Undiscovered Scotland

 

Cairnryan is a linear settlement looking across the main A77 road to Loch Ryan. It was established as Lochryan by 1701 when Lochryan House was built at the northern end of today's village. The house was remodelled in the 1820s and the imposing structure just visible from the main road today was the result.

Until the 1800s Cairnryan was an important staging post on the coach route to Ayr, with half a dozen inns along this short stretch of coast. It also achieved a less desirable reputation as a haunt of highwaymen preying on the passing traffic.

Today it appears to approaching ferry passengers as a long low line of mainly white-harled cottages and houses, set against a beautiful green hillside.

In the 1860s the railway came to south-west Scotland and nearly terminated at Cairnryan, which would have turned it into the main port for passenger services to Northern Ireland. But the railway went instead to Stranraer, swiftly followed by the steamer and later the ferry traffic wishing to connect with it. (Continues below images...)

 

During World War Two Cairnryan was turned into a large military port intended to act as a reserve for transatlantic shipping in case Liverpool or Glasgow were put out of action by enemy bombing. Three large jetties were built and the port was linked by a new railway to the line east of Stranraer. One of the jetties still exists. One of the port's wartime roles was to allow the construction of the Mulberry Harbours, the floating ports on which the Allies depended after D-Day.

In the 1960s the military railway was dismantled, but the military port allowed the growth of a new industry, shipbreaking. This culminated with the dismantling here of the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal in the late 1970s.

Being closer by sea to Northern Ireland than Stranraer, the attractions of Cairnryan as a ferry port led to the building by P&O of a roll-on roll-off terminal at the touthern end of Cairnryan in the 1970s. In late 2011 the other main ferry operator, Stena, also moved its services from Stranraer to a purpose-built terminal a little to the north of Cairnryan.