Times Subject to Tides: The Story of Barra Airport [Paperback]

A well-illustrated history of the Western Isles airport beginning with the services of Northern and Scottish Airways in 1936.

Roy Calderwood has both a great love of islands and an avid interest in transport and they know merge to form the subject of his first book, "Times Subject to Tides". Born in Hawick in 1953, he now lives and works in Edinburgh where he is employed by an international business travel agency. However, he has been know to be at his happiest while on a Hebridean beach.

In 1936, when the air service to Barra began, the island’s roads were still unmetalled. The road from Northbay petered out at the side of the Tràigh Mhòr near Crannag, and horses, carts and the odd car, the first of which is believed to have arrived on Barra around 1926, had to cross the strand. A mile or so to the north, the road resumed its path across the machair to the Eoligarry school, then so recently built by Inverness County Council. Just over the hill lay Eoligarry House, once the home of the chiefs of the Clan MacNeil after they abandoned Kisimul Castle, and a few crofts on the peninsula so loved by the writer, Alasdair Alpin MacGregor. ("Ah! Eoligarry! The very name is mellifluous...")

Except for the school, the only building on the primrose covered neck of land linking Eoligarry to the rest of Barra, was Suidheachan, (pronounced "soo-yech-an") which Compton Mackenzie had built as his home. Constructed in 1935/36, the building materials were delivered directly to the Tràigh Mhòr by one of the many coal puffers which plied the waters of the west of Scotland.

Jimmy Orrell of Midland & Scottish Air Ferries landed on the Tràigh Mhòr, which MacGregor, in his romantic style, called the Great Cockle Shore, in 1933 while undertaking a search for landing sites in the islands. Although it pioneered the routes to Kintyre and Islay, that company never managed to start an air service to the Western Isles. Short Scion, G-ADDP, of West of Scotland Air Services, another airline which had ambitions to operate Hebridean air services, is recorded as landing on the beach during 1935. However the task of bringing such dreams to fruition fell to George Nicholson, who had formed Northern & Scottish Airways at Renfrew in 1934, and his Chief Pilot, David Barclay, with their introduction of regular air transport to Barra in 1936. There is little flat land on the island and, after their failure to find a suitable landing strip, it was the Northbay postmaster, John MacPherson, who asked Barclay if the beach could be used for such a service.

It was near Crannag that early pilots, such as Barclay, drew up the Spartan Cruisers and de Havilland Rapides (tide permitting) for the first ten years, and where a small hut was provided. Sometimes, however, the aircraft drew up further away, as happened to the author of a piece in The Aeroplane in July 1938 (and quoted in Peter Clegg’s excellent history of Scottish Airways, Wings over the Glens), who was sampling the trip in unseasonable summer weather:

"At Barra we approached a wide, yellow beach, to leeward of a ridge which made itself felt in gusts. Barclay’s landing was a work of art, and nearly full throttle was needed to taxi against the wind to where the car waited. The airport hut is slightly farther along the coast so the car had been brought to the machine... We dropped one passenger, an elderly lady, and took on two men. The crew crept into the car to fill in forms and sign manifests, etc. The Spartan rocked and the gale squealed over the cabin, although the motors were still running."