*My home for the night with some of the people who used to work here*

(Adapted from a script for a YouTube Video, video linked at bottom)

Location: Graveyard, early evening

Bill was always in a hurry to start work, he lifted his pick and drove it into the rock which we had blasted on the day before. As he struck the ground there was a deadly roar; the pick whirled round, sprung upwards, twirled in the air like a wind-swept straw, and entered Bill's throat just a finger's breadth below the Adam's apple.

One of the dynamite charges had failed to explode on the previous day, and Bill had struck it with the point of the pick, and with this tool which had earned him his livelihood for many years sticking in his throat he stood for a moment swaying unsteadily. He laughed awkwardly as if ashamed of what had happened, then dropped silently to the ground.

The pick slipped out, a red foam bubbled on the man's lips for a second, and that was all.

We turned him over and straightened his limbs, then hurried off for a muck-barrow to move the body. On coming back we discovered that some person had stolen the man's boots.

- Children of the Dead End, Patrick MacGill

--

Just over 100 years ago about 3000 men lived, worked and died here in Scotland all year round in horrendous conditions. Many of those men were Irish and one of them Patrick MacGill wrote a book called Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy.

It’s a story that makes Cormac McCarthys The Road seem quite cheery by comparison. And it’s a book that brought me to this place to try and understand the misery that thousands of my countrymen and women endured just over a century ago and to spend a night here with the ghosts of the past.

But we’ve got a bit of a Journey to get here first.

That morning, the village of Kinlochleven, Scottish Highlands.

Something that needs to be said is that this book in written not as a standard autobiography but as a semi-fiction were Patrick MacGill attributes the events of his life to a young man called Dermod Flynn.

The book was published 110years ago in 1910, so a lot of the people in it would still be alive, so maybe he wanted to protect their identifies by using different names.

Or as we say today “based on a true story”

This is Kinlochleven hydroelectric plant, which plays a part in our story as I’m following the massive water pipes back up into the mountains.

But our story doesn’t start here. It actually starts in Donegal, Ireland in the late 1800’s, a few decades after the great famine.

It was a terrible time to be Irish, there was widespread poverty and injustice.

Young Dermod lives at home with his family. After attacking his bully of a teacher with a stick, it’s decided that at 10 years old, it’s time for him to go out to earn money for the family working in the fields for the neighbours.

When he is 12 years old his younger brother Dan dies in the middle of winter from some kind of fever. His parents are so poor that they don’t even call for a doctor. They did have money, but they needed most of it to pay rent to the landlord or they would risk loosing their home. Many of the mostly English landlords back then were incredibly unsympathetic to the plight of their tenants.

So Dan is given a drink of hot milk, put to bed and he’s dead before the morning this is Dermod’s first experience with death. The first of many.

At 13 years old Dermod is made to leave home and look for work and on the road he meets Norah Ryan, one of his schoolmates who also is having to leave home to look for work.

Dermod is madly in love with her (he describes her as looking like an angel). But he isn’t brave enough to tell her and ends up loosing contact with her in Scotland. Over the following years he tries repeatedly to track her down, eventually finding her in Glasgow years later.

But more on that romance later on.

After working in horrible conditions on various farms in Ireland, Dermod like millions of other Irish around this time, eventually leaves looking for better work elsewhere and he ends up in Scotland.

In Glasgow he gets one of his first jobs after a railway worker is cut in half by a train.

“I clambered up a railway embankment near Glasgow with the intention of seeking a job, and found that a man had just been killed by a ballast engine. He had been cut in two; the fingers of his left hand severed clean away were lying on the slag. The engine wheels were dripping with blood. The sight made me sick with a dull heavy nausea. All the men were terror-stricken, and a look of fear was in every eye. They did not know whose turn would come next.

A few of them stepped reluctantly forward and carried the thing which had been a fellow-man a few minutes before and placed it on the green slope. Others pulled the stray pieces of flesh from amidst the rods, bars, and wheels of the engine.

One old fellow lifted the severed fingers, and counted each one loudly and carefully as if some weighty decision hung on the correct tally of the dead man's fingers.

"A bad sight for the fellow's wife," said the old man to me. "I've seen fifteen men die like him."

- Children of the Dead End, Patrick MacGill

Naturally, after seeing just how deadly this work could be, Dermod immediately runs to the manager and offers himself as a replacement worker. It just shows you how desperate for work he was.

Later he hears about good work going in Kinlochleven in the Highlands and walks about 100miles to get there. He actually follows a lot of what is now called the West Highland Way.

He stops at the Kings Inn, in Glencoe, it’s still there today, but now called the Kings House Hotel. He also seems to walk up and over the Devils Staircase and down into Kinlochleven.

There he finds an army of workers living in a makeshift town in huts with mud floors and doing backbreaking work on the land here.

*Kinlochleven in the early 1900s was an industrial wasteland during the construction of the Blackwater reservoir*

In the early 19th Century The British Aluminium Company built the aluminium smelter in Kinlochbeg on the Argyll side of the River Leven and founded the village of Kinlochleven for its employees. Smelting aluminium requires a great deal of electricity and to this end - between 1905 and 1909 – they created the Blackwater Reservoir by damming the Black Water River and merging 3 lochs together to create the massive 9 mile long Blackwater Reservoir.

The building of this dam was the last major project in Scotland that was built without machinery. Instead it was built using the backbreaking labour of 3000 men, many of them what were called Irish navvies. The poorest of the poor and the most desperate. Hard men living hard lives and doing hard dangerous work.

Mostly it seemed to involve blasting rock, breaking rock and moving rock. In the book Dermot Flynn says they didn’t even know what they were working on , nor did they care, all that mattered was the pay packet they received each week that often was spent on alcohol and lost gambling. Fighting was common in the evenings, drunk men squaring up and battering each other into unconsciousness.

Alcohol to numb the mind to the harsh life they lived, gambling other to give them a fleeting spark of hope and fighting to make them feel alive.

The long days, harsh conditions, lack of safety standard and often drunk men meant that lots of accidents and deaths occurred. Men crushed like ants by heavy machinery or falling rocks. Loosing fingers, arms, legs or too often their lives. Or dying from cold during the night in their miserable huts.

Sandy

This happened to one man in the same hut as Dermod, his name was Sandy and he was probably around 40-50years old. He dreamed of owning his own place on the Isle of Skye. But he didn’t have good health and the work he was doing didn’t allow him the recovery he needed. During the winter he was forcing himself ou of bed each day to go and work in the freezing cold

One night when Sandy realised he wasnt going to recover, he breaks down and cried as he realises he won’t live to see his dreams fulfilled.

Two days later he dies during a particularly cold night while huddled together for warmth with the other men.

A Cold Lonely Death

Another man got fired on the spot for punching his manager and headed off into the mountains at night in winter

His body was found in spring by a shepherd, it was sticking out of a thawing snowdrift and scattered around him were the half burnt matches he had been desperately trying to warm himself with before he succumbed to the cold.

Some of the men, perhaps those with no families to collect a body, ended up here in this graveyard, built just a few hundred meters from the dam.

The Graveyard

“There was a graveyard in the place, and a few went there from the last shift with the red muck still on their trousers, and their long unshaven beards still on their faces. Maybe they died under a fallen rock or broken derrick jib. Once dead they were buried, and there was an end of them.”

- Children of the Dead End, Patrick MacGill

Eventually it’s his writing that allows Dermod Flynn, or really Patrick MacGill to escape this life. He starts writing about fights and incidents that happened here and sending them to newspapers who paid him for them. This allows him to leave and begin a better life.

By the way if you don’t want to hear a major spoiler for the book you might want to skip the next part.

Finding Norah

And as for Norah Ryan, the girl he was infatuated with as a teenager. Well years later he traces her to Glasgow where he spends months on the streets looking for her.

And the book ends with him finding her.

But he finds her on her deathbed after being assaulted by a group of men. And it turns out that her life had been no less cruel than his, living in poverty and selling herself on the streets on Glasgow

And thus ends the book.

After The Dead End

But Patrick MacGill goes on to be a successful Author. He also served in the First World War and wrote another book about those experiences Called the Great Push, which I’ve just finished reading. It was even more grim than this book.

He was wounded in 1915, then in a strange twist recruited to work in British military intelligence in MI7 creating propaganda and producing press releases.

After the war he married Margaret Gibbons, they had 3 daughter, Patricia, Christine and Sheila

He died in Florida aged 73 having emigrated to USA in 1930 to try and pursue a writing career in Hollywood.

So someone who went through a terrible start in life, but reventually managed to some through it and live a full life.

There’s maybe a lesson in there for all of us.

Based on a YouTube Video From 12th March 2025 https://youtu.be/Nq480P1xQD4

The Place in scotland where irishmen worked to death

stephen j reid