The Ferry Stores - 1

The Ferry Stores is the only shop on Western Ardnamurchan. The next nearest shops are at Acharacle, 50 minutes by car, or in Tobermory, a 35-minute ferry ride away. The shop has always prided itself in offering a wide range of goods, as befits an establishment serving such a remote area.

The Ferry Stores is nearly 100 years old, though there was an earlier shop on the site. What is now the house was the original shop - you can see the original entrance between the two near windows on the ground floor. The site occupies part of Croft 67, Ormsaigbeg, held by a Dougald Mackechnie at the beginning of the 20th century. His father may have been called MacEachrainn: the family seemed to use the two surnames interchangeably. Dougald, as well as being a crofter, was a coal merchant with his own boat which he used to bring in coal from Troon. He stored the coal in a ‘coalree’ on the site of what is now the shop. The access road to his croft house, now called Bay View, ran up to the right (east) of the coalree, across land now occupied by the existing shop store room.

Dougald’s sister married Duncan Cameron who was a ferry man. Duncan fell out with Dougald who would not give him land upon which to build so he obtained a plot on the adjoining croft 66, the MacCallum croft, where he built the Ferry House in the 1880s. Duncan was drowned off Mull in 1910, after which the Ferry House passed to his son, Lachlan. Lachlan also took on the ferrying business, taking passengers out to the ships which stopped in the bay and across to places like Tobermory.

On the site of the present Ferry Stores house there was a cottar’s cottage inhabited by Allan Campbell. Allan was called “a’bhuth”, meaning “the shop”, since he operated a small business “out of his front or back door”. Allan must have been related to Lachlan Cameron because, when Allan also drowned, Lachlan inherited the cottage and his business. He demolished the cottar’s cottage, moving Allan’s shop into rooms in the Ferry House while he built the Ferry Stores on the cottage site, completing it in 1912.

Lachlan Cameron built the shop so that, if the business failed, it could be used as a dwelling house. It was not until 1930 that Lachlan bought ten poles, largely occupied by the existing shop building, from the Ardnamurchan Estate.

The Camerons had a shed beside the jetty. The bothy on this land, to the south of the Ferry Stores, now used by the Jetty Committee, was built by the estate, probably in the 1890s. John Mackechnie, brother of Dougald, lived in it at one time, as did others of the Cameron family, even though it occasionally flooded. It was also used by the salmon fishery.

When Dougald Mackechnie died in 1934/5, Croft 67 passed to Lachlan, as did the coal business. Thereafter the croft house, now called Bay View, was not occupied by the family though it was often let to others.