Caledonian MacBrayne will celebrate the completion of the new overnight berth at Lochranza Pier on the Island of Arran on 29 June 2003.

The first arrival at the new structure will be the preserved paddle steamer Waverley when she steams in shortly after 1 p.m. Caledonian MacBrayne chairman Dr Harold Mills will invite Arran Councillor Margie Currie to cut the tape to allow passengers to come ashore. Chairman of Waverley Steam Navigation Company, Iain MacLeod, will welcome the reopening of the pier to passengers.

When the travellers from Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh disembark they will be welcomed by the Arran Pipe Band and will find a village en fete, with stalls promoting the produce of the island decorating the new structure.

The Waverley will then sail on to Campbeltown and the Mull of Kintyre, returning six hours later. Her timetable shows that she will call at Lochranza Pier each Sunday for the following two months on an excursion from the Upper Firth piers. Clyde Marine’s The Second Snark is also scheduled to call twice per week.

Lochranza Pier had been the focus of the life of the island village for the best part of a century until it closed in 1971. In its heyday it could receive at least six and sometimes more steamer calls each day at the height of the summer season. Fishing boats and the ubiquitous puffer would also tie up regularly. An exorbitant repair bill forced the pier’s early demise and the Campbeltown cruise steamer was diverted via Brodick.

In the following year a new service was started using a small bow-loading ferry between Lochranza and Claonaig, the nearest point in the Kintyre peninsula. This provided a very convenient ‘back door’ to Arran and its popularity increased so greatly that the present ferry, Loch Tarbert, can carry almost four times as many cars as the Kilbrannan which inaugurated the route.

One operational problem was that the ferry had to berth at a buoy in Loch Ranza overnight and this was a huge inconvenience to her crew. Thanks to a £0.375m Piers and Harbours grant from the Scottish Executive, Caledonian MacBrayne have been able to rebuild the pier out from the stone stump which remained, and so offer safe overnight berthing facilities for the ferry, at the same time allowing ships such as the Waverley to call.

The new structure, costing £0.585m overall, is sheet-piled, filled in with stone, given a tar macadam surface and finished off with wooden coping.

Robbie Brown, CalMac’s Route Manager for Arran, said: "We are delighted that PS Waverley will berth at Caledonian MacBrayne’s new pier at Lochranza to mark its official re-opening, 115 years after PS Scotia called to open the village’s original pier in 1888."