25. Oct, 2021
Scottish Ferries: even "the best ferry a bad thing."
Scotland, with its plentiful, wide rivers, indented coastline and inhabited islands, has always relied on ferry services as an important part of its transport infrastructure. Whether large steamships or small rowing boats, the traveller has had to trust him or herself to their services for centuries. "The ferries at this time of year frighten me" wrote Alexander Brodie in 1748, when he was considering a journey to Balnagowan. According to John Knox, he had every reason to be frightened, for Knox found "the boats appropriated for these ferries are generally old and rotten" when he toured the country in the 1780s, and he pronounced even "the best ferry a bad thing."
John MacCulloch, the geologist, was even more damning of the ferry services in general, stating that too often "the public is obliged to bear with every kind of hazard, as well as delay and extortion; incommodious or dangerous landing-places, insufficient boats and incapable or insolent, or drunken boatmen, whose convenience, or will, they must conform to or wait for, and who exert their petty powers of tyranny with impunity because they too are monopolists, not subject to competition, and scarcely to legal control..." Poor Dorothy Wordsworth, travelling in 1803, experienced such rough and unhelpful service at Loch Etive that both she and her carriage horse were left in a state of shock, the horse thereafter panicking whenever it came to water.
One of the worst ferry disasters occurred at Meikle, where, on the Dornoch Firth, a fully-loaded boat sank in calm waters, killing all but three of the passengers. The event "created a deep sensation all over the country" remembered Donald Sage in 1899.
I have assembled a selection of images from my collection on this website, on the page titled "The Ferries of Scotland, Large and Small."
No wonder, then, that the Highland Road Commission was delighted to boast in their report of 1817 that at last, "the great Roads fro the Northern Coast of Sutherland, and from the Northern Coast of Caithness, forming a junction at Bonar Bridge, ....[proceed] without the intervention of a single Ferry, towards the Capital of the Kingdom."
Details of my book, The Immeasurable Wilds can be found at:
https://www.whittlespublishing.com/The_Immeasurable_Wilds