Helmsdale

Helmsdale (Helmsdal, Bun Ilidh) is a village on the east coast of Sutherland, in the Highland council area of Scotland. The modern village was planned in 1814 to resettle communities that had been removed from the surrounding straths as part of the Highland Clearances. The River Helmsdale (Gaelic Ilidh) was noted by Ptolemy as Ila, which remains an obscure name. The Gaelic name for the village, Bun Ilidh, means Ilie-foot. Norse settlers called the strath Hjalmundal, meaning Dale of the Helmet, from which the modern village name Helmsdale is derived. The remains of Helmsdale Castle were demolished in the 1970s in order to build the new A9 road bridge. The castle was the location of the murder of John Gordon, 11th Earl of Sutherland and his Countess, Marion Seton, in 1567. They were poisoned by Isobel Sinclair, the wife of Gordon of Gartly. Isobel Sinclair's own son also died, but the fifteen year old heir of Sutherland, Alexander Gordon was unharmed. He was made to marry the Earl of Caithness' daughter Barbara Sinclair. In 1569 he escaped from the Sinclairs to Huntly Castle. The previous bridge, which still stands, was designed by Thomas Telford and completed in 1811. The last force-fire in Helmsdale was in about 1818. Two tributaries of the river were the scene of a gold rush in 1869. The history of Kildonan's gold started in 1818, when a single nugget of gold was found near the Suisgill and Kildonan burns. Late in 1868, a brief announcement in a local newspaper stated that gold had been discovered at Kildonan in the county of Sutherland. The credit for the discovery goes to Robert Nelson Gilchrist, a native of Kildonan, who had spent 17 years in the goldfields of Australia. On his return home, the Duke of Sutherland gave him permission to pan the gravels of the Helmsdale River, and he prospected all the burns and tributaries. During World War II, the Royal Air Force built Loth Chain Home radar station at Crakaig, a few miles south-west of Helmsdale. There was also an RAF Chain Home Low radar station at Navidale, about northeast of Helmsdale.