Blue and gold, metal Ontario Mod badge mounted on a wooden plaque with plate inscribed “1979, The Walter McFadyen Memorial Trophy, Solo Singing, Song Composed in Canada”. From the belongings of the MacDonald/MacCorquodale/MacLean family of Kenovay.
Detailed copy of the original hand-drawn weather chart created by the Meteorological Office of the Air Ministry in London for the morning of Monday 5th June 1944. It includes isobars, windspeeds and weather systems in the north Atlantic and notes on general inference and outlook. On the reverse are rows of data collected in various areas, including Tiree, from which the chart was drawn. These data were used to forecast the break in the weather that enabled the D-Day landings on the 6th June 1944.
Copper Irish half-penny, minted in 1747 and bearing a Hibernian George II. Found in 2022 in the sand at the west side of Scarinish Harbour, in front of the black-roofed house. Accompanying paperwork includes a map, and descriptions of the find and the finder. It is thought that the coin fell from the pocket of a sailor as he came ashore.
Photograph and sample of gutta-percha from a bale found embedded in the machair shore at Sandaig (NL 936 436) by visitor Jennie Hynd in September 2022. The extent of the lichen and vegetation on the bale suggests that it had been there for some time.
Gutta-percha is a stretchy, rubbery material, derived from the latex of the Palaquium gutta tree in Malaysia. During the second half of the 19th century, gutta-percha was imported into Britain in vast quanities and used as insulation for underwater electrical cables, golf balls, chewing gum and root canal treatment. Synthetic materials have since largely replaced it.
Bales of gutta-percha have been washed up on the beaches of western Europe for over 100 years, with many likely to have come from ships wrecked during WWI such as the Japanese liner Miyazaki Maru, which was sunk by a German U-boat off the Scilly Isles in 1917.
Two colour photographs of the front and back of a crude wooden cross, hand-carved from a driftwood branch, probably pine. The back has been fashioned to hang flat on a wall. Found in the dunes at Salum Bay in 1998, it hung in ‘The Wee Church’ at Ruaig.
As there are no pine trees on Tiree, it is likely to have drifted there from Coll or Mull.
Black & white photo postcard of a view of “Scarinish Village” taken from the south in around 1910. Visible in the distance are the manse/care home, school, bakery, The Reading Room/An Iodhlann, Brown’s Store, Mary Stewart, old lighthouse.
Black & white postcard photograph of cattle standing in Loch a’ Phuil in around the 1920s. Houses and barns of ‘The Land’, Barrapol, are visible in the background.
Black & white postcard produced by MacNeill, Post Office, Balemartine in around 1910, showing a photograph of a woman and a girl outside a black-roofed house at “Machrie, Balinoe”. Date-stamped 1919.
Colour postcard of a full flit-boat leaving Scarinish harbour to join the ferry, which would have been at anchor off-shore pre-1915. The image appears to have been created from a hand-coloured glass plate photograph. Date-stamped Aug 1919.
Colour photograph of passengers disembarking from the Twin Otter air service at the old terminal of Tiree airport in 1986.
