Opponents of the wind turbines like to say that nobody has asked the Peallaidh, the shaggy water sprite of Highland folklore whose burn gives the village its name. A few of the oldest residents still leave a bowl of milk on the rocks at the mouth of the burn every first of May, just in case.

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Aberfeldy is a small village on the south-eastern coast of Belden Island, in Lochburn County, just beyond Lochburn City. Founded by Scottish families from Perthshire, it lies at the end of a single road, away from the bustle of the city, and is known today for its church, its sheep and a project of three wind turbines that has divided its residents.

HISTORY

∟ A village from the Highlands

The name Aberfeldy comes from the Scottish Gaelic Obar Pheallaidh, the mouth of the Peallaidh, a shaggy water sprite of Highland folklore. It was given in 1753 by Duncan Robertson, a schoolmaster and preacher from Strathtay, in Perthshire, to the settlement he founded where a small burn runs into the sea at the south-eastern foot of Mount Lochburn. The families who followed him came from the Highlands around the market town of the same name. Since the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746, their country had been disarmed, tartan had been banned and the old clan order had been dismantled, and many saw no future for their children there.

The colonial authorities, who had no use for a steep and stony stretch of coast, granted the land without difficulty. The newcomers asked for nothing more than to live quietly and be left alone, far from the tumult of Lochburn City.

∟ Apart from the city

Aberfeldy never had a port and never needed a lighthouse. The boats were pulled up on the beach, the families fished, kept sheep and cattle on the slopes and grew oats and barley, and they kept Gaelic alive in their homes and in their psalms well into the 19th century. The first church, raised in 1754 with timber from the sawmill of Clearfog Harbor, was also the school and the meeting hall of the village, and it has remained the place where every important matter is settled.

The 20th century barely touched the village. Lochburn County Road 6, its only road, linked it slowly to the rest of the county, and electricity arrived only in 1958, when a line was finally strung along that same road. Many young people left for Lochburn City over the following decades, while the wool, the fish and the church remained at the heart of village life.

∟ The Lochburn Rebellions

When the Crown introduced its tax on timber and fishing in the spring of 1824, the small fishing boats of Aberfeldy were hit as hard as the fleets of the larger ports, and in a village founded by people whom the Crown had once disarmed, sympathy for the rebels ran deep. Yet the village stayed out of the fighting. Its only part in the story is a quiet one.

In the autumn of 1824, after the skirmish at Dunmoor Beach, a few miles along the same coast, fishermen from Aberfeldy are said to have gone down to the shore by night and carried off a few crates of muskets that the rebels had left behind. They brought them to Malcolm Robertson, the minister and grandson of the founder, who had them hidden beneath the floor of the church. When a patrol searched the cottages and the boats of the village the following week, the officer did not think of searching the house of God. Nobody ever said what became of the muskets.

∟ Aberfeldy today

Today, Aberfeldy counts 142 inhabitants, many of whom work in Lochburn City. Since 2026, it is also a village divided. On 3 February 2026, the municipal council approved by four votes to three the construction of three wind turbines on the seafront, a project championed by the mayor, Fergus MacLaren, who was elected on 6 November 2018 and re-elected on 8 November 2022. The aim is twofold: to cover the electricity needs of the village and to sell the surplus to Lochburn City, which has no power plant of its own and imports most of its electricity from elsewhere in the archipelago. The power would travel through a cable laid along LBCR-6. Works began on 16 March 2026.

Supporters see independence, a steady income for the school and the church, and a way for the village to finally stand at the start of the line instead of the end. Opponents, among them the 48 residents who signed a petition, fear for the view over the sea, for the seabirds and for the quiet that the first families came here to find. They also point to the lone turbine of Valbeach, standing idle since the early 2000s, as a warning. The public debate of 12 January 2026 was held in the church, as every important village meeting has been since 1753, and it ended without a vote.

ECONOMY

∟ Wool, fish and small farms

The economy of Aberfeldy still rests on what the first families brought with them: sheep and wool, small-scale fishing from the beach and a few farms on the slopes. The village has no harbor, no factory and few shops, and a large part of its working population commutes to Lochburn City every day.

∟ Wind and visitors

The wind project is meant to become the second pillar of the local economy, with the sale of electricity to Lochburn City expected to bring a regular income to the village. A trickle of visitors, drawn by the church and by the quiet of the end of the road, already completes the picture.

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Version française

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