Building this lay-by is all I can think about now

Many years ago I was encouraged to read Roger Hutchinson’s Calum’s Road. The small and quirky book made a deep impression on me: deeper, perhaps, than I realised at the time. Since then the story has always been there in the back of my mind. It began a story of my own. As there is unlikely to be a book, Matthew’s Lay-By, I shall tell the tale myself.

The late Calum MacLeod’s story deserved its book. One of the last inhabitants of Arnish in the north of the island of Raasay in the Western Isles, the crofter campaigned with others to persuade the local authorities to connect Arnish to the rest of the island with something better than their footpath. They got nowhere. So he decided to build the road himself. MacLeod bought a book on practical roadmaking, secured a bit of early help with blasting, and then in the ten years from 1964 to 1974 constructed the one-and-three-quarter-mile single track road on which he had set his heart. It’s still there, and has now been surfaced. In the photographs it looks a fine, lonely little road, winding over the hills. MacLeod managed this with just a barrow, a pick and a spade.

Now it so happens that I too live in an isolated spot served by a narrow lane: a public road that winds steeply and sharply up from the valley below. Our house is off a bend near the top, and before that bend there’s a particularly tricky section hemmed in by high banks on both sides, with nowhere for two vehicles to pass. A passing place about halfway up existed but it was wet, bumpy and slimy, and quite steeply uphill, and once you’d pulled off into it you’d as often as not bog down, wheels spinning. So one car or another had to reverse, and it’s about 200 yards in either direction before passing is possible.