Bridge that drove the Highlands into the 21st century
40 years on, crossing is now vital to local economy
IT is a listed structure. It is sleek, rather beautiful, actually earthquake proof, has had huge socio-economic impact – and the Kessock Bridge, spanning the narrows of the Beauly Firth and plugging much of the East Highland seaboard into ready commute to Inverness, is 40 years old today.
Though officially opened by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother on August 6, 1982, the Kessock Bridge had opened to traffic on Monday, July 19.
And that evening, with a particularly beautiful sunset as backdrop over the Highland hills, and as yachts and launches and dinghies and even a chap waterskiing formed something of a regatta, the car ferries made their three-minute runs between North and South Kessock for the last time.
The new bridge closed what had never been an efficient ferry crossing – quartermile queues were not uncommon – and spared Black Isle motorists the 20-mile detour west to Inverness by way of Beauly.
And yet what has long been the reality – and which seems perfectly obvious to us: a swift A9 run from Inverness to Wick via shiny new bridges crossing the Beauly, Cromarty and Dornoch Firths – was for years ferociously resisted by the people in power.
AS late as 1969 the Scottish Office, the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB) and assorted chaps in striped trousers still insisted cost and terrain made such spans unfeasible and instead pressed on with plans for a dual-carriageway looping lazily round the heads of all those firths.
The ‘Dingwall Autobahn’ would have scythed through charming little towns, churned up some of the best farmland in Europe – and been at least 30 miles longer.
It took ‘Three Wise Men,’ as they were dubbed, and a change of government, to stop it happening.
The three were Reay Clarke, an Easter Ross farmer; Dr John S. Smith, an Aberdeen University geography lecturer, and Major Pat Hunter Gordon, head of AI Welders of Inverness.
They wanted both to save motoring time and all that good land and their question was simple and unanswerable: why go around something when you can go over it?
The discovery of North Sea oil was even more ammunition for those pressing for a much more coastal highway.
Yet the Dingwall Autobahn would probably have become drear reality had voters not, in June 1970, booted Harold Wilson’s Labour government from office.
The new Secretary of State for Scotland, Gordon Campbell, was
MP for Moray and Nairn, familiar with the facts on the ground and puzzled by HIDB obduracy.
Campbell ordered a detailed survey and, when the results finally landed on his desk, they proved the HIDB’s proposals involved a new road that would cost nearly £3million more than a new stretch of A9 re-routed over new estuarial bridges.
The Dingwall Autobahn was dead and the Scottish Office was now committed to the Cromarty Bridge – a straightforward structure across shallow water – opening in 1979.
The Dornoch Bridge, a long box-girder job, would in turn open in August 1991.
But the Kessock Bridge was the biggest headache of the lot.
Inverness is still a sea port, so the structure had to be high enough to allow substantial ships to sail beneath it, while strong enough to be open to traffic in all but the most extreme weather.
Its towers, too, had to be robust enough to withstand the collision of some errant vessel.
The new cable-stayed bridge also had to sweep from the flat coastal plain immediately east of Inverness – the ferry crossing was to the town’s west, from a built-up area – straight into Black Isle hillside.
MOST challenging of all, it would span the Great Glen Fault, so there was a risk of earth tremors – and, amidst spectacular Highland backdrop, it had to look as attractive as possible.
The £17.5million contract was won, in 1975, by Cleveland
Bridges and, rubbing his hands in glee, German engineer Hellmut Homberg started up the shovels in 1978.
His design was very similar to a here’s-one-I-made-earlier crossing over the Rhine at Dusseldorf.
But, at the north abutment, almost at the line of the Great Glen Fault, Homberg built in antiseismic buffers.
And at Pier 7, the south main pier and the most likely to be ram-raided by some coaster, very strong longitudinal restraint was also built in. The Kessock Bridge, accordingly, looks robust – and would be uninspiringly stolid but for two curves.
It inclines gracefully upwards from the southern, Longstone shore – and, as it nears Easter Ross, it curls graciously to the west. At once imposing and reassuring in daylight, it shows at its best, splendidly illuminated, at night, especially on approach from the east.
By today’s values, the final bill for the Kessock Bridge was about £160million. But, coupled with those other spans and the greatly improved A9, its impact on Inverness was swift and startling.
It made it far easier for those who work in the town – Inverness did not gain city status till 2000 – to live north of it. It hugely improved the journey northwards to Dingwall, Ullapool, Dornoch and Wick.
Delighted bus operators opened swift new services from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Inverness and beyond, forcing British Rail to slash its Edinburgh-Inverness fare to just £5 by 1984. You could even come for a day’s shopping from Lewis, by bus and ferry, without needing to stay the night.
But, most dramatically, the Kessock Bridge launched the expansion of Inverness itself.
In 1981, the population of greater Inverness was just 43,246. By 1990, swathes of new housing were swelling to its west and south. And from 2003, it became the fastest-growing city in western Europe.
It’s now home to some 65,000 people and two new road bridges over the River Ness – for it’s the sort of town where people still like to go home for lunch – have ended its once-notorious traffic jams.
BY 2001 it at last boasted really good restaurants: for years, its only culinary claim to fame was its doubtful boast of the only McDonald’s in Scotland.
There is now a new university campus, a vast business park, a cultural and conference development. A second new town to its east, the pretty Tornagrain, is already rising.
Inverness has a booming healthcare industry – it’s home to a global centre for diabetes research – and, by 2007, Stuart Black of Highlands and Islands Enterprise was practically gushing.
‘Vibrant, exciting and cosmopolitan,’ he enthused of the Highland capital. ‘Fabulous mountain scenery. A very low crime rate and the schools are excellent. Without doubt a great place to live and work…’
There was but one 1982 grumble – and from down south: why was the Kessock Bridge toll-free when similar Tay, Forth and Erskine spans were not?
Today, the more thoughtful wonder why, of all the millions poured into the region since the Highlands and Islands Development Board was created in 1967, Inverness and the wider Moray Firth have done spectacularly well out of it while the West Highlands, certainly in terms of traditional employment and a Gaelic culture now all but on life-support, have continued to decline.
But that is scarcely the fault of the Kessock Bridge and the new A9 which, in but a few years, delivered Inverness from the 1950s.