Hi all - on my holiday travels in the west coast, I chanced upon a couple of buildings and some cabling - is it telephone or electricity - I'm thinking the former.  Anyone have anymore information?

The buildings are located at Keillmore, south of Tayvallich on the Sound Of Jura NR688801.

Also noted a watch building near Skipness, but unfortunately didn't get a photograph.

Odd, certainly looks as if it could be a submarine cable though strange that so far from the shore, two buildings and so far from the road.

GPO/BT tended to use VHF then UHF links across to the smaller islands.

Are they power cables?  In the last pic there appears to be 3 cables - 3 phases?     The buildings could have held small sub stations to boost the voltage.

Never know what will show up in an aerial view

http://binged.it/O5fWro

Unfortuantely, Bing maps appear to use a parameter that this Forum is unable to allow in posts, so the embedded view cannot be shown

I have limited access to some large scale OS maps of the area, but they do not even show little squares where these two building lie (they often show and identify older features, but failed miserably this time), but they gave an 'eyeball on the map' location of the spot, which might make other searches a bit easier:

Full Grid Reference:   168785.275, 680206.594

100m Grid Reference: NR 687 802

Latitude, Longitude: 55.96, -5.70

Is that a third building a short distance to the north?

Any suggestions for the white objects at the water's edge?

I didn't see a third building.  There are lots of rock formations in the area as well, so that may be what can be seen here.  

It's very strange.  If submarine telephone cable then why two buildings?  If one was a later addition then you would expect some difference in style or aging to show but they look contemporaneous.  I would have expected a cable on land to be heading up towards Tayvallich and beyond but in that ground the trench for a cable duct should be visible.  Even if they used self burying cable then you would expect a manhole or another building where it meets the road as well as some cable markers after that.  They could be joining two submarine cables but where to, they might as well run a single cable from Jura.

Did you notice the size of the cable cores?

If for power, each of the cores/phases should consist of quite a large cross section of copper. That's why these days such cabling is very nickable for the desperados, even when it's live! Rather than sub-sea island links, these could be the main incoming power feeds to the buidlings to carry power in for.....whatever!

Comms and data cables usually consist of multiple smaller cores as there is no requirement to carry any heavy electrical AC load.

Anyone had a scan of the opposite shore on Jura using Apollo's Bing link? There appears to be a few farm/buildings but with the highest resolution it's difficult to see anything that could be related.

Although I do not have any personal experience with this type of cable, unfortunately one thing I can say is that you need to be in the business to identify them in detail by eyeball from a pic - and even more so from what amounts to remains.

The problem is that undersea power or data cables look (to the untrained eye) very similar, because the majority of the structure is actually armour and reinforcement around the active portion.

Even a single fibre-optic cable for undersea use is as thick as your arm due to the armour and waterproofing. Even the 'lightest' have to be able to offer at least token resistance to being dredged up by errant anchors, and other mistakes made above them.

I thought I had made a lucky strike earlier, with a defence document that claimed the information it contained (which included drawing showing the cables' locations) dated back to the late 1980s - it's hard to date those little buildings of course, but they are reasonably fresh and clean looking, so 1980s would be reasonable as a date they were in use.

But no luck.

Although numerous cables are shown, and some for the islands in the area, there is nothing at the location being considered:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/345830/0115110.pdf

(You might want to download this, as I suspect it will disappear at some point.)

So...

From this we can probably conclude that this site predates the 1980s, and that it was out of action by the 1980s, or it would have been detailed in this doc - not much, but at least it might be something to help focus more detailed searches on earlier dates, and have some confidence.

It's not likely to be later, as the doc also states it includes cables in place up to 2004.

We should not forget the possibility that the there could have been an MoD or similar facility on the site, possibly unmanned, and the two buildings were merely substations providing terminations for underground power cables, and that there is no undersea aspect to this site.

If it was Cold War era, it is unlikely to appear on any OS mapping, since the MoD has only abandoned the old policy of not marking its installation on such mapping recently, say the past decade or two in round figures, so if this site was abandoned as the Cold War fizzled out... it will not show up on any later OS maps.

At least, not with any description, although the presence of the small buildings may be recorded at some future time.

I'm not suggesting ruling out the undersea aspect - merely suggesting a little thinking 'out of the box' and some more open minded thoughts, just in case

Just checked my 1980 Imray sailing chart of the area.

There is a power cable shown running from Rubha Riabhag at Keillmore to Rubh'a Chamais, south of Lagg Bay on Jura.     This would appear to be at the right spot.

I can see the two buildings on the 1988 aerial image.