Before the quarry, this glen belonged to people. The 15th-century tower of Glensanda Castle - Caisteal Na Gruagaich, the Maiden's Castle - was built around 1450 by Ewen MacLean, 5th of Kingairloch, and served as the seat of the MacLeans of Kingairloch for the better part of three centuries. A community of around five hundred clansmen worked the glen, fished the loch, hunted the red deer. The Macleans backed the wrong side at Culloden in 1746, lost most of their estates to the Campbells, and in 1812 Sir Hector Maclean - the 7th Baronet of Morvern and 23rd Chief - made an extraordinary decision. He emigrated to Pictou, Nova Scotia, and took essentially the entire population of the glen with him. Five hundred people walked away from Glensanda. Sir Hector is buried in Pictou cemetery.

After the Macleans left, ownership passed through English landowners and Glasgow distillers. In 1902 the cotton tycoon George Herbert Strutt bought the estate; his son Arthur lived there until his death in 1977, though his body was not discovered for five years - a measure of how empty the glen had become. Arthur's widow Patricia Strutt was a celebrated stag hunter who reportedly shot around two thousand deer between 1930 and her death, more than any other woman in Great Britain. By the time she sold the estate in 1982, the last solitary resident had died decades earlier and Glensanda was a ruin: a broken castle tower, a few derelict cottages, a wrecked cattle shed. Poachers called it the Larder of Lorne for its red deer and its salmon.

John and Angela Yeoman of Foster Yeoman bought Glensanda in 1982 with one calculation in mind: the mountain Meall na h-Easaiche was made of fine-grained granite, and the world wanted granite. The first shipload left for Houston in 1986. By June 1989 the operation had switched to its signature method - the glory hole. Each blast knocks loose around 70,000 tons of rock. Dump trucks haul it to a primary crusher that breaks it down to chunks no larger than nine inches. The chunks pour into a heap covering a vertical shaft a thousand feet deep and ten feet wide, kept permanently full of rocks. At the bottom of that shaft, deep inside the mountain, a horizontal conveyor carries the granite through a mile-long tunnel to a second crusher on the shore, where the ships are waiting.

The whole operation was designed to be nearly invisible. The pit sits a mile inland and cuts down into the mountain from 1,600 feet above sea level, which means yachts crossing Loch Linnhe see almost nothing of it. By 2100, when the granite reserves are expected to run out, the excavation will have created a new corrie - a fresh glacial bowl in the Scottish landscape, 400 feet deep, where a mountain used to be. Around 160 people work the site, most of them commuting in by boat from Barcaldine near Oban. The castle still stands at the river mouth, an empty 15th-century shell looking out over the same loch the Vikings used to reach this glen of the sandy river. Behind it, the mountain quietly disappears.