A Little Bit of Coll in the Great Glen

Perched above the village of Fort Augustus, within the grounds of the Free Church, is the grave of Flora Campbell McBean. Her gravestone records that she was from Coll and that she had married the Rev Francis McBean, Free Church minister in Fort Augustus from 1844 to his death in 1869. This church is still used and its windows, edged with stained glass, recall the windows of the Free Church in Arinagour.

Strangely enough, the initials F C M B, for Flora Campbell McBean, are commemorated in the windows of the Coll Free Church. But who put them there? The 1884 Arinagour Free Church was built many years after her death, so it may have been a gesture by one of her Campbell relatives on Coll.
Two previous Coll Magazine articles by Betty MacDougall ("Sorasdal", Issue 6/ 1988 and "Campbell of Cornaig", Issue 10/1992) have recounted something of the history of the Campbells, former owners of Caolas and Cornaig. As Betty explains, the two ends of Coll were not part of the Coll estate and in the late 18'th century Flora's father, Murdoch, bought Caolas while his brother Malcolm acquired Cornaig. Thus began a line of Campbell proprietors which surely contained some of the last representatives of the old Gaelic speaking gentry of Scotland.

In 1861 the then owner and first cousin to Flora, Colin Campbell, created new holdings on Cornaig for the destitute Coll people. An old MacFarlane family rent book in Sorrisdale confirms that whilst Factors were employed to collect the rents, the tenants were allowed to fall behind with payments for a number of poor years towards the end of the century.

The line came to an end in the Second World War era when Colin Buchanan Campbell, a grandson of Colin, sold the two properties and ended his days in Oban. He is remembered in Sorrisdale as a landowner with whom the tenants could freely argue their point and Gaelic was the language of business. His brother or step-brother, Dr Buchanan, known locally as "An Dotair Ruadh" or the red-haired doctor, had lived for these final years at Caolas.

Today Caolas and part of Cornaig are owned and tenanted by the Gaelic speaking descendants of the Coll people who were assisted by the Campbells all those years ago.

Text on gravestone of Flora C. McBean at Fort Augustus:

Here rest the remains of Flora Campbell McBean who died on the 8th of May 1856 aged 59 years.

She was the elder daughter of Murdoch Campbell proprietor of Caolis in the island of Coll, a representative of a younger branch of the House of Argyll and the wife of the Rev Francis McBean first Free Church minister of Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston.

For many years she was distinguished by a quiet and tender walking in all the Commandments and Ordinances of the Lord blameless and died in the full assurance of the hope of salvation.

This stone is erected to her memory by her sorrowful husband in token of his affection and his high esteem of her distinguished worth.