Civil Engineering drawing – Eynort Access Road
One of a series of maps and drawings found in old ex military map cases stored in the loft of the Fort August Forest office and recovered by Grant Macintosh.
Indeed a rare find as virtually of all these drawings were destroyed at some period after the road works were successfully completed. Over the period of the 1960s and early 1970s there was a very significant road building programme throughout Scotland to access the maturing timber crops planted from 1920 onwards. The new pulp and paper mill at Fort William and in other locations new sawmills created a substantial demand for timber that had somehow to be transported from forest to mill. A major innovation which shaped the road programme was the introduction and development of the double drum cable crane winch in 1952 initially extracting over short distances but by the mid 1960s with skyline technology reaching up to 300 metres. Following these innovations the roads were then constructed at much greater distances apart resulting in significantly lower costs per unit of timber extracted.
Much of Scotland’s forest terrain was a severe challenge to road builders going from the extremes of soft peat several metres deep to steep valleys with rock buttresses and very steep side slopes all segmented by streams and rivers. Maintaining a road gradient of less than 1:12 slope while minimising very expensive bridge crossings and even more costly rock cuttings all contributed to continually testing road engineers and road surveyors. Surveyors had to walk out on proposed road lines through unbrashed crops in many cases and keep readjusting their survey lines until they arrived at the optimum solution for a site or forest. This was followed up by a detailed drawing of the route, drawings of each bridge, large culvert, profiles of cuttings through rock buttresses and so on. The writer recalls two road surveyors in the Torlundy Office (Fort William) in 1967, Donald Macintosh and George Robertson, and there may well have been another two in Fort Augustus Office at Jenkins Park possibly Mike Johnston and Arthur Vickers. Updates and corrections on this would be welcome.
This drawing on tracing papar depicts an improvement to an existing access to the forest which passed the old Glenbrittle Forest Office. It was drawn up by Mike Johnson and assumed to be about 1973 when the accompanying drawings were actually dated. The attached PDF covering drawings of approach works and actual construction specifications for Bridge No 1 on the route is of a low quality and the drawings are now shown in the the following two records 4490 and 4491
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Groups: Forestry Areas, Forestry Records, Booklets and Reports, Road and Bridge Engineers and Works