Taking on a peninsular outlook

mindset changed by the inexorable sweep of the bridge. John Macleod

looks at the challenges ahead

OFF THE east coast of Harris, some 10 minutes' drive from Tarbert,

lies the Isle of Scalpay and the car-ferry thereto. Scalpay, at first

sight from Tarbert's harbour, appears unprepossessing -- low, brown,

barren. But, as you bowl over the switchback road to Kyles, up hill and

through bend, past winding dykes and little white houses, you see

Scalpay's main village, a great huddle of cottages, stores, piers and

assorted utilities. You reach the narrows. You reach the ferry-slip. And

CalMac's swift bow-loading ferry, the MV Canna, duly wades across the

sound.

So you step on to Scalpay, and you find yourself in a distinct and

wonderful Hebridean community. Harris is gaunt and solid. Scalpay

appears to float on the sea, a stream of reefs and headlands, shimmering

inlets, islets in their tail. Harris has an aging people, wearily quiet.

Scalpay, supporting more than 400 of a population -- an astonishing

figure for such a small landmass -- hums with activity; it boasts

magnificent houses, large cars, a remarkable quantity of young families

and children, and gaily painted fishing boats at the North Harbour quay.

Scalpay has, for many years, proved a prosperous and thriving place in

comparison with its near neighbours. The reasons for this could merit

another article altogether, but her success is founded on three grounds

-- the rich fishings about her capes, the supreme seamanship of the

Scalpay people, and the long-term exercise of gifted local leadership by

men of a drive and vision many other West Highland communities would

have made sure to smother.

The people of Scalpay have not been long here. Historically, it

supported but one or two families; there were only half-a-dozen souls

here when the fugitive Bonnie Prince Charlie camped briefly on the site

of the present Free Church manse. But there came the Clearances. And,

decanted on Scalpay, from the lovely oceanic isles of the Sound of

Harris -- green, fertile, now emptied for sheep -- came a new

population.

They knew no more of rich swards, deep arable, the necessary resources

for rich agronomy. So they turned their faces to the sea, and became

fishermen. Over many decades the Scalpaich made themselves great. And

they have wrought for themselves a unique and clear identity -- not

Harrismen, not Lewismen, but something blending the best features of

both. For Scalpay stands apart. Scalpay is an island.

OH, BUT not for long. A bridge is coming to Scalpay -- soon, certainly

before the end of the century. Civil engineers have agreed its line; due

authorities have agreed in principle to fund it. A simple single-span

concrete affair, crossing the Sound at its narrowest, a few hundred

yards west of the present ferry route. And then the Scalpaich will have

a new freedom. They will no longer be bound by the ferry timetable. They

will no longer be bound to Scalpay on the Sabbath, when the Canna does

not run.

They could then blast over to Stornoway for the day, for the night,

and return when they please. If the local preaching did not please them,

they could worship at Tarbert. The young folk could even go to a pub

after tea. (Scalpay is dry.) Scalpay's merchant will find himself in

stiff competition with Harris shops and Harris vans.

It will be the end of a great deal, this bridge. It will slowly erode

the seamanship which all the Scalpaich -- even these lads without any

interest in fishing -- possess and exercise. Only a few weeks ago,

indeed, when I missed the last ferry, two Scalpay boys took me across in

a tiny aluminium dinghy -- a hair-raising venture; we drifted in the

tide, and at length landed below a low cliff, over which we had to climb

and haul the boat with us. It was left above high water for their

return; the lads were making for Stornoway and a football match, and

would be too late home for the Canna's last sailing of the day.

Such ploys will be history when the bridge comes.0

UNTIL very recent times, the sea -- not merely for Scalpay, but for

all townships on this eastern seaboard of Lewis and Harris -- was not an

alien element, not a barrier, but a terrace and a boulevard. They

perceived their world as a coastal basin; Diracleit, Drinishader and

Meavaig, on the opposite coast of Harris, were near and handy --

Ardhasig, nearer in land-miles but on the west side of Tabert, was

alient and awkward. They fished from the sea. They lived by the sea.

They came and went on the sea. Scalpay floated like a ship, a liner on

passage.

They were self-sufficient then. What they could not make for

themselves could be fetched by little boat; very heavy materials were

dropped by MacBrayne's mailboat Lochmor on her weekly call, or by

assorted coasters. And then there came a new car ferry to Tarbert and

North Uist; the Lochmor vanished, and the new route did not include

Scalpay.

So David MacBrayne Ltd, in 1965 gave the Scalpaich a car-ferry.

Slipways were built on the narrows, and a second-hand Ballachulish

ferryboat -- of the turntable type, carrying four cars -- inaugurated a

new three-minute crossing from Kyles to Scalpay. During her first

overhaul in 1966 she was away for a month, and Scalpay was served by a

fishing-boat; nobody complained. During her second, the grumbling began.

During her third, she was relieved by a chartered car-ferry of similar

type from Skye.

The dependence had begun. In the Seventies came a larger six-car

turntable ferry. Later, in 1977, came the modern bow-loader. The notion

of a bridge was bandied about. But this was an era of riches and

prosperity, a time when the Scalpaich wallowed in incredible wealth.

They were confident, proud, a little self-righteous. A bridge threatened

their own services -- the doctor's clinic, the secondary school, the

little Church of Scotland. A bridge opened up the night-time fleshpots

of Tarbert to innocent youngsters. So the leaders, and elders, said no.

MANY a ferry and many a crossing is now no more. The Ballachulish

narrows latterly employed three turntable craft, a log-jam of queuing

vehicles in summer, queing to avoid a 20-mile detour. But the bridge

came in 1975. The narrows of Loch Long had to be crossed at Dornie to

reach Lochalsh; a bridge opened at the onset of the Second World War.

The Strome ferry on Loch Carron was a notorious bottleneck -- the detour

this time hundreds of miles; a new if inadequate road finally opened in

the south bank of Loch Carron in 1970.

The Kessock ferry kept a distance between the couthy Black Isle and

sniffy Inverness, until a huge earthquake-proof bridge was completed in

1982. The Queen herself cut the ribbon for the Kylesku span in August

1984. The displaced vessels from these two routes took over on the

Corran narrows south of Fort William, rendering redundant two of the

last turntable ferries -- quaint, cumbersome, all-the-time-in-the-world

small craft once so synonymous with West Highland travel -- but one

turntable boat still chugs, at the Kylerhea ferry, the privately run

back door to Skye.

SKYE. And there is a ferry, at Kyleakin. And there will be a bridge. A

bridge to rape one of the most luminous views in the West Highlands,

from Lochalsh up the Sound of Raasay and the Inner Sound, over distant

islands and jagged peaks and shimmering currents and dotted boats. A

bridge of bargain-basement utility, concrete, ugly, vulgar. The caissons

are already in place; it takes shape in ugly nests of steel tubing, the

thump and grind of heavy machinery. A great pier crushes the heart of

Eilean Bhan, the beautiful lighthouse retreat of the late Gavin Maxwell.

The link will gouge through the policies of Kyle House, whose gardens

were bequeathed to the National Trust for Scotland in the naive belief

that they could be held inviolate forever.

A toll bridge. Not even a nominal toll -- 40p, 50p -- but a toll

equivalent to the present ferry fare, perhaps #6 when the thing opens in

1996. And, unlike our other toll bridges, there will be no alternative.

If you do not want the shortcut at Erskine, or Queensferry, there is the

Clyde Tunnel, or the (free) Kincardine bridge. Here there will be no

free alternative. In winter, the people of Skye will have no alternative

at all.

The bridge will do little, mind you, to destroy the Highland heart of

Skye. That was ruptured long ago, before the Moloch of the tourist

industry; it thrashes its final death in an island whose natives are now

outnumbered by southern immigrants. Of course, the Skye bridge should,

one day, be free. Yet it will always be ugly. And it will stand as a

monument to the crass vulgarity of the regime and era that gave it

birth.

I MAY have given the impression of seabound Scalpay as a rural idyll.

And I have not explained why, after such longstanding opposition, the

islanders now eagerly seek a fixed link. In truth, the idyll today is

tarnished, faltering. The boom days of fishing are gone. Many boats have

been decommissioned; young men toil for dwindling catches, primarily of

shellfish. There is not the wealth there was; the population is ebbing.

And -- as happens in so many small communities, especially such as

Scalpay, with its deep web of blood-relationships, its dynasties, its

intensities -- trouble has come.

There is a vicious division in the community. It started, long ago, in

some family feud; it has now riven the Free Church congregation asunder

(which means 95% of Scalpaichs -- nearly 90% of whom still attend church

regularly, an astonishing figure) -- and now it boils on, low-hateful, a

hating without reason and without discernable cause.

In such a trouble a small community becomes claustrophobic; and

Scalpay is peculiarly close, its houses and gardens on top of each

other, privacy ever at a total discount. The young folk twist and

shuffle. They want to leave. They will leave if there is no fixed link.

Scalpay life is to them an intolerable prospect, if the island remains a

prison in the evenings and a hen-coop at weekends.

A bridge will irrevocably alter Scalpay, its lifestyle, its values,

its perceived identity. Something, no doubt, will be lost. And yet a

certain liberty may also come, a freshening of that little world, like

the skylight in the roof. A bridge is change inevitable, and a little

fearful; but the islanders have ridden change before, and can master the

same, riding its waves as they have mastered the shifting Hebridean sea.