The Drovers' Inn

This slim volume, which has no date or publishing details, is the story of how Lionel Leslie and his wife Barbara discovered and restored a derelict and isolated house in Scotland.

Lionel Alistair David Leslie married Barbara Enever in 1942. In 1945, after he had been demobilised from the Britiush Army, they took a holiday on the Scottish Island of Mull where, at Grass Point, looking out to Oban on the mainland, they discovered a ruin with which they fell in love and decided to restore. First, however, they returned to London for the winter, and Leslie worked as a builder's labourer to learn the skills they would need. Work started in 1946, and soon afterwards they brought their two-year old daughter Leonie to join them. The first chapter of the book describes how they found the building, the next couple describe how they lived there in those difficult, food-rationed, post-war years, and the slow work of restoration, which they did largely by their own hands but with some professional help and some from neighbours. Chapter five recounts some of their boating adventures, and the final chapter is an account of how things stood thirty years later. Two of the photographs show it before and after their endeavour.

The house was built in the eighteenth century, and for much of its life had served as an inn for the cattle drovers assembling there at the ferry for the mainland, but it was bypassed when motorised ferries were introduced, and it had been empty for forty years when the Leslies found it. By chance the ferry site was revived when the seamen went on protracted strike, and since then the Leslies were able to capitalise of the growing number of daytime visitors who came over from Oban by providing teas and through the gallery they opened in which to display his sculpture. It is now (2012) as a self-catering holiday cottage as Old Ferry House.