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This is this week’s front page…..

 

Other items from inside …
Letters

ULLAPOOL POST OFFICE SERVICES
I am writing for clarification on the ongoing provision for postal services in Ullapool. As I am sure you are aware Heather Parlett has done a great job under difficult circumstances to keep this service alive in Ullapool at the village hall.
Can you please tell me what the provision in Ullapool will be when she steps down in the near future.
Yours faithfully,
Jan Dawson Ullapool resident
This is an Automatic reply
Thank you for contacting the National Consultation Team.
If you are providing feedback about changes to your local Post Office, your comments will be taken into consideration. Once the current local customer engagement period ends we’ll review our plans, taking into account the feedback received from customers and local representatives together with any other relevant factors.
Once a final decision has been taken and our plans finalised we’ll let local representatives know the outcome, along with details of the main issues and questions raised and how these were considered. Customer information materials will also be displayed in branch and published on our website, at that time.
Thank you once again for letting us have your feedback. If however you have contacted us about a different Post Office matter, your enquiry will be forwarded to our customer service team for investigation and reply.
FREEPOST Your comments (this is all you need to write on your envelope) comments@postoffice.co.uk
postofficeviews.co.uk
Textphone: 03457 22 33 55

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LOCAL WEATHER REPORT   Tues 23 – Mon 29 January

Max temp 19.8C = 68F Min temp 3.4C = 38F
What a week!
Storm Jocelyn for the most part didn’t have much impact. It remained wet and windy though and by Sunday it was very windy indeed. Not a named storm but troublesome, nonetheless.
A long spell of prolonged gusts led to some structural damage to buildings and there were multiple trees down affecting road and rail.
Down at the Harbour they recorded wind speeds of 95mph.
With the wind from the South we often see freak temperatures due to the Foehn Effect. On Sunday it reached 19.8C on my weather station which would be a UK record. Though Kinlochewe will have it at 19.6C as it has a Met Office site.
If we get these temperatures for the Summer, we would be happy enough.

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A resident lost a large eucalyptus tree on Sunday morning due to the winds!

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Book Review

The Growing Down of Maggie D’ by Jill Beavitt
From the opening paragraphs of loss and discomfort, interspersed with moments of hope and practicality, this fantastical book takes the reader on a journey toward inevitability, celebrating a life well-lived in the process
The author’s survival through dystopian melancholia entwined with amusing reminiscence keeps the reader turning pages mixing real life with fiction.
If this story were brought to life through the medium of film, it would appeal to directors such as Ken Loach for its gritty grip on real survivalist issues for a person with little left but hope and determination.
There are lessons for us all embodied in its pages, loneliness and loss of energy being but two.
Overall, a very intriguing personal account that will bring emotional resonance for those coming to terms with how they view their demise.
IP
Scoraig
The Ullapool Bookshop is selling copies of The Growing Down of Maggie D’.
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First part of a short series on the origins of the bus links between Ullapool and Inverness.

The Coming of the Motor Bus
It is strange to see the hotel in Garve disused these days, and the nearby railway station so quiet. What a busy place Garve was in the old days when the trains pulled in and the mails were unloaded and then loaded onto the waiting Ullapool mail-bus. Most train passengers alighting at Garve would have been heading for either the hotel or the bus.
Fifty years ago, the Dingwall-Kyle railway was under threat of closure. It was reprieved in the summer of 1974 by the incoming Labour Government, and fortunately trains do still call at Garve station today.
The old hotel and the station played a key part in Lochbroom’s history, and one particular Garve family has had ties with this area for nearly 200 years and five generations.
In 1832 a new inn, advertised as “modern and commodious”, was opened at Garve. It struggled, because the road to Ullapool was in disrepair over the next few years and times were cruelly hard, but finally a new road was opened between Garve and Ullapool in 1851.
In 1855 William Mackenzie, originally from Ardersier, advertised that he was the new tenant of the Garve Inn. Within a few years he started operating the mail-coach service to Ullapool, taking over from a Mr Morrison. In 1858 Mrs Mackay of the Commercial Inn in Ullapool advertised that conveyances were provided there “in connection with the mail-car from Garve”.
When the Dingwall-Stromeferry railway opened in August 1870, with a station at Garve, it brought Mr Mackenzie and his family, including his teenage son William (W.D.), a huge boost in trade. Visitors arrived to stay at the hotel or travelled onwards on the coach to Lochbroom.
A new mail steamer service between Ullapool and Stornoway was started in July 1871. Sir James Matheson’s steamer Ondine sailed the route from then until the end of 1884. William Mackenzie’s coach surely carried a lot more mail and passengers during those years.
David Macbrayne switched the steamer service to Stromeferry at the start of 1885, but William Mackenzie kept going with his coach service and the hotel. By the turn of the century his son William had taken over, and in 1902 he also took over the lease of the Royal Hotel in Ullapool.
In 1908 and 1909 W.D.Mackenzie bought his first motor vehicles but it was not until 1913 that horses were replaced as the motive power on his Garve-Ullapool mail service.
End of the Horse-Drawn Era
The Highland News reported the changeover, with some sadness, in June 1913, as follows:
“Owing to the introduction of the motor car for the conveyance of the Ullapool mails, Mr W.D.Mackenzie, hotel-keeper and mail contractor, Garve, disposed of his horses on Friday 6th June. Mr D. Mackintosh, Dingwall, conducted the sale, and good prices were received for the horses. The carriages and harness, however, were sold for the proverbial ‘old song’.
“The advent of the motor displaces what for a period of fifty years was one of the best-horsed mail- coaches in the Highlands. No better proof of this is required than to recall that when the late King Edward visited the Island of Lewis in 1902, it was a pair of horses withdrawn from the Garve and Ullapool mail coach, with Mr John Grant, mail-driver, as coachman, who were sent from Garve to Stornoway, by request of Major Matheson (proprietor of Lewis and Ullapool), to drive His Majesty.”
As well as John Grant, Charlie Fraser and all the other horse-coach men are remembered for their years of service in getting the mails and passengers safely through between Garve and Ullapool in all weathers.
In the early 1920s W.D.Mackenzie bought the Garve Hotel from the Stirling family. In 1935, aged nearly 80, he gave up his lease of the Royal Hotel in Ullapool but kept on the Garve Hotel and the mail-bus service.
He was keenly involved in many community activities up until his death in 1939. His daughter, Miss Helen Mackenzie, then took over the business, but she retained her father’s name W.D.Mackenzie as the trading name.

DS

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