Specialists in Removals for the Highland


The Knoydart Peninsula Job

Not long after we started we were asked to carry out a job on behalf of Pickfords. They had taken into store the belongings of a Royal Navy Commander in London who had purchased a property on the Knoydart Peninsula. The only access to this baren but beautiful part of the highlands was by sea or air. After the manager at Pickfords looked at his road map in London, he found to his amazement, that there were no roads for his large removal van to get within 50 miles of the house.
He tried to explain to his cutomer, that they could not deliver due to the lack of roads only to be told that this particular commander had navigated submarines around the world and, frankly was not interested if there were no roads, they were the biggest removal firm in the country and he expected his furniture within a month.

We were asked to go and see if we could get the goods to Knoydart, which after 2 days of planning we decided that we would try! The plan was that Pickfords would send their van from London to the pier at Malaig, which was where the road ended for them. Thereafter the containers were forklifted onto our trailer and the complete trailer craned onto the boat. A small word about the "boat". This great ship called "Spanish John" was a wartime landing craft to which the two cockney Pickfords men remarked "thats not a boat, we're used to travelling to France and the've got real boats, were not getting on that thing".
After a lot of persuasion and a promise of a beer in Britains most remote pub thay finally agreed to board our "boat".


Once the trailer was loaded we had the problem of transfering the Discovery from the pier to the boat. The very helpful crane driver started rolling out a large rope net and asked us to drive the Discovery onto this net, after which he would lift the car onto the boat. After asking him if he was joking to which he replied that he definately was not and "this is the way we do it all the time" we were told that there was a slipway at the other side of the harbour which we would be able to reverse down onto the boat. This turned out to be a break in the railings which went round the harbour. When they brought the boat over and put the ramp down, we were left with reversing over 10 metres of rocks covered in seeweed just to reach the ramp.
The Discovery managed it and the car and trailer were once again joined on the deck of the boat. If we thought that this was eventful, there was far more in store for us at the other side.

 
This is what we had to cross at Knoydart. The tide is in here,  but when we arrived it was completely out! There is a lack of sand on Knoydart, so the "beach" was actually a 40 metre sprint across wet shingle. We made it about half way, but luckily there was a large tractor on hand to pull us the rest of the way onto what the locals call the M1. Its about a mile of tarmac and thats the only road. After the road finished we had about a mile of track to navigate. This had a dry stone dyke at one side and a ditch at the other, leaving about 6 inches of clearance on either side. Just for good measure the track had a hairpin bend half way up. This is where most of the locals had gathered, thinking that if we made it up the beach, this would definately finish us. We only found out in the pub later that they had all placed bets as to how close we would get to the house. No one bet on us actually getting there, so when we did, the beers were on them!
Unfortunately for us this Commander had quite a lot of furniture so this is us at 6.00 a.m. waiting for our boat to take us back to Malaig to repeat the whole process once again. It's good to know that no matter what the circumstances we will not be beaten! We later found out that if we hadn't been able to do the job the allternative was a helicopter from Aberdeen which would have cost around £2000.00 per hour.

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