A postcard from Oban

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Here’s another from my mother’s collection of old postcards, this time from 1952. It caught my eye when we were clearing her house before Christmas because I knew we were going to Oban very shortly, and I decided to make it our mission to capture the same scene. The Corran Esplanade hasn’t changed much in 50 years, has it?

For completeness, here’s the other side of the card. Miss C. Stroud is Mum, but who was Nellie? I don’t know. Nor do I know why she seems to be a stranger to punctuation, or why a card from Oban, Argyll, was posted in Dunblane, Perthshire, or whether Mum paid the tuppenny surcharge because the card only had a penny stamp. If she was here I could ask her those questions, but now I’ll never find out.

And why were we in Oban? That I can answer! When Mum died in October, we decided that the best way to handle Christmas was to get away from it all, which we did – very successfully – in a beautiful cottage in Connel about five miles to its north. Much more on all that when I get my blogging mojo back properly. It’s still a bit weak at the moment! I hope 2022 is going well for you so far.

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  1. Oban looks nice….and I have been as a child. And also to Connel. We must have camped in a caravan. I remember a beach, a sealife centre and buying an owl made from shells with my holiday spending money. X

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    • The sea life centre closed a few years ago, but there is something called the Ocean Explorer Centre (exhibitions, I think – no creatures). Nothing was open when we were there over Christmas of course. And do you still have the owl? šŸ˜‰ šŸ¦‰

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  3. How fascinating to see the two images together like this! I love old postcards and when they have a personal connection they are all the more meaningful, even if you don’t know who Nellie is (or why she can’t punctuate when he English is otherwise perfect!) The main difference that struck me was the absence of boats in the modern scene. A sign of a long-gone fishing industry???

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  4. So impressed you managed to capture just the same spot, and how lovely you got away. Do hope you are beginning to feel re-charged and ready for the strange world we are living in.

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  8. Oban is a great place to spend time in with a bit of lively buzz about it, even in the winter months. Had a wander through that first photograph middle section a few years ago as that area contains several interesting partly overgrown period ruins including the old Oban Hydropathic Sanatorium halfway up that slope below the round folly.

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  9. How cool to have a new photo of the same scene. Nellie must have been making the most of her time and didn’t want to waste the effort to use punctuation. What is the word in the sentence “going for a ___ tomorrow” ? I can’t make it out. So glad for you that you had a peaceful Christmas.

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