THERE are many brilliant photographs on the Am Baile website that I mentioned last week.
One shows members of Inchnadamph Sunday School on an outing to Ardmair on August 23, 1930. The vehicle is a Ford Model A lorry - at the time almost new - driven by Donald Corbett, grandfather of the former Highland journalist and editor, Willie Morrison.
At the time, Donald was the chauffeur/mechanic at Inchnadamph Hotel. Mina Corbett, wife of Donald, is one of the people seated on the lorry. Seemingly the lorry's occupants are sitting on benches, borrowed from the garden for the occasion. A great photo.
There are also copies of old postcards of Ullapool. One postcard shows the Morefield Hotel, now demolished. Although the site is now surrounded by houses, it once stood on its own overlooking Loch Broom.
The one of Loch Broom and the Braemore Hills from around 1930 gives a very different view of Ullapool and Morefield from the one today. It is taken from around the top of Morefield Brae and shows the houses of the old Morefield township. Then there were swathes of fields where all the new houses of Morefield and Kanachrine now stand. On the Ullapool side of the river on the west side of Quay Street there are the houses at the top of West Terrace and the coastguard houses. The next street of houses you see is the back of West Argyle Street (Red Row as it was called then).
Aerial photos of Ullapool and Braes from around the late 1950s show the house-building (mainly council) that had taken place by then - West Terrace, Seaforth Road and Ladysmith Street. But it still showed plenty of space as there was no Castle Terrace, no Riverside Terrace, no Morefield housing development.
It would have been wonderful if all that land could have been preserved but housing needs really had to take precedent. So many people were attracted to our way of life and sensibly moved here. They and next generations of local people needed houses to live in, which led to the council building homes in St Valery Place and all of Morefield. Along with private house building (see the old aerial photo of Braes and compare it to nowadays) it adds up to a veritable explosion of new houses.
But it's not as if there aren't still hundreds of acres of empty land around for us to enjoy!
