Taken from the wonderful gardens of Kyle House. Parts of the gardens were compulsory purchased, against her will, from Clodagh Mackenzie of Kyle House in the 1990s by the then Scottish Office. Interestingly, the Scottish Office capped the private consortium's land purchase costs at £300,000, with the taxpayer ultimately paying almost half a million on top of that. Clodagh Mackenzie who lost a large part of her garden, woodland, and part of a field was compensated with £50,000. The people of Kyle lost out even more, with only £13,000 compensating them for the loss of almost nine acres of recreation ground that had been gifted to the community in perpetuity. Sir Tom Farmer, who owned the three-acre Eilean Ban received £200,000.

It still irritates me how much profit the Bank of America made out of this bridge - both from the tolls and, ultimately, from the Scottish taxpayer.

It stands as testimony as to why the likes of the Scottish Conservatives cannot be trusted, and to the folly of the Private Finance Initiative. Interestingly though, the Wikipedia article points out that the high tolls were supported by Highland Council and Charles Kennedy MP, both of whom seemed to escape the wrath that was unleashed upon the opening in 1995.

The best protest story I know of is that on the day of opening, Skye locals drove on to the roundabout on the Skye side of the bridge, and just kept on going round and round, not letting anybody on to the bridge, or off it! After all, they didn't know what to do - they wanted to leave the island, but didn't want to pay the astronomical tolls, and Calmac had been banned from operating a competing ferry link in order to sweeten the PFI deal (private monopolies being OK of course, when they involve ripping off remote communities). Protestors also deliberately waited until the bank vans had taken cash away from the toll booths and then queued up all wanting to pay with £50 and £100 notes, or wrote cheques on the side of a cow or a stone slab - all the tricks in the book were used! Ultimately it was the mass non-payment, and subsequent court cases (including that of the elderly Clodagh Mackenzie herself) that made the headlines.