Eye on Millig: Loch Long hamlet of Glenmallan is no more

This week our Eye on Millig column looks at the history of the hamlet of Glenmallan on the shore of Loch Long: once a small but vibrant community, how home to a major expansion project to enable its MoD jetty to welcome the Royal Navy's largest ships.

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ONCE upon a time there was a vibrant hamlet: now Glenmallan on Loch Longside is the scene of a massive civil engineering project, using giant cranes.

The £63 million scheme is to rebuild Glenmallan Jetty, built in the early 1960s to service the Royal Naval Armament Depot at nearby Glen Douglas, so it is fit for use by the largest ships in the Royal Navy today to load and unload ammunition.

A passer-by would find it difficult to visualise the site as one which formerly hosted a small community, including for some years a well-loved school.

Local historian and Helensburgh Heritage Trust director Alistair McIntyre, who grew up there, says that people first put down roots in the Glenmallan area many centuries ago.

Up on the hillside was a farming settlement known as Stronmallanach. Records prove its presence as far back as the 16th century, but its origins could well be older, possibly much older.

It was abandoned in the mid 19th century, and today there are only crumbling drystone walls to tell of its presence, lost in a tumbled forest of Sitka spruce.

Stronmallanach was probably a casualty of moving to larger farming units at the time of its demise, with another factor being the lack of access to the public road along the lochside.

The road was built in 1777 — some accounts give the date as 1787 — by John, Duke of Argyll, to link his castle and estate at Rosneath with the existing military road from Dumbarton to Inveraray beside Loch Lomond and the Rest and Be Thankful.

After the road was built, people began to settle at suitable places along the way, and one location was a small area of flat land near the mouth of the Mallan Burn.

One of the first recorded houses to be built in the vicinity was Glenmallan House, constructed in the 1820s for John Colquhoun, who was the Sheriff of Dunbartonshire.

Lying close to the Mallan Burn on the south side, the site is very secluded, and few passers-by have ever seen it. More prominent is the lodge house, which stands next to the road.

An unusual facet of the Sheriff’s time there was an account he wrote of his experience when at home of the great Comrie earthquake of 1842, as reported in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal of that year.

A later owner was a Miss Drummond, an admiral’s daughter, and her gardener was Peter McGregor, a descendant of the last farmer at Stronmallanach.

In the 1960s and 70s, an animal hotel was run from the house by Roy and Elizabeth Hart.

The house and lodge were inhabited until later that century, but they have lain empty ever since. The house, and others in the hamlet, tend to use the spelling ‘mallon’, but for consistency in this article I have used ‘mallan’.

Another early house nearby was Strone Tollhouse, located several hundred yards north of Glenmallan House and the hamlet’s most northerly dwelling.

It can be dated precisely to 1829, when it replaced the earlier Morlaggan Tollhouse, built as one of a string of tollhouses on the Dumbarton to Arrochar road after 1807.

Typical of tollhouses, it was built almost next to the road, while at the back it was hard against the steep hillside.

The toll-keeper was appointed on a year-to-year basis, the mechanism being to bid for the right to operate a given toll, a process conducted at the Elephant Inn in Dumbarton.

Bidding was often quite competitive, but at Glenmallan this seems not to have been the case, and Mrs Elizabeth McLellan, a widow, was in post from about 1850 until the national abolition of tolls in 1883.

She lived at the tiny tollhouse with her nephew, Peter, a wood cutter.

The annual rental paid by Mrs McLellan and her predecessors was usually £20, but this fell to £10 after 1853 and the passage into law of the so-called Forbes-McKenzie Act of that year.

This saw tollkeepers lose the right to sell alcoholic drink. Most toll rentals were affected in a similar way.

After the national abolition of tolls in 1883, some tollhouses were sold off, but many were retained by the road trusts, and from 1889, their successors, the county councils.

Strone Tollhouse was retained by Dumbarton County Council, and it served mostly as a tied roadman’s house. As such, though substantially enlarged from the original, it ultimately formed a dwelling-house for John McGlone and his family from the 1920s onwards.

No narrative about Glenmallan can fail to mention the McGlones, and it is mainly thanks to Stella Trainor, a descendant who lives in Canada, that much of the wider story of Glenmallan has come to light.

John McGlone’s father, also John, had first settled at Thorniebank, a small cottage a couple of miles north of Glenmallan, around 1905.

He was not the first of the family to come to the area, however, and Suzy Reid of Suzy’s Castle fame had moved into her unique upturned boat home at Portincaple in the 1880s.

The Old Tollhouse fell empty in 1954, when the John and his family moved along the road to a newly built bungalow, more or less on the site of the former school, a little to the north of the Mallan Burn.

Not far from the Old Tollhouse was Strone Cottage, probably built in the mid 19th century to replace several old drystone and thatched homes located close by.

Owned by Luss Estates, at first it housed agricultural workers, but later saw a variety of tenants. One was George Dalziel, remembered as

something of an eccentric. A keen astronomer, he lived in the house from the late 1920s until about 1950.

After that, it became a home for Nessie McGlone and her daughter for roughly a decade. They were the last occupants.

Along with the Old Tollhouse, the properties were demolished in the early 1960s, when Glenmallan Jetty and the private Ministry of Defence road to Glen Douglas were being built.

South of Strone Cottage was Stronmallan, a substantial half-timbered house built around 1880.

The exterior timbering was painted bright red, contrasting well with the whitewashed walls, and the property was popularly known as the ‘Lipstick House’.

For many years it was the home of the Rae family, whose interests included running the Whistlefield Tearooms, opposite the Inn Buildings.

The most prominent member of the family was Jessie Ronald, now Jessie Nickel, who under the stage-name Glenda Mallon, became a notable singer and musician, studying in London and on the Continent.

Jessie now lives with her husband at St Albans.

The Rae family had a caravan in their grounds, and in the 1950s and 60s, this was rented by Miss Knox and Miss Henderson, both teachers at Hermitage School.

Miss Knox taught music, and Jessie has fond memories of her. They kept in touch until Miss Knox passed away.

A little to the south of Stronmallan was an originally wooden bungalow, owned by a Glasgow family, but rebuilt as a stone-faced bungalow in the 1970s. Jessie remembers Miss Donald, the owner, as “very prim and proper”.

It then became the home of a gentleman with two large dogs, who walked them very early in the morning.

He acted as an alarm clock for Jessie on Sunday mornings, when she needed to rise early, as she was organist at Garelochhead Church from the age of 14.

One method used to wake her was to throw stones at her bedroom window.

Next to the bungalow, on the south side, was Glenmallan School, built around 1929, when it replaced the school of 1926, originally conducted from one of the cottages.

The new school was a wooden building, and was in use until around 1947, when it closed at the same time as several others, including the one in Glen Fruin.

The new roadman’s cottage was built in the grounds. Between this site and the burn was a small area known locally as the Donkey’s Field.

A planned development in 1980 that never came about was the construction of ten holiday chalets.

One of the factors which may have gone against it was the proximity to the RNAD jetty.

Military planners were concerned about the potential dangers posed to civilians living close to such a facility, and this almost certainly is what led ultimately to the demise of the whole hamlet around 2,000.

Alexander’s Bluebird Buses once ran along Loch Longside, and there was sufficient roadside space at Glenmallan to allow them to halt there.

A large concrete ramp still exists for launching boats — Glenmallan is one of the few places along the lochside boasting anything resembling a beach.

Another Glenmallan feature was its role as a communications hub, as it had its own red telephone box.

This survived the demolition of the houses, although it has since been removed.

Today, apart from memories, only Glenmallan House and Lodge remain as visible reminders of what once was there.

Email: milligeye@btinternet.com

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