Lochaber

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Lochaber District 1975-96

Lochaber (from the Scottish Gaelic, Loch Abar) is now a Highland Council committee area based on a former local government district of the Highland region. It is in the western Highlands of Scotland, and includes North Lorne, Glen Coe, Nether Lochaber, the western part of the Rannoch Moor, the Road to the Isles, Moidart, Ardgour, Morvern, Sunart, Ardnamurchan, and the Small Isles (Rùm, Eigg, Muck and Canna).

There is also an earlier sense of Lochaber as a smaller area within the county of Inverness (Inverness-shire), and a yet earlier sense of Lochaber as a district covering an area similar to that of the district of the Highland region.

The district of the Highland region was created in 1975 under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, and defined as consisting of: Ardnamurchan, Ballachulish and Kinlochleven areas formerly within the county of Argyll; and Fort William and Lochaber areas formerly within the county of Inverness. It was one of eight districts in the Highland region, and local government functions were divided between district and regional councils.

Map of Scotland showing the historic district of Lochaber

The district council was abolished, and the area committee created, when the Highland region became a unitary council area in 1996, under the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994.

1 Area committee
2 Lochaber hydroelectric scheme
3 Further reading
4 External Links

[edit] Area committee

The committee area consists of 8 out of the 80 Highland Council wards. Each ward elects one councilor by the first past the post system of election.

The area is currently represented by seven independent councillors and one Liberal Democrat councillor.

[edit] Lochaber hydroelectric scheme

The Lochaber hydroelectric scheme was a power generation project constructed in the western Scottish Highlands after the First World War. Like its predecessor at Kinlochleven, it was intended to provide electricity for aluminium production, this time at Fort William, a little further north. The scheme was initially designed by engineer Charles Meik but after his death in 1923, the scheme’s realisation was left to William Halcrow, by then a partner in the firm originally founded by Meik’s father Thomas Meik.

The project was finally sanctioned by Parliament in 1921, but construction did not start until 1924; the aluminium smelter was established in 1929 and took about 95% of the 82,000kW of power generated.

The scheme harnessed the headwaters of the Rivers Treig and Spean and the floodwaters of the River Spey (plus a further eleven burns along the way). The Laggan Dam (213 m long and 55 m high) contained the flow of the Spean in a reservoir (Loch Laggan). A 4 km tunnel then linked this body of water with another reservoir (Loch Treig) contained by the Treig dam. From here, the main tunnel, until 1970 the longest water-carrying tunnel in the world, an enormous 24 km (15 miles) long and 5 m in diameter, was driven around the Ben Nevis massif. From the western mountainside, down five massive steel pipes, the water rushed towards the turbines in the power house at the smelting plant.