Luing fixed link cheapest and most expensive option

The proposed causeway between the Isles of Luing and Seil, crossing the short Cuan Sound, seems to be Argyll & Bute Council’s preferred option – although hydrographic surveys will have to be undertaken to establish the depth of water, with results that may have an impact on the case.

Given its chronic underfunding, it is hard to criticise the Council for wishing – needing – to choose the cheapest option in responding to requests from some – but by no means all – the 200-odd islanders for a fixed link rather than a ferry.

We understand that most of those, and perhaps the loudest voices,  pressing for the fixed link are people who work in Oban.

This hardly supports the argument that such a link will bring economic development to Luing – unless it wants to be overrun with commuters, scrambling twice daily across a causeway and driving up and down through Seil and on out to the main road. There’s nothing particularly attractive about a dormitory slate island.

The argument for Skye was very different. That is a large island with a significant spectrum of resources for major growth and a population of around 9,000 in 2001, now up to over 12,000.

Luing is a little island in a fabulous position off the west coast of Argyll, along with its fellow slate islands. It’s main occupations are lobster fishing and cattle farming with tourism of a very specific kind now being thoughtfully and sustainably developed.

Like many small communities, it has always had a rich cultural life, now reinventing itself with the addition of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics. It also has ambitions in development to host an Atlantic Islands Centre. Isn’t there a damaging irony in reaching an Atlantic Islands Centre by causeway?

For the island and those who live on and for it, the ferry link is without question a key factor in defining its nature and its way of life. That the approach and the leaving of this fertile little island is still by boat, at once underlines for visitors the reality of life down the years in such a place.

Clunking over a causeway simply destroys that crucial experiential other-worldness that distinguishes small islands.

There’s no productive one-size-fits-all solution to anything. Skye had potential that the time taken in waiting for, embarking and disembarking on short ferry crossings obstructed. Some of that potential involved heavy transport, for which a bridge was the most helpful provision. Skye needed to become an economy that ignored its islandness – as well as one that could capitalise on it.

Luing simply is not big enough – in size, resources, population and potential population – to have and to grow two parallel economies. So choose. Is it to develop and sell its islandness, its culture, its experiences? Or is to develop and sell the fact that it’s much like anywhere else – only smaller.

Whizzing on and off the island, easily and quickly by causeway, will diminish Luing.

Waiting to get there allows a moment of anticipation of a different power;and time to shift identity.

Apart from the environmental consequences of a causeway across the Cuan Sound – which we are see as very substantial and which, over the next couple of months we know will be coming strongly to the fore – the social and experiential consequences will be profound and irreversible.

Time for the islanders of Luing to think on.