Hidden history at the Ardgour War Memorial

The Ardgour War Memorial commemorates the men from the area lost during the First World War. While scouting the site ahead of a nightshoot, local photographer Steven Marshall was intrigued by what he saw.

“The Memorial itself is typical of the many that you find scattered across the Highlands, consisting of a granite Celtic cross and plinth mounted on a base of what seemed to be made of local stone… I noticed that the Memorial’s stone base was sitting on what appeared to be a metal ring with several bolts protruding from it… the more that I thought about them, the more I couldn’t help wondering what they had been used for.”

His subsequent research revealed that the memorial was built on the site of a gun battery erected in 1917. Its construction used one of the concrete slabs and steel rings- or ‘holdfast’- used to secure the weapons in place.

The gun battery was intended to provide protection for ships unloading naval mines at Corpach, to be taken up the Caledonian Canal to a US naval base in Inverness. From here they were transported north to be used as part of the ‘North Sea Mine Barrage’, a 230-mile-long mine field stretching from Orkney to Norway, at that point the largest ever laid. The intention was to prevent German U-Boats entering the Atlantic and attacking convoys bringing supplies from the US to Britain. A huge undertaking costing over the equivalent of 1 billion pounds in today’s money, it was largely considered a success.

“So there you have it, a tiny little bit of history hidden beneath the Ardgour War Memorial in the form of a steel ring and some bolts giving a small clue of something that went before. I would never have thought that these incongruous bolts would have been part of what today would be the equivalent of a £1bn military project that is thought to have played a key part in bringing World War I to an end.”

As contributed by Steven Marshall Photography. For more details and close-up photographs of the memorial read the full blog post here. Follow Steven on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Flickr.