir in the glen to the east. A very large dam, the Blackwater Dam, was constructed, to form the reservoir, with pipes linking it to an electricity-generating station at the works. The process used in the works consumed very large quantities of electricity.

The first works opened in 1909, with raw materials – alumina (aluminium ore), cryolite (used to dissolve the ore in the electric furnaces) and carbon (used in the construction of the furnaces) – brought in by coastal steamers. A narrow-gauge electric railway linked a pier on the loch with the works. A new road round the head of the loch, built in 1927, allowed materials to be brought in by motor lorries and enabled the works to be enlarged, and with it the village. The construction of a new primary school was started, and in 1930 the church which is the subject of this article was opened by the Church of Scotland.

This simple and dignified building was designed by J Jeffrey Waddell, a Glasgow architect who became something of an expert on church restoration. The polygonal chancel of Kinlochleven (not seen in the drawing) echoes the use of this feature in Scots churches of the early 16th century, and this feature gives Kinlochleven a grace it would otherwise lack.

The aluminium works closed in about 2000, apart from the generating station, which now feeds the Fort William works (opened in 1929) via the National Grid. Today, with motor transport so nearly universal, Kinlochleven is no longer seen as particularly isolated, and the fine mountain scenery of the hinterland of the village has made the area very popular with hill-walkers. The church still fulfills a vital role in the community