Standing Building surveys have increasingly become a part of the suite of work requested by planning authority prior to development. Such surveys include the Old Quay in Campbeltown (CANMORE ID 38826) on behalf of West of Scotland Water in 1999 where a 6m stretch of the original curved quay shown on the 1835 harbour plan was noted and recorded with a written description, survey and video, backed up with documentary and cartographic research (Speller 1999; RCAHMS 1971). Many of the standing building surveys remain as grey literature, which can be hard to obtain, It is worth scrutinising PastMap [http://www.pastmap.org.uk], CANMORE [https://canmore.org.uk], the West of Scotland Archaeology Service Historic Environment Record [http://www.wosas.net] and the Archaeology Data Service [http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archsearch] to find what work has taken place and whether the associated report is available online. Three examples undertaken by Heather James in Argyll include an 18th-century laird’s house at Glennan (CANMORE ID 152206), an unfinished mansion house at Poltalloch and a farmstead at Ardnaw (James 2005a, 2005c, 2006). Although prolific, the Scottish Vernacular Building Working Group have published very few articles on structures in Argyll, which perhaps reflects a bias because most contributors live outside of the region. One article which related to Argyll was on 19th-century sheep folds (Kehane 1985) and another described a corrugated iron building and hooded fireplace on Mull (Callander 1995).
Aerial view of Campbeltown Harbour ©HES
The significant architecture of Argyll has been published in the Buildings of Scotland series (Walker 2000) which includes religious, industrial, nautical and domestic sites (Walker 2000, 484-87). Several standing building surveys have been carried out on buildings of more local interest at the request of the planning authority prior to development or demolition (eg Bailie 2011 and Shaw 2012) or by the National Trust for Scotland (Lelong 2014; Morrison 2011), the Forestry Commission (James 2005c) and the Auchendrain Trust (Regan 2011a). Synthetic papers are rare (but see Parkinson 2004).