Monthly Archives: July 2008

Calmac closes bookings for Ullapool to Stornoway sailings until Tuesday

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Anyone from Argyll planning to go up to the Western Isles via the ferry from Ullapool between now and Tuesday – and who has not already booked – should contact Calmac on 0800 665000 to identify a suitable alternative date. The company announced this afternoon that it has had to close further bookings for sailings between Ullapool and Stornoway until Tuesday 5th August because of a technical fault.

Our original news item on this had stated that the sailings themselves had been cancelled, rather than the withdrawal of further booking. We are grateful to ‘sandymor’ for posting a comment giving us the correction which guided the revised piece above. His information is that the technical problem relates to the mezzanine lift mechanism.

Anger in Inveraray as NHS Highland withdraws allocated funds for new doctor’s surgery

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Inveraray has been angered to discover that NHS Highland was withdrawing funds it told them eighteen months ago were in place and allocated to the building of a new doctor’s surgery in the town. The money is now to go to providing improved dental services in Campbeltown, Oban and Dunoon. Ironically the planned new surgery was to have a dentist’s surgery and an ambulance station as well as medical and nursing facilities. With no dental service in the town, Inveraray folk can currently wait for over a year to get a dental appointment in Furnace, Lochgilphead or Oban. Inveraray Community Council Chairman, Garrett Corner, is particularly disappointed with this outcome as he has personally worked ceaselessly to secure better health services for the town.

A variety of protests are now planned and Inveraray is being urged to fight for the services it knows – and can demonstrate – that it badly needs. Its present doctor’s surgery is smaller than those in some neighbouring villages. This will be a test of the town’s will to work to defend and develop itself.

Look out for Gigha’s 2009 Calendar

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The Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust will be publshing a fun 2009 calendar later this Autumn. The photos are pretty surreal – a Trust Board meeting held with all attending up to their knees in the sea, an islander with a halibut in his ear, pensioners shadow-boxing on the pier. (Why not the real thing?) All designed to entertain, the calendar is also another fund-raiser in the island’s continuing efforts to become sustainable. It is produced against a background where Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) will no longer provide funding to support economic development projects. Since the community buy-out in 2002 the island has renovated and built housing, established a wind farm which earned them £100,000 in its first full year of operation and grown their community from 98 to 157, with an increase in the primary school roll from 5 – 23 this coming year. These modest but real successes have led to Gigha being re-classified. It is no longer considered to be ‘a fragile community’ and so is no longer a priority for funding. Chair of the Trust, the legendary Wille McSporran, considers that HIE should have continued to offer support for a few more years, to allow their growth to be consolidated. They face ongoing ferry problems with the Tayinloan harbour – twenty minutes away on mainland Argyll – tending to silt up with weed and sand in winter storms.

Inveraray visted by World Explorer Yacht, Kiring, on charter

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World Explorer Yacht Kiring at Inveraray 29/7/08 Inveraray has just enjoyed a visit from a much respected world explorer yacht, the 34 metre Kiring, on charter out of its base at Viareggio in Italy. The Kiring was built in 1993 and refitted in 2002 with an interior design by Terence Drisdale. It has just been sold for US$ 7 million. It sleeps nine, has four staterooms and carries – described as ‘tenders and toys’ – two fast tenders, two 155hp two-person Waverunners, one 73hp SuperJet Jetski, an Optimist sailing dinghy, a 50cc motorbike, a Kayak, a ‘Banana’ Ocean Rider and three sets of diving gear. Now on its way south from Argyll to Largs and Rothesay, it’s no wonder it attracted a lot of admiring attention as it lay at anchor off Inveraray pier.

Two (plus) top ten visitor activities for Argyll in VisitScotland survey

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View from Rest and Be Thankful in Argyll (photo Richard Heavey, Wikipedia Commons) VisitScotland has just published the results of an online survey it commissioned to discover what visitors to Scotland most enjoyed doing here. Top of the list was watching dolphins in the Moray Firth, followed, in second place by aerial views of Argyll, courtesy of Loch Lomond Seaplanes. In sixth place was picknicking at Rest and Be Thankful, the top of the great pass between Loch Long and Loch Fyne. Walking the West Highland Way was the third most popular activity – and Argyll has a stake in that. Driving through Glen Coe was fourth – an area part of the historical Argyll,even though the changes to local authority boundaries see Glencoe now under Lochaber. What is interesting is that all of these activities indicate that it is Scotland – and Argyll – itself that is the attraction. The majesty, charm and intrigue of the landscape, the emptiness of the sparsely populated Highlands, the wildlife, the opportunities for physical activities of many kinds and the lure of exploration. What are often called ‘activities’ are often anything but that. The VisitScotland survey suggest that visitors come here to find and relish geniune activity.

The photograph above – of the view from Rest and Be Thankful east down Glen Croe to Loch Long – is by Richard Harvey. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modifythe image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Royal Navy – and Faslane – to receive HMS Astute, first Astute Class nuclear attack submarine in August

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BAE Systems Submarine Solutions at Barrow-in-Furness is due to deliver HMS Astute, the first submarine of its class, to the Royal Navy at the end of August 2008. Launched by the Duchess of Cornwall on 8th June 2007, Astute is intended to be in service this November.She and her sister vessels, Ambush and Artful, will be the Navy’s largest and most powerful nuclear attack submarines ever.

The design and construction of the Astute Class is said to be possibly the most challenging engineering project in the UK and has been described as more complex than the space shuttle, involving the production of over 7,000 design drawings.

The Royal Navy website describes Its nuclear power plant as more complex than a power station, with more restrictions placed upon it and says the submarines will each have 98 people on board. Once deployed, Astute is designed not to require refuelling throughout her full service life – in excess of 25 years – and can patrol for 90 days, remaining undetected thousands of miles from home and hundreds of metres underwater. The Astute is destined for Faslane, the Ministry Of Defence (MOD) nuclear submarine base on the Clyde in Argyll. The cloud cover offered by the Clyde has traditionally made Faslane the preferred base for such submarines.

The unique Ship Lift at Faslane has taken delivery of 45 very large pieces of wood called cappers. They are the giant blocks that will cradle the Astute when she arrives. This Ship Lift can lift entire ships or submarines out of the water for maintenance or repair and is the only Ship Lift in the world that can lift nuclear submarines out of the water.

While the Barrow yard gets the vessel ready for sea, its Command Team have been training on the simulators of the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (Marin). Among many challenegs to come, they have some tricky navigation to so in sailing from BAE Systems out through the narrow Walney Channel.

Volunteer for Master Composting Project

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This does sound like something Private Eye would have fun with, but the GRAB Trust (Group for Recycling in Argyll & Bute) is looking for volunteers to be part of its new Master Composting Project. You will be trained in successful home composting techniques and you’ll then be in a position to pass on what you’e learned to others in your community. Contact Matthew Lewis at the GRAB Trust either by phone on 01546 600165 or by email: matthew.lewis@argyll-bute.gov.uk

Grants available to improve private water supplies

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This refers to water supplies not provided by Scottish Water. The Scottish Government is funding the scheme which is not means tested and covers most people who use a private water supply. Grants are available up to £800 per property served by the supply. So, if you live in Argyll and Bute and you have a private water supply you’re interested in improving, phone Jacqui Middleton the Council’s Environmental Health Officer on 01546 604131 or check it out online.

Colintraive in top ten Scottish Property Rich List, Campbeltown bottoms out in Argyll

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Colintraive Community Garden A Rich List of Scottish streets, areas and towns – calculated by average property values – created and published by Zoopla, a property valuation website, has placed Colintraive. in the Cowal peninsula opposite the Isle of Bute, as the ninth highest value area in Scotland and the fourth highest value town with an average property value given as £290,714. Cairndow in MId Argyll was the only other entry in this category for Argyll, coming eighteenth at £260,968. Campbeltown came twentieth in the lowest value towns in Scotland. Auchterarder in Perth, though, sees two of its streets in first and second place as the highest value streets in the country. They are Caldedonain Crescent whose average property value is £1.8 million; and Balmorl Court coming in at £1.53 million.

Within Argyll, Bridgend on Islay was named as the highest value street at an average of £931,296, a long way ahead of the second placed street, Kilmelford, at £482,136 – interesting in that Islay itself has four postcodes given in the ten lowest value areas. Cairndow came second to Colintraive in the Top Ten highest value areas – but had three postcodes named in the top ten in this category: PA25 at 260, 968; PA26 at £200,700 and PA24 at £171,353. Appin took second place to Colintraive in the highest value towns category, at£223,522.

Campbeltown’s statistics underpinned its real need for regeneration. It came bottom in all three categories of lowest value street, area and town in Argyll. It had four streets in the ten lowest value street category in the county and one seventh from the bottom in all of Scotland. At £38,137 there is a gulf between Bayview in Campbeltown and Bridgend in Islay.

The copyright on the image above – of Colintraive Community Garden – is owned by Lynn M Reid and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Mull jury out on new ‘girlie’ sign

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Argyll’s Isle of Mull has woken up to find that a piece of midnight mischief has left one of their Victorian mileposts painted shocking pink. One of only ten remaining from the original thirty mileposts on the island it informs travellers on the A849 that it is twenty-one miles to Salen (on the Sound of Mull in the north) and senventeen mies to the Iona Ferry (at Fionnphort on the Ross of Mull to the West). Pilgrims arriving on the Oban ferry and making their way to Iona will get a bit of a surprise. Dating from 1897, the mileposts would have originally been painted in yellow and white. Londoner Peter Keeley, who has a holiday home on the island, has been working on a millennium project rust-proofing and painting each of the remaining mileposts. He’s got a surprise coming up. Traditionalists are, of course, outraged – on an island which has made its name for its brightly painted main town of Tobermory and the even more brightly painted fictional version of the town in the tourist magnet children’s television series, Balamory. The Daily Mail has quoted one local resident as saying: ‘It’s an attractive sign, perhaps a little bit too girlie for some of our tastes’.