Many CRSC members offered their personal congratulations and thanks to Angus Ross (centre foreground) after his talk — including (left to right) Robert Newth, Neil Guthrie, Nairn Roy and Gregor MacDowall
Angus Ross enthralled his CRSC audience on 12 March at Glasgow’s Maldron Hotel with a superbly illustrated survey of shipping services to Skye over the past 200 years. Combining historical research with personal observation, it was one of the most fluent and authoritative presentations we have had in recent years, writes Andrew Clark.
Quiz time: 1. In which year did the Portree mail service begin, and when did it end? 2. How many ports on Skye received steamer calls at the height of shipping services to the island? 3. In which two years did the Westminster government directly finance the construction of new vessels for lifeline services to the Western Isles, including Skye?
We had been advised at the start that there would be a quiz at the end, but the well-filled audience Angus attracted for his talk did not need any such incentive to keep their ears wide open. His presentation held everyone’s attention throughout the hour and 10 minutes that it took for him to traverse the 200-year history of sailing ‘over the sea to Skye’, from Highland Chieftain in 1820 to Loch Portain in 2025 (photographed by Angus only last month at Uig pier).
The title image of Angus’s presentation: MacBrayne’s Fusilier at Portree c1932
As a past president of CRSC and an habitué of Uig (where generations of the Ross family have owned a croft), Angus is eminently well qualified to illuminate the peculiarities of sea services to, from and around an island which, paradoxically, has boasted an uninterrupted road connection to the mainland for the past 30 years. What fascinated Angus — and by inference his audience — was the plethora of traditional landing points around Skye, most of them no longer in use, and the variety of vessels that had made a Skye voyage their life’s work.
He divided his survey into four eras, beginning with ‘all the way’ sailings from Glasgow in the early and mid 19th century, followed by the late 19th century development of services after the opening of railheads at Strome Ferry (1870), Oban (1880), Kyle of Lochalsh (1897) and Mallaig (1901).
Despite cutbacks triggered by two world wars, the period from the 1930s to the 1950s was the ‘heyday’ of services to Skye. The final chapter cited by Angus was that of the car ferry, from the introduction of the 1964 Clansman on the Mallaig-Armadale crossing to present-day ‘point-to-point’ services, including the modernisation of Raasay’s connection with the outside world.
Along the way Angus found room to mention the original ‘all the way’ fare to Skye (20 shillings, or £157 in today’s money), the runaway popularity of the tourist route to Loch Scavaig from the 1850s, and the role played by McCallum Orme steamers in late 19th century lifeline services to the west of Skye and Soay.
New-old tonnage: Lovedale (foreground) and Gael, dressed overall for the opening of the railhead at Kyle of Lochalsh in 1897
We were told of David MacBrayne’s introduction of ‘new old’ tonnage from the south (Lovedale, Gael, Glendale and others), of the family-run company’s run of bad luck in the 1920s, and the introduction of diesel-electric tonnage by new owners (Coast Lines/LMS) — notably the 1934 Lochnevis on the Portee mail service — 90 years before CalMac’s ‘hybrid’ ferries. There were tales of Plover’s six-hour stops at Dunvegan pre-1914, of Lochgarry ‘drying out’ alongside the pier at Portree in the late 1930s, of Loch Fyne starting her career on the Kyle-Kyleakin crossing in the early 1990s before ending up, after the opening of the Skye Bridge in 1995, being ‘re-purposed’ for Mallaig-Armadale.
This was no dry historical account: we could tell from Angus’s colourful detours that he knew the territory like the back of his hand. His grandmother had sailed to Skye on Dunara Castle. His own early journeys from Glasgow to Uig, in his father’s Morris Minor, had taken 12 hours, including a lengthy queue at the Kyle-Kyleakin ferry.
There was no running water or electricity at the croft: the only means of finding warmth and comfort on bad-weather days was a sail to Lochmaddy on the 1964 Hebrides. Angus told of freshly baked scones and jam roly-poly in the silver-service dining saloon, visits by the cargo boat Lochdunvegan to help out with booming summer vehicle traffic on the Uig triangle, and Highland Council’s failure to build a linkspan in time for the arrival of Skye’s first purpose-built drive-through ferry, Hebridean Isles.
More recently, Uig had welcomed Isle of Mull, Isle of Lewis and even Alfred — but not the new Glen Sannox, amid fears her ramp would not fit.
And the quiz? There was no shortage of answers from the floor. Yes, well done that man who got the correct dates for the Portree mail service — 1870 to 1975. Several people in the audience had enough knowledge of MacBrayne history to know that 1928 and 1964 were the years when the Government stepped in with large-scale finance for new tonnage. But it took a few wild guesses before Angus revealed the number of active ports at the zenith of shipping services to Skye — 19 (compared to four in 2025).
Closing the proceedings, CRSC president Graeme Hogg led a big round of applause and invited everyone to attend the Club’s AGM on 16 April.
A video of Angus Ross’s presentation, exclusively for paid-up CRSC members, can be viewed here.
New era: Clansman inaugurated drive-on, drive-off sailings to Armadale in 1964
Lochdunvegan helped out at Uig in 1974, by which time the volume of traffic had become too much for the 1964 Hebrides
Eigg at Portree, where ‘Island’ class ferry crossings from Raasay landed on Skye in 1975-76 pending the construction of a terminal at Sconser
Angus Ross has been a member of CRSC since he was a boy. Have you joined this friendly association of ship enthusiasts? Click here for your £15 introductory membership and you’ll get all the benefits, including CRSC’s highly prized colour magazine, an annual Review of west coast shipping and exclusive access to photo-rich ‘members only’ posts on this website.
Published on 15 March 2025