The Roads of Coll
Tracks of a muddy and uncertain kind linked the main farms and settlements when Johnson and Boswell visited Coll in 1773 ... Hugh McKinnon, once in charge of island roadmaking and maintenance, takes up the story ...
To my knowledge, the first official record of Coll roads is dated 1842, when £16 was allotted for the upkeep of eight miles of public road. Two years later a survey of nine miles, 211 yards of road was made and a report stated that they were in a very poor state of repair. Nothing much seems to have been done, except that 'men' (numbers unspecified) worked for a total of thirty-six hours at one shilling and threepence per hour to improve them and two new picks (costing nine shillings and sixpence) were made for their use. Two years later yet there is another account for labour, for the use of horses and carts, for the putting up of stone and wooden bridges-the wood being shipped over from Quinish Lodge on Mull. And
in 1851 Allan MacLean, mason, was contracted to build a quay in Arinagour for a total of £35, which he finished by the end of that year.
From then on a certain amount of repair work was carried on, mainly by Allan and various other MacLeans, at yearly intervals until 1861 when the new owner of the major part of the island, Colonel John Lome Stewart, decided to put the roads in a tolerable state of repair at his own expense. By 1890 there was twelve miles of reasonably wellformed public road on the island and it was in that year that Argyll County Council took over.
In 1894 the East End people were pushing to get a road built from Cachaileith Cnoc a Tuir ('the fishing gate' as it's called today) to Sorisdal. But the Council kept saying that the project could not be completed 'without such a considerable expenditure as would, in all probability, bar it.' Eventually however the building was carried out between the years 1902 and 1911.
In 1923 the contract for the construction of the two miles and 480 yards from Cnoc Eilebruig at Gallanach Farm to connect up with the Sorisdal-Cornaig road was given to the contractor, MacRae and Son, the cost being £1400. It was completed in 1924 and taken over by the Council the following year as an addition to the list of highways. In 1938 the Council finally decided to tar-spray and chip all the listed roads, but with the outbreak of World War II it was years after hostilities ceased before the job was completed. Since then, bits and pieces have been added here and there to make a total of seventeen and a half miles of surfaced road on the island.
When I worked on the roads in the ‘50s and ‘60s all the stone used was local and was cut and dressed on the island for the bridgeworks. It was got out of quarries at Grishipol, Kilbride and near Cornaigbeag and transported on carts usually. Sometimes the hard pan (we called it quarry gravel) would be wheeled along in a barrow and used to fill up the holes as you went along. All the roads were in better condition by this time, but as late as 1958 residents’ new cars were considered worthy of press mention. On the 22nd February of that year the Oban Times reported that ‘Mechanised transport is steadily on the increase. Two cars came on the island recently – one for Mr J Cameron, ferryman and one for Mr G MacDonald, shepherd…’
There are benchmarks along some of the roads, often covered with natural growth. Anyone interested will find the one in the brown flat rock as you turn into the Church of Scotland road quite easy to find. From there, going east, measure a mile on your car speedometer and you should be able to spot them all as far as Sorisdal.
