Ballachulish

Quarry Heritage and the Brecklet Trail

The larger of the two slate quarries at the east end of the village is half full of water now, its terraced workings and waste-built harbours left where the last men finished cutting in 1955. They had been at it since about 1693. Above the water stands a restored inclined-plane arch of slate rubble, the Tom Beag arch, which once let loaded wagons run down to the lochside piers and hauled the empties back up. It is the last standing structure from the working quarry, and Highland Council owns it now.

Start at the visitor centre opposite the quarry, which doubles as a café and gift shop. The kitchen does full Scottish breakfasts, homemade soup, toasties, baked potatoes and what it calls its iconic club sandwich, with vegan cheese, "not chicken" and a daily vegan soup for anyone avoiding the meat. The shelves carry slate clocks, Glencoe Photography prints, maps and Scottish-made candles. From the car park the Brecklet Trail climbs steeply above the old workings — 116 metres of ascent over less than two miles — to a slate picnic table and a view down onto the village roofs, the loch and the Beinn a' Bheithir horseshoe, before dropping back through Brecklet past its two churches.

Churches and Village Food

Those churches carry the village's history between them. St John's Scottish Episcopal Church went up in 1842 to Peter MacNab's design, with David MacIntosh adding the chancel some forty years later. It is still in use, with the Revd Amanda Fairclough as priest in charge, and it keeps a set of altar vessels inscribed "Parish of Appine, 1723", reputedly carried by Jacobite troops for Communion before Culloden. Before the church existed, worshippers met in a storehouse during the Penal Laws, or quietly in caves and on the hillsides. A short way off at Brecklet, former St Munda's was built in 1845 as the quarry population swelled, and gained a crenellated tower from John Honeyman in 1880. It closed to the public and was put up for sale in 2023, so admire it from the outside.

The Laroch, on Loanfern, is the pub in the modern village. Recent diners have eaten Isle of Mull scallops, pork belly and salmon risotto there, finishing on crème brûlée; small dogs get a spot in the bar. A few doors along, Quarrier's Kitchen fries fish and chips to take away or eat in, and there is a Co-op at the old station yard for self-catering.

From Laroch to the Mountains

The village grew out of three older settlements — Brecklet, East Laroch and West Laroch — and the quarry name finally stuck when the railway arrived in 1903. The nearest trains now run from Fort William, with the Shiel N44 bus linking the town to Ballachulish Square and the A82 skirting the village on its way to Glencoe. For a full day on the hill, Beinn a' Bheithir gives two Munros, Sgòrr Dhearg and Sgòrr Dhònuill, on a long ridge above Loch Leven. There is a play area at Jubilee Park for anyone not walking, and the local shinty club keeps a team going for Ballachulish, Glencoe and Kinlochleven.

Glencoe in Context

Just east on the A82, the Glencoe visitor centre runs a free exhibition, a cinema and a giant 3D map, with a reconstructed turf-and-creel house and paths into the glen where the 1692 massacre happened.

The Figure from the Bog

In 1880 a man cutting peat in a bog above the loch narrows turned up a 1.4-metre female figure carved from alder, its eyes set with quartzite pebbles and its making dated to around 600 BC, laid under a covering of wickerwork. Nobody is sure who she was meant to be — a spirit of the straits, a fertility figure, an ancestor. She sits now in Edinburgh, cracked and distorted from the day she was lifted out and left to dry.