DONALD G. BOOTH describes the UK’s longest daily registered bus service, run today as part of the Scottish Citylink network
It is the UK’s longest registered local bus route — what in pre-deregulated times was called stage carriage — stretching from Scotland’s largest city to the Isle of Skye.
Now firmly part of the Scottish Citylink network, the service between Glasgow and Uig offers the traveller a rapidly changing vista of spectacular scenery, and passes through areas rich in history, some of it bloody. It passes 17 lochs, seven of them sea lochs, crosses two geological faults, one of Europe’s last great wildernesses, numerous mountains including the UK’s highest, and one of the UK’s great canals.
At 46 years old, it is a fairly young route in historical terms, but it has had more than its fair share of trials and tribulations, particularly in the two decades following coach deregulation in 1980, when it became a pawn in a game for supremacy by various operators, large and small.
It skirts the ‘Bonnie Bonnie Banks’ of Loch Lomond, which at 27.5sq miles is Britain’s largest inland loch (or lake), climbs through Strathfillan up on to wild and remote Rannoch Moor before descending through majestic G…
