Employment for local craftspeople
A contemporary Oban Times account, cited in the academic history of the tower, said McCaig intended the work to provide employment for masons and other artisans when work was scarce. Later local and national heritage records repeat the winter-employment purpose.
A public ornament and viewpoint
The unrealised central tower was to include a public viewing platform. Contemporary reporting described the scheme as an ornament to the town and a public acquisition. This public aspect matters: the project was never only a private family memorial.
A memorial to the McCaig family
McCaig’s will proposed statues of himself, his parents and siblings. The family memorial purpose became more explicit after his death, but the statues were never made. It is therefore accurate to call family commemoration one of the project’s purposes, not the only purpose.
Interpretation, not certainty
Historians can place the monument within Victorian civic ambition and a wider Scottish tradition of monumental architecture. Those are reasoned interpretations. Claims about McCaig’s private emotions or vanity go beyond what the surviving evidence can prove and should be presented as interpretation rather than fact.