The Arisaig estate papers recently transferred to Lochaber Archive Centre from the West Highland Museum by agreement with the Museum, in order to make them more accessible to researchers, have now been fully arranged and catalogued and are available for consultation by researchers at the centre. They are an invaluable resource for information about the house and estate between 1850 and 1993, and include legal papers and leases, property documents, factor’s correspondence and photographs, including several showing the house after it was gutted in a disastrous fire in 1935 (see picture), which is believed to have started in the kitchen chimney.
As well as estate papers, the collection includes the personal papers of the Astley Nicholson family that owned the estate. Especially interesting are the papers of Constance Astley (1851-1935), particularly her extensive diaries which cover the period 1883 to 1901 and give a very full picture of life in Arisaig House and the Arisaig area in this period, and which also contain many photographs, drawings and contemporary newspaper cuttings. Two of the diaries are devoted to a voyage Miss Astley made to New Zealand in 1901-2. She also maintained a wide correspondence, some of it with well-known Victorian figures, and the collection includes letters to her from the poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) and the opera singer Jenny Lind (1820-1887), known as the ‘Swedish Nightingale’.
As well as the Arisaig papers, the West Highland Museum has also agreed to transfer other valuable and interesting collections to Lochaber Archives, all of which have now been catalogued and are available to researchers, including Jacobite correspondence from the seventeenth century onwards; papers of the Ben Nevis Observatory; the estate and family papers of Macdonell of Lochgarry; the Macdonald of Glenaladale papers and the papers of Nigel Banks Mackenzie, a Fort William lawyer who was heavily involved in the promotion of the West Highland Railway.
Alex Du Toit, Lochaber Archivist