The Shiants Shan’t be Once Again

We set out to cross the Minch via the rat infested islands of the Shiants.  There’s not many people I know can cook up a plan like this but Rab is definitely one of them!

Julia, Rab, Paul Cromey and myself left for the north of Skye on a Thursday evening.  Having planned to drive up with Paul, I had to rethink  when I couldn’t get him on the phone.  I ended up driving up on my own – perhaps a saving grace in retrospect.  After Fort William I let a ambulance overtake, and when it turned towards Kyle of Lochalsh onto the A87 I started to hope it wasn’t anything to do with Paul, who was most likely ahead on that very same road.

It’s a fast road with few cars.  It was just over the lip of a hill that I found a swarm of blue lights, and right at the center, confirming my worse fears, a mangled car with a kayak on the roof.  I jumped out of the car and ran towards the crash site. I had in fact never met Paul before, but it only took seconds to work out who it was.  He was, completely remarkably walking on two legs though looking quite shaken.   The passengers in the other car had not been so lucky.  Paramedics were still attending to someone stuck in their car who had been periodically loosing consciousness and mumbling about spinal pains in between.   The front of both vehicles had been crushed in, but the smaller car facing Paul’s had undoubtedly come out worse.

All passengers were eventually freed, though it took some time as the lady in the opposing passenger side had to be maneuvered onto a stretcher. As Rab and Julia arrived it was, from any basic analysis, obvious what had happened.  It was a very sad end to the holiday of a couple of Canadian tourists who had made a simple and honest mistake leading to a head-on collision with Paul, who had been doing somewhere around 60mph at the time.    It can only be due to the airbag that anyone walked away alive, and I was counting my luck realising how close I’d come to being in the crash.  Paul walked away with little more than a bruised ankle.  While the roof bars on Paul’s car had deformed and slid forward, it was somewhat remarkable the Kayak was still attached.  The impact of the crash had in fact thrown the boat forward with such force it had hit the deformed car bonnet and cracked the hull just under the bow.

By now it was late, and as he was shaken-up we were keen to see Paul to the guesthouse he had booked into.  His wife had phoned ahead to the guesthouse in broadford to inform them what had happened and that we would be late.  Rab, Julia and myself hoped that under the circumstances we might be able to stay on the floor in Paul’s room to keep an eye on him through the night.  None of us were prepared for what, in all our estimation, must be the single worst example of highland hospitality any of us have witnessed.  The Hebridean Guesthouse turned not only us three extras away from the door, but Paul himself.   We couldn’t believe it.

There was no option but to bed down in the cars in the car park in Broadford.  I’m still not sure who got the worst nights sleep – Paul who had been in a high speed car crash, or Julia who had Rab’s garden tools and wheel-barrows as bed buddies.

And so enough was enough – we called off the trip and returned South to HQ the following day – the Shiants shall not be once again.