Colina Campbell in Caoles House, Coll
Photograph of Colina Campbell in Caoles House, Coll.
Courtesy of Mr Hugh MacKinnon
Colina Campbell was the wife of Dr Alexander Buchanan and the daughter of Colin Campbell and his wife Mary Ann MacLean. Her father, a landed proprietor who owned the estates of Cornaig and Caoles on the Isle of Coll, was also the tenant of Balephetrish farm for some twenty years from the 1840s to the 1860s.
In 1856 Colonel Hugh MacLean lost his estates on Coll. Five years later several families evicted from the centre of Coll were given sanctuary on the Campbell estates in the east end of the island. Some fifteen families removed their cattle and effects to their new home on the same day.
According to a Gaelic poem in the ‘Handbook to the islands of Coll and Tiree’, it was Colina herself who offered them aid, although she was barely twenty years old at the time. She died in 1930 aged eighty-nine.
Black and white photograph taken in Caoles, Coll.
Colina Campbell (1841-1930), wife of Dr Alexander Buchanan, Medical Officer for Tiree, photographed in Caoles, Coll.