A ONE PLACE STUDY and growing ARCHIVE ON THE PEOPLE AND PLACES OF THE PARISH OF ARDCHATTAN [Glen Creran, Barcaldine, Benderloch, Connel, Bonawe, Glen Etive] by Oban NORTH ARGYLL
An exploration into the natural and social history of the area
[we would very much welcome anyone else's input into this
project - its very much the start of a work in progress and is for everyone to share and join in with - email us here]
Contact us
Who are we? : Tim and Jill Bowis
Where are we? : Kintaline Farm, Benderloch, Oban, Argyll PA37 1QS
Why are we doing this? : We have always been fascinated with the history of the farm and the people who have worked here in the years gone past. We are aware of knowledge and experiences others have had but never got around to writing things down. We are painfully aware that working so hard here on the farm that we are not as knowledgeable about our local area as we should be but realise that it represents an encyclopedic microsm of Scottish history.
We have been working away at the genealogy of our families in other parts of the country and found wonderful sites that others have put together about parishes and areas that our ancestors lived and worked in. Being unable to travel to take our families further back in time we turned our attention to the farm and this area. There is almost nothing collated about this area so hopefully this site will prove useful to people in the future, looking for information about their ancestors, and we can repay a small portion of debt to everyone else who have put online information that has been useful to us. It is also an intensely interesting project to be involved in.
By creating this website it forces us to focus our minds, identify what we need to learn more about [everything] and a repository for the information we find. It also allows us to share it with anyone else who is interested and, hopefully, will trigger a great deal more interesting information and photographs from others.
We would love to hear from ANYONE who has a story to tell about this area - growing up, living here, ancestors who hailed from these parts, holidays here - anything at all. If you are online PLEASE go to the forum and share . If you have documents or images you can copy and share there is a growing archive here at the shop on the farm which everyone will be able to access.
If you think that something we have included or written is wrong - please do not just tell us off from the other side of your screen - get in touch and do it properly. We want to know.
We will be concentrating on the area around the farm, predominately, to start with, so if your interest lies with other parts of the parish PLEASE, for everyones sake, get involved in collating the information, images, and people from your favoured area. If you wait for me it will take forever.
We cannot promise that this site will grow fast or be updated frequently, especially at our busy times, but we will be working on it all the time in some way or another and will look after any information we get very carefully.
If you have any old photographs to share the best thing is to get someone to take a digital picture of them, or to scan them, and send that to us. That way your precious photograph is not left to the vagaries of the Post Office, and it can be added to the site much more easily.
If someone out there can help us set up a Coppermine Gallery we would be able to craete a wonderful area to share your images.
We are working on creating searchable databases of the various sources of information thanks to someone's very kind help. If you would like to help with this please get in touch
There are lots of aims and ideas for the direction of this site
- for example creating maps through the ages showing where people had lived and worked ;
transcribing old documents, the monumental inscriptions,
researching references in the archives
taking images around the parish
contributing and sharing certificates - any you have will have more than your ancestor on it, share it with us. We have permission to publish them online here.
