BRIDGE THAT HIT TROUBLED WATERS
Ruinously expensive concrete monstrosity – or lifeline that rescued an island? The Skye crossing was mired in bitter controversy from day one. But 25 years on, is it now in danger of destroying the communities that it was meant to serve?
AGLOOMY silence descended on the islanders watching from the dock as the ferry drew away, never to return. Her work here was done; her final crossing complete. The 840-yard ribbon of concrete looming overhead was the reason.
It was not just the horizontal rain which soaked faces on the Isle of Skye that day in October 1995. Tears played their part, too, as the age of the ferry gave way to what some viewed as a civil engineering carbuncle.
Because of it, the crews of the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry Loch Fyne and her sister ship The Loch Dunvegan were losing their livelihoods – and Skye, it seemed, was losing something elemental to its identity.
No longer a Hebridean isle reached by sea, it had become an appendage to the mainland accessible by highway. Few were the native voices which expressed unqualified approval for Skye’s new umbilical cord.
‘Everyone sings about Over The Sea To Skye,’ reflected one dejected ferry worker at the time. ‘Who is going to think about that, coming here at 40 miles per hour over a lump of concrete?’
Over on the Skye Bridge itself the opening ceremony was embarrassingly muted. The local MP, the late Charles Kennedy, had stayed away in protest against the tolls which, at £5.20 one-way for a car, were beyond any comparison with tolls over the Forth or the Tay. Skye councillors did not turn up either.
As then Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth and Skye schoolboy Steven Campbell shared ribbon-cutting duties in the rain, there was little fanfare – none of the razzmatazz or hyperbole that would attend the opening of the Queensferry Crossing, for instance, two decades later.
A quarter of a century has passed since that sombre day when the two sister ferries set sail for the James Watt Dock on the Clyde, leaving Skye with its freshly tarmacked crossing.
BUT, for all the sobriety linked with the bridge’s arrival, it is hard to overstate its impact on this community of 10,000 people. ‘If it wasn’t for the bridge I don’t think I’d have managed to stay my whole life on Skye,’ admits hotelier Anne Gracie Gunn, 65, whose thriving boutique hotel business exists because the bridge does.
‘It’s an obscene concrete monstrosity,’ says campaigning local Robbie the Pict, 72, who, even today, is fighting to establish the illegality of the long-abolished tolls.
‘The first 25 years are the worst, you know,’ he jokes.
‘The benefits have been tremendous,’ declares Calum MacLeod, 52, from Broadford. ‘It has opened the island up. We are more accessible.’
The local councillor’s attitude is all the more instructive in view of the fact he is a former ferryman.
He worked as a purser back in 1995, collecting fares from passengers while, in the background, the bridge construction project linking Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland and Kyleakin on Skye progressed.
He says: ‘If you went away on a fortnight’s holiday and came back, that’s when you really noticed the incremental changes. From a ferryman’s perspective, you were seeing the day getting closer when your job was going to end.
‘This was a way of life which had given generations of Kyleakin men, Kyle of Lochalsh men and Skye men a solid opportunity for employment. A lot of them had to up sticks and go after the bridge was completed.’
Mr MacLeod was one of them. Weeks before that last ferry sailing he took a job on the mainland – ironically, collecting tolls on the Erskine Bridge. But the island to which he returned to live years later was much transformed – almost all for the better, he believes.
So significant in that process was the £ 25million crossing which opened on October 16, 1995, that people here talk about Skye life as ‘pre-bridge’ and ‘post-bridge’.
For many locals, they mean very different things.
Pre-bridge, recalls Mrs Gracie Gunn, there was a ‘mental barrier’ about going to the mainland.
The best part of a day might have to be set aside for crossing the third-of-a-mile stretch of water separating Skye from the mainland.
She says: ‘You wouldn’t do that very often actually because there could be a four-hour wait in getting off or on the island. You had to forecast what the ferry queues would be like at what time of day.
‘So when you left the island you felt you had to do everything you had to do because it was such a big deal doing the crossing. Then, of course, when the bridge arrived, the island became accessible to all.
‘I can go from my home in Sleat to Kyle in 20 minutes now. There is a whole different mindset regarding the issue of travel and the island has changed as a result.’
She adds: ‘It’s enabled young people to live here, to work here. It’s made it an attractive place to stay for young people with job opportunities. It’s totally different.’
Back in 1995 such glowing reviews were rather harder to come by.
‘Hideous, isn’t it?’ Clodagh Mackenzie, then 80, told one reporter who knocked on her door.
She and her late husband had arrived in Skye some 40 years earlier, settling in a Kyleakin cottage with 25 acres of ground, a beach and one of the most breathtaking views in Scotland over the Inner
Sound to the mainland. Now a section of this land had been the subject of a compulsory purchase order to allow construction of the bridge’s support structure.
‘It’s a horror,’ said Mrs Mackenzie as the day of the opening ceremony finally approached.
Pre-bridge, life was ‘really peaceful,’ she said, adding: ‘Let me know if you see my beach. It’s underneath the bridge somewhere.’
If islanders were less than enamoured with the bridge’s design, that was nothing compared to the attitude of many to the hefty tolls.
Such was the sound and fury that, for the first decade after it opened, any assessment of the benefits brought by the crossing was likely to be overshadowed by the stink over the price of using it.
The bridge was commissioned by the Conservative government of the time as Scotland’s first Private Finance Initiative, which meant its construction was funded by the contractors rather than the taxpayer. The problem was the project – a Bank of America-financed collaboration between Scottish firm Miller Construction and German engineers DYWIDAG Systems – soon went over budget.
The tolls were intended to claw the money back but, at a cost of £5.20 for one-way, that was only 20p less than people were paying for the ferry.
It was also some £4.40 more than the cost of using the Forth Bridge and, as campaigners soon discovered, Europe’s most expensive bridge toll.
‘The Skye Bridge...’ went the local adage. ‘... the only place in the world where you get mugged AND get a receipt.’
It was moments after the tolls came into force at midnight on October 17, 1995, that protests began as three cars arrived from Skye and approached the toll barrier. The drivers all refused to pay.
Within an hour they had been joined by another 30 cars and the Skye Pipe Band. At 4.30am the police warned the protesters they had half an hour to disperse and, at 5am, they started charging them with refusal to pay the toll.
Over the next decade hundreds more faced similar charges – including future Scottish transport secretary Keith Brown and octogenarian Mrs Mackenzie, whose land the builders had commandeered.
The protests brought chaos, civil disobedience, arrests, jail time and legal challenges from colourfully indignant figures such as former policeman Brian Robertson who, by then, had changed his name to Robbie the Pict.
‘I’m afraid it’s not easy to discuss the bridge in general terms either aesthetically or commercially,’ he tells the Mail now.
‘There is not a grain of respectability in that operation. From the point of view of the regime it has never been set up in lawful order – never – every single toll demanded has been a criminal offence.’
It is a view which finds sympathy in unexpected places.
David Hingston, the procurator fiscal responsible for bringing the full force of the law down on nonpayers such as Robbie, found the ordeal so upsetting that he had a nervous breakdown.
One problem was he operated out of Dingwall Sheriff Court on the mainland. In order to get there, those charged with non-payment had to cross the bridge, whereupon they again refused to pay and incurred another criminal charge.
THE other problem was Mr Hingston suspected the protesters’ arguments were sound and that behind the confidentiality cloaking the bridge’s financial history lay fabricated paperwork.
‘It was extremely stressful,’ said Mr Hingston in a BBC documentary last year. ‘In the end, all these prosecutions were in my name.
‘The pressure was really ramped up extremely high. I had a nervous breakdown through stress.
‘As a fiscal I had to do what I did,’ he said. ‘ But as a human being and a citizen I thought they were a scam.’
He believes legal documents were fabricated and backdated after campaigners found the paperwork for the tolls were incomplete.
That would have made the tolls themselves illegal. Hence the suspicion of behind the scenes chicanery. He said: ‘I think the answer is there was no assignation and this document was produced to try to paper over this very large hole in the process.
‘Someone, somewhere, has perverted the course of justice and that’s a very, very serious crime.’
Ultimately the tolls were scrapped in 2004 when the then Scottish Executive bought the bridge for £27 million. It subsequently emerged that, over the preceding nine years, £33.3million had been collected in tolls and that the operating costs of the bridge during this time had been £3.5million.
It is figures such as these, perhaps, which keep campaigners such as Robbie the Pict burning the midnight oil in autumn 2020, 16 years after the tolls were abolished, to expose the ‘crookedness’ of the bridge regime.
For others it is the here and now – not the history – that counts.
In summer many of Skye’s iconic locations are besieged by traffic and parked cars and there is not a bed to be had in hotels and Airbnbs and police talk of bedraggled tourists showing up at the station in desperation having failed to find accommodation.
It has led one or two on the island to propose the unthinkable. Might some kind of toll on the bridge be the way forward, they ask.
But not, perhaps, within earshot of Robbie the Pict.