Durness.org THE PAST AND PRESENT OF DURNESS
Loch Croispol Schoolhouse
About The School....
From the GUARD report and other sources....
The Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), established in 1709, commissioned the construction of a schoolhouse at Loch Croispol which was completed in the 1760s. As a parish school it was operated by the church, and Kirk accounts (Graham Bruce, pers. comm.) provide some details on money being spent on the building and repairs to a bridge (likely to have crossed the water course east of the school) in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.The First Statistical Account of Scotland (1791-99) describes a schoolmaster, Mr. Thomas Ross, 'approved for his diligence and success', who ran the school with a roll of 45 pupils (Thomson 1799, 584). The account also suggests that the building was in the process of repair and that it consisted of at least two rooms: a room for the master and a school room (ibid 583-4).
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The Second Statistical Account of Scotland shows that the school remained in use in the 1830s, although 'a considerable number of cottars and poor tenants, who have access to the parochial school, have not of late years been much alive to the benefits of education' (Findlater 1834, 102).
A dispute around 1841 involving the schoolmaster and the local community, of which little is currently known, appears to have left the school without pupils. Local scholars were instead sent to the school at Ceannabeinne, approximately 6 km to the east. The Kirk Session was unable to dismiss the master despite going to the Court of Session in Edinburgh. He continued in post with no pupils until 1861, at which time an Education Act adjusting the terms of employment of teachers finally allowed this schoolmaster to be pensioned off. It is likely, that the school buildings were abandoned at this point. (Graham Bruce, pers. comm.).
The structure is not listed in the National Monuments Record of Scotland. However, an assessment of its historical value by Andrew Wright, a chartered conservation architect, has identified it as possessing some architectural significance, in terms of an eighteenth century schoolhouse and in particular noted the high standards of construction employed by the masons.
In the environs of the schoolhouse, particularly on the higher ground to the south-east, are the remains of cultivation ridges that probably relate to Cnocbreac township. The township buildings most likely occupied the lower, sloping ground to the south-east, between the schoolhouse and the Manse, until the settlement was cleared at some point in the 1840's (Graham Bruce, pers. comm.).
The schoolhouse occupies what would have been a fairly central position for schoolchildren attending from the nearby townships of Borralie, Borralie Beg, Cnocbreac and Clashneuch. These links to surrounding settlements are attested by a footpath which leads westward through a now-blocked gap in the stone dyke immediately south of the schoolhouse, climbing along a natural terrace in the limestone outcrops above the loch shore. A hollowed lane leading between parallel dykes from the Manse attests to the close links between the parish minister and this church-run school.
A small bridge, roughly constructed of slabs, spans the burn at the foot of the lane leading from the Manse and a short distance upstream from a modern wooden footbridge. As late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Kirk accounts record expenditure on repairs to a bridge relating to the schoolhouse, it seems likely that at the time the burn was broader and more unruly and that this slab-built bridge was built after it was canalised and narrowed.