Blackwater Dam Graveyard, (Kinlochleven) - Did You Know

Blackwater Dam graveyard is one of the most stories I have heard about my homeland and one of the saddest! All about a young Irish itinerant by the name of Patrick McGill who became a poet from County Donegal.

The Blackwater Dam, the last project in Scotland that didn’t use heavy plant

In reality they were making one loch out of three, with a dam that was over 900 metres long. The Blackwater Reservoir – 75 feet deep, nine miles in length – would eventually contain 24,000 million gallons of water.

In the little fenced graveyard lie twenty-two graves, some with names etched on them, some without, set in amongst the heather and rocks.

Here lay the remains of some of those who had died in the building of this great dam, and the reservoir that lay behind it. Some names are scratched on the stones – John MacKenzie, W. Smith, Darkey Cunningham, and curiously, Mrs Reilly, a lone woman in this male-dominated environment.

Patrick McGill wrote “We were men despised when we were most useful, rejected when we were not needed, and forgotten when our troubles weighed upon us heavily

MacGill writes of one incident; “That night Maloney was handed his lying time and