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[Weaver]

A jack-knifed lorry blocked the Broadford to Port Righ road in the Red Cuillin mountains. Luckily this is the only place where there is an alternative road, the old Mol coastal road provides a low-level alternative past the site of the accident, which Mrs Weaver thinks occurred at the most spectacular and dangerous part of the road. However in the snow and possibly next to a precipitous drop, many trapped school buses coming home southwards from Port Rìgh dared not attempt to turn around in the road. So all the kids were stuck on buses forever in the snow. And no toilets of course. Miserable day for <em lang="gd">an sluagh òg</em>.

[burakkucat]

an sluagh òg -- the young people / the young ones ? 

(I don't think I will ever become proficient in Scots Gaelic.)

I remember it was either last winter 2016/7 or the year before 2015/6 when you showed a photograph of a lorry that had fallen over and off the edge of one of the Island's roads.

[sevenlayermuddle]

I was just reading about it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-42712588

On the Isle of Skye, the main road - the A87- was blocked for several hours in both directions by a jack-knifed lorry.
The closure meant two school buses with pupils who had been stuck for hours had to return Portree High. The school said they would be put in temporary accommodation for the night.

Sounds awful.

But if there is a silver lining, how nice to see the word “pupils” in correct usage.   Down here, for PC reasons that I’ll never understand, they’d be referred to as “students” even if they were too young to actually be students, and had never set foot in a University or College.

[Weaver]

Isn’t that usage referred to by sevenlayermuddle an Americanism ? oddly, they refer to (entire) Universities as “schools” on occasion.

Just as Burakkucat says, I did indeed post a pic of a lorry hanging off the road near there some while back. It is a high quality road, frightening to the uninitiated. I used to enjoy it very much indeed when conditions were good.

Apart from that one section, where there is the old Mol coast road (from Norse - a stony beach) this is the one and only road of the Island and when it gets cut the island is cut in two. It is culturally a bit like that, with people talking about “An Ceann a-Tuath” and its literal exact equivalent “The North End”, the latter being the made up of the west side area around Port nan Long, plus Port Rìgh and the trì corragan an Eilein.