A new book explores some of Scotland's most fascinating but often 'unremembered' places, writes Sandra Dick

Getting there had involved overcoming the forces of nature, biding time for tides and the weather to align in an act of grace that would allow a small craft to be hauled on to the narrow, shingle beach.

Patience was rewarded. As Patrick Baker paddled his kayak past wobbling purple and white jellyfish and the occasional porpoise, battling to beat the temperamental currents, the deserted island of Belnahua took shape.

Once ashore, he trekked over the beach and the overgrown grass to reach deserted terraced homes where dozens of slate quarry workers and their families once lived. Long since abandoned, the dilapidated walls and rusting machinery remain rooted, crumbling monuments to an almost forgotten age when Scottish island mined slate put a roof over the world.

“Belnahua was very ghostly,” says Baker, an Edinburgh-based outdoor writer whose new book The Unremembered Places (Birlinn) explores some of Scotland’s wild, often overlooked locations and unravels the fascinating stories embedded in their past.

“It was eerie and poignant and beautiful,” he continues. “The journey to Belnahua adds to its mystique. The island has that rare frozen-in-time quality to it.

“Lots of the places I ended up visiting had that same feeling.”

Part travelogue and part social history, Baker has recorded his journeys to locations that have fallen off the beaten track: hidden caves, a quiet Highland reservoir with a deadly human toll linked to its construction, and secluded islands.

Despite doing the footwork to become familiar with each before setting off, often these "unremembered" places still managed to capture Baker off-guard either by their enigmatic beauty or a tiny detail that shed new light on their seldom-told histories.

At Belnahua, once at the epicentre of a mammoth slate industry which saw it and its neighbouring islands send Dalradian slate around the world, Baker picked his way through the "ghost village" with its abandoned homes, corroded machinery, rusted steam-driven crane and flooded quarries.

Beyond the physical remains, he unravelled a much deeper story of island communities surrounded by turbulent waters which carried an astonishing number of vessels – a fair number of which would end up wrecked as they battled against the harsh, stormy Atlantic waters.

“That brutality of the winter storms and their location on the edge of the Atlantic, would have made it an incredible place to live,” says Baker. “At one point the water around Belnahua was one of the busiest watercourses around the UK, which is incredible to think of.”

A series of economic and natural calamities including a storm which Baker describes as being “of epic proportions” devastated the industry, leaving 60ft deep mines flooded by the swell of seawater which drenched their workings, and families with no work or reason to stay.

Once home to more than 200 people at the slate industry’s peak at the end of the 19th century, by the 1920s the island was empty.

“It feels like it has been deserted,” reflects Baker, whose book links the growth of the slate industry with bustling sea traffic and the rise of lighthouses to guide vessels on their way.

“It was a rapid turnaround of being a very populated island with many people living on a tiny patch of land, to being completely deserted within a matter of weeks.

“It has a feeling of rapid desertion to it. It’s quite eerie but fascinating with machinery lying where it was left and no-one going to remove it.

“The houses are there,” he adds. “But what struck me was the row of deserted cottages which housed the slate miners and their families.

“It banks to a small beach that is just footsteps from the front door to the water. I stood there and thought what an incredible place to live, but equally what a very hard and brutal place.

“It’s only really when you visit these places that you can transpose yourself into what it must have been like to live there and experience that.

“And Belnhua is very visceral and very real.”

While some "unremembered" spots are remote and challenging to reach, such as Blackwater Reservoir in Lochaber where he was taken aback by the small graveyard and the human cost of creating the dam, others are far closer to urban life.

The Glen Loin Caves near Arrochar in West Dunbartonshire are the reputed resting point for Robert the Bruce and his army after the Battle of Methven in 1306. However, Baker points out that much more recently they were a focal point for working-class sporting prowess.

For two decades from the 1920s, groups from the hard-working shipyards and poverty-stricken Glasgow tenements made the area their playground, taking up weekend residence in the caves from where they would climb the rocky walls of the "Arrochar Alps".

The climbing clubs they formed would go on to lay the foundations for the sport’s modern standards, techniques and ethics.

However, as years passed, the location of the caves they frequented became largely forgotten; Baker’s search for them resulting in a frustrating challenge over jagged rocks, through pines and across overgrown gashes in the hillside before finally stumbling into the dark, gaping entrance.

“Some of the places are pretty remote and hard to get to which may be a discouragement to people seeking to visit them,” says Baker, as he explains the balance to be struck between drawing attention to secluded, forgotten spots and attracting people to visit.

“We want to share the wonderment we are seeing and share these stories,” he adds, “but we don’t want to degrade the places or their mystery.”

That’s a particular issue for the "wild" islands he visits, dotted across Loch Awe and Loch Shiel, havens for wildlife, some harbouring centuries-old graveyards or, in the case of Eilean Fhianain, once home to Irish missionary Saint Finnan and with its ruined chapel and burial grounds.

Other islands revealed another side to their previously well-documented character.

Baker explored Inchkeith Island, three miles north of Edinburgh in the Firth of Forth, aware of its prominence as a stop-off point for vessels between Fife and Edinburgh since the 12th century but surprised to discover its links to a bizarre attempt to invade the Port of Leith.

“I often had an idea about the story that was going to unravel in a particular place, and then found out other elements,” says Baker, whose book covers eight destinations, each with its own character and significance.

“It was fascinating to find out about Inchkeith’s strategic importance and how, in 1779, it was used as a sort of staging post for a fleet under the command of Scots-born John Paul Jones, who effectively founded the US Navy.”

A squadron of five ships had gathered at the mouth of the estuary near Dunbar, sparking panic in towns along the coast.

Sailing under a commission for the Continental Navy for the American Colonies, John Paul Jones was known for attacking British naval and merchant ships and launching land offensives.

His sights on this occasion, writes Baker, were set on Leith.

Having penned a letter threatening to attack the port, his vessels took anchor at Inchkeith Island to await their next move.

As luck had it, a fierce westerly gale put paid to Jones’s plans. Having been prevented from reaching the port, Jones decided it was “impossible to pursue the enterprise with a good prospect of success”.

Baker, who has previously written about stories and landscape of the Cairngorms, says while the "unremembered" locations explored in his book may seem disparate, they share common links.

“Scotland’s wild histories ... speak of immeasurable social change, of the movement of people through time and landscape,” he writes. “Yet they are often lost, overlooked or passed by.

“They still have cultural relevance, but we don’t tend to give them enough significance. That’s the common theme.”

The Unremembered Places by Patrick Baker is published by Birlinn on May 21