The Tarbet peninsula (or the 'Highland Balkans'!)

A local recently told me that Tarbet, Fanagmore and Foindle were known as “The Balkans” because the three settlements were forever falling out. Looking across this beautiful peninsula, it seems an unlikely setting for such a description, although once you start following the history of its roads, you can appreciate how neighbours might have found themselves at odds. Most visitors turn off the A894 between Scourie and Laxford Bridge with Handa Island in mind, following the narrow road to Tarbet and the ferry, without realising how long people here campaigned for the connections we now take for granted.

The difficulty becomes easier to understand if you look beyond the tarmac at the ground it crosses. Between outcrops of Lewisian gneiss, lochans and stretches of peat, there is little to suggest that making a route through would ever have been straightforward. Before the roads arrived, moving anything meant choosing between a boat, a pony or carrying it yourself along paths over the hill, whether you were bringing home supplies, taking fish to market or gathering peats for the fire. Getting a doctor to someone’s bedside presented the same difficulties, as did taking children to school or carrying the dead for burial. A connection to the main road promised to ease all of that, so you can understand why people were determined to secure one, particularly if another township appeared to be getting ahead.

Foindle received its branch from the Scourie–Durness road in 1904, but Fanagmore had to wait until 1927 and Tarbet until 1938, leaving decades in which neighbours could compare what they had been given with what they still needed. Even those roads did not resolve the awkward business of travelling between the settlements, because each had acquired a way out to the wider world before the peninsula had a proper route linking them together. The steep connection between Tarbet and Fanagmore was finally completed in 1960, almost sixty years after the first branch reached Foindle. With public money limited and every community able to make a persuasive case for help, there was considerably more at stake than whose journey happened to be shorter.

Today, that hard-won loop makes an enjoyable diversion through country many people see only on their way to Handa. Tarbet is now the familiar name, despite having waited longest for its branch road, while Foindle and Fanagmore receive rather less of the passing attention. I would hesitate to take “The Balkans” as evidence of endless feuding, but it is an entertaining reminder that the roads beneath us were somebody’s cause long before they became part of our holiday. In the audio blogcast, we follow the efforts to get them built and discover why connecting three neighbouring settlements proved such a protracted business.

To learn more, listen to the blogcast or book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.