Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
trying to contact the hotel and unthinkingly rang the number for Glenfinnan Lodge given
in the phone book, only to get whoever was in the estate shooting lodge at the time. I rang
back just to be sure and he was not a happy toff.
We used to come up to the Prince's House fairly often until some new owners, want-
ing to go upmarket, removed the pool table and just generally brought about an ambience
in the place that wasn't as local-friendly as it might have been. A real era ended for us
when the Lodge took out its pool table too. Chimney-farting antics aside, we had some
great times there and the pool table going was a real blow. These days as a rule we sit
around Les and Aileen's dinner table and drink wine rather than go to the Lodge for beer.
It's fun, and home apart there's almost nowhere I feel happier, but I still miss the pool
table. Place is a laundry room or something now. Very sad.
(If Les was reading this right now he'd be indignantly making the point that these
days I do have my own pool table, over in my parents' house, but that isn't the same
either.)
The Prince's House has another set of owners now; it's a bit quiet when we stop but
the soup and sandwiches are good and we head off into the sunlight again. The road to
Mallaig is a GWR which is gradually becoming just a great road. It's another split-per-
sonality work; fabulously long, open straights sweeping past breathtaking views suddenly
plunging into tiny twisty sections wriggling through the trees or rolling abruptly into the
straggling villages on the tattered rockscape of coast. This is
Local Hero
territory; they
shot a lot of exterior scenes out this way, and the bits in the office of the head man Happer
- played by Burt Lancaster - were apparently filmed inside Ben Nevis distillery while it
was mothballed. Fort Bill standing in for downtown Dallas. Now there's a thought that
wouldn't strike you every day.
Most of the time the railway from Fort William to Mallaig is nearby, swerving from
one side of the road to the other over a succession of concrete echoes of the Glenfinnan
viaduct. There used to be a short cut through Arisaig where you could go straight on while
the main road dipped left to the sea and round the front of the village, but that seems to
be turning into a proper micro-bypass. At Morar, too, they're still working on the road,
straightening and widening.
Finally we arrive in Mallaig for the ferry to Skye.
Nowadays, of course, you can take the bridge to Skye, at Kyle of Lochalsh, but I try
to avoid taking this route if remotely possible. The Skye Bridge is grossly expensive to
cross and is a glaring example of Why Private Finance Initiatives Are Shite. To use the
Skye Bridge is to shovel money into the coffers of the Bank of America, which owns it
and will be allowed to collect the grotesquely inflated tolls until 2022.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if there was any sign of this supposedly so damn spiffing
competition capitalists keep whining about, but Caledonian MacBrayne, the still-just-
