The Ferryman of Loch Torran

The bridge is nine minutes by car and the ferry is twenty-six minutes by water and the ferry costs four pounds.

There is no argument. Nobody making a rational transport decision takes the ferry, and since the bridge opened in June 2019 the passenger numbers have gone from about eleven thousand a year to about nine hundred.

The service is funded until 2027 under an agreement that everyone involved understands to be a wind-down.

Effie MacAulay has skippered it since 2004.

The four sailings

08:15, 11:40, 14:50, 17:20.

The 08:15 carries, most days, nobody. Effie sails it anyway; that is what a timetable is.

The 11:40 carries tourists in summer and nobody in winter.

The 14:50 carries, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Mrs Chisholm.

The 17:20 carries, on Fridays only, between four and eleven teenagers, and is the single most important sailing of the week, and is the one the funding review is going to look at last if it looks at it at all.

Mrs Chisholm

She is ninety-one and she goes to the mainland on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a hospital appointment on one of those days and for no reason at all on the other.

She cannot take the bridge. There is no bus over the bridge; the bus route was withdrawn in 2020 on the grounds that people could now drive, which was true of everyone except the people who could not drive, of whom there are, on this side of the loch, about thirty.

The ferry lands four hundred metres from the surgery.

Mrs Chisholm has said, in Effie's hearing, that when the ferry stops she will have to move, and has said it lightly, in the way that people say the most serious thing they have to say.

The Friday teenagers

There are seven or eight of them at the moment, aged fourteen to seventeen, and they go across on the 17:20 and come back on the last bus to the bridge and walk the last bit, which takes an hour and which their parents pretend not to know about.

They go because there is nothing on this side of the loch.

They are not, individually, interested in the ferry. Effie is aware of this. She has been fourteen.

But what she has noticed over six years — and what she put in her submission, badly, because she is a skipper and not a writer — is that the 17:20 on a Friday is twenty-six minutes in which seven or eight teenagers from four different scattered townships are in one small heated room with no phone signal.

They are appalling on it. They are loud and they put their feet on things and in 2022 one of them was sick.

They also, in twenty-six minutes with nothing else available, talk to each other, and this is the only place in the week that happens, because the school is on the mainland and the bus routes split them at the roundabout.

What Effie's submission said

It said the ferry carried nine hundred passengers a year at a subsidy of about thirty-one pounds a passenger.

It said this was poor value.

She wrote that herself, first line, because she is not a fool and because the number is the number and because a submission that pretends otherwise is thrown away in ninety seconds.

Then it said that of those nine hundred, about two hundred were made by eleven people who have no alternative, and that the correct comparison was not with the bridge but with what happens to those eleven people if the service stops.

Then it said, in a paragraph she rewrote nine times and still does not like:

The 17:20 on a Friday is not transport. I do not know what to call it. It carries young people who would otherwise not see each other and I would ask that somebody who knows what that is worth puts a figure on it, because I do not.

The response

The consultation response came in October. Four pages. Courteous.

It notes that the service is under review. It notes the submission. It observes that alternative provision for non-drivers is "a matter for the local authority."

It does not mention the 17:20.

Now

Effie sails four times a day.

The 08:15 went out on Tuesday with nobody on it, in weather that made it genuinely unpleasant, and she took it round the point and came back, because that is what a timetable is.

The 14:50 had Mrs Chisholm, who did not have an appointment, and who sat where she sits and looked out at the water for twenty-six minutes and said, getting off, that it had been a lovely crossing.

The 17:20 on Friday had nine.

One of them, a girl of about fifteen, asked Effie on the way over whether it was true the ferry was stopping.

Effie said it was under review.

The girl said, "That means stopping."

Effie, who has been on the water for twenty-one years and does not lie to people about the sea or anything else, said: "Aye. Probably."

The girl went back to her friends and said something, and there was a lot of noise, and then they were talking about something else within about forty seconds, which Effie thought at the time was that.

On the Monday there was a letter in the office. Nine signatures. Addressed to the council.

It is not a good letter. It is spelled badly in two places and it makes an argument about the environment that does not survive contact with the fact that the bridge exists.

Effie has attached it to her file as Appendix C.