A872 (Corran Ferry)

This article is about the original route of the A872, which connected the Corran Ferry to the A82 and is now a short spur of the modern A861 on the east shore of Loch Linnhe.
For the current A872, a road from Dennyloanhead to Stirling, see A872.

The Corran Ferry

Several editions of the Ten Mile Road Map from the 1930s and 1940s shows the road across the Corran Ferry on Loch Linnhe as the A872, being a short spur on the eastern side and barely more than a slipway on the western. Other maps show the road as a mix of unclassified, un-numbered A road, A82 spur and the modern situation of A861 spur. Assuming that the A87x numbers were used in sequence in the late 1920s, the A872 must predate the original use of the A876 number, which was given to the Great Western Road extension in Glasgow in c. 1927.

The original layout of the road here was very different from today. In 1922, the old A82 still looped through Inchree, so approaching the Ferry at a different angle. It then dropped down the footpath to the Corran Inn, before climbing up the current spur to rejoin the present route. This means that the spur to the ferry would have originally been less than 100 m long. The A82 was realigned in the 1930s, but the Corran Inn was still accessed by two separate spurs from it. The present layout dates from the 1970s, when extra queuing space was required for the ferry, and two separate junctions on the A82 was causing unnecessary congestion.