Kingston Bridge

“The engines are noisy, the air cold and filled with the smell of diesel. By seven dawn is breaking over the shipyard…’

There’s an elegiac tone to Peter Ross’s account of one of the last trips of the Renfrew ferry.

The decline of ferry services is part of the changing song of the Clyde. Once this part of the river was teeming with criss-crossing boats. By the end of the 19th century there were eight ferry services in operation.

Most traffic was taking workers to the shipyards. In the 1960s the Clyde tunnel and the Kingston Bridge were the death-knell of most of the ferries. The Renfrew Ferry, which had been running since the 17th century, made its last trip on 31 March 2010.