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.