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| An example of a west coast planned village begun by the Earl of Seaforth, whose
factor wrote in 1794 of the necessity 'to lay out the villages of Ploc and Dornie'.
Four years later the estate was put for sale and eventually bought by Sir Hugh Innes. |
| In particulars prepared with a view to the sale, Plock is described as being occupied
'as a village and fast improving in its value and the number of its inhabitants
and several good houses built and others building.' |
| Here, as in other west coast settlements like Ullapool, tenants were expected
to combine the care of crofts with small-scale fishing. |
| Sir Hugh Innes encouraged the new village. An advertisement in the Inverness Journal
for 16 September 1808 offered feus and 99-year leases in the burgh of Plockton (now
a burgh of barony, with town added to its name): 'It presents an eligible situation
for a fishing station, or any branch of manufacture which requires a number of hands
. . . The proprietor is much disposed to give every facility to any undertaking
which would yield employment to the rising population.' |
| A plan of 1801 shows provision for another street of houses running behind Harbour
and Bank Street, but these were never to be built. Nevertheless, by 1841 there are
said to be 537 residents. |
| Plockton has a unique situation for a west coast settlement. Set on the east side
of a great headland sticking out into Loch Carron, it is protected from the sea
gales and looks onto a safe anchorage where small creeks and islets diversify the
coastline. |
| On the small headland projecting from Harbour Street is a rare survival of a 'traditional'
West Highland cottage, with low walls of whitewashed rubble, a later chimney at
one end, one tiny window either side of the door and a heather-thatched roof. |
| In Innes Street at the south end of the village is a parliamentary church of 1827-8,
harled with ashlar margins; it retains the original pulpit and sloping galleries,
being one of the eight parliamentary original churches in which galleries were built.
Opposite is the single-storey manse, no. 81, now a private house. |
| Trains came in and out day and night with mines and this area of ground is now
known as the compound. It is just recently after 50 years that the village got it
reinstated back into crofting. |
| After the Second World War, the second exodus of young people left the village
- some emigrated, some went to university and some to nursing, so the decline in
population continued. |
| Today we have only 21 inhabitants in the village, four of these
are young children aged between one and twelve years of age. |
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