COLIN CAMPBELL: Inverness’s Riverside Way outlay offers meagre value for money

After being closed for nearly nine months, work on 400 yards of road leading along the riverside out to the Bught seems to have reached completion.

Judging by what has emerged, has it been worth it?

Well, what have we got now? A newly resurfaced road, a cycle track and a pavement. So, apart from the cycle track, it's much as before. The new road surface is obviously an improvement but in the absence of any cavernous potholes I never heard any complaints from drivers about it the way it was.

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Worth the disruption and expense? I don't know what this work cost but many months of labour there obviously doesn't come cheap. And with potholes strewn everywhere across the city, priority road repairs are a very touchy subject these days, particularly among drivers who've had their cars damaged by them. So whether money should have been thrown at a route which had not been the subject of any complaints beforehand is debatable, to say the least.

As for the cycling element, I've pedalled along the riverside so many thousand times, without the slightest hint of concern about anything. It's a quiet road and it didn't need a token cycle track. Ride a bike a mile away in areas where there is serious traffic and it can feel like you're taking your life in your hands. By comparison, this stretch was a cruise.

Along at the Bught, funded by "Levelling Up" scheme money, the gross tonnage of heavy machinery assembled on some days since work began there has been formidable. One evening amid vast mounds of turf and dirt I counted a dozen earth-moving and construction vehicles of one kind or another. A wandering visitor might have thought work was under way to build a small village.

This isn't a criticism. I pass the extensive building site - which is what it has looked like - most days and the scale of the equipment there has been matched by the level of activity.

Compare and contrast the progress at the Bught with the dismal saga involving riverside "artwork" which dragged out for four years not far away from it. Councillors became obsessed with using cash that came their way via an arts grant and just had to spend it, whether it would actually enhance the riverside or not.

A bizarre notion to build a "tilting pier" emerged, was soon recognised as a crackpot proposal, and was challenged and rejected by the public all the way downriver from Ness Walk to the Merkinch.

Undeterred, and determined not to be thwarted a second time, "The Gathering Place" was then presented by the council as a substitute amid ludicrous claims about its artistic value. After prolonged public protest about the destruction of a natural beauty spot, and construction deferrals and delays, it was finally installed at a cost of £300,000. What a ruinous waste that was.

We'll see what finally emerges from the current upheaval. It looks like a mixed bag.

The Bught Park upgrade will certainly be beneficial.

But a great deal has been spent on supposedly "enhancing" the riverside over the past few years. At least the era of peppering it with artwork junk seems to be over. Maybe it's now time to call a halt and stop spending money on trying to supposedly improve a treasured part of Inverness that many would say only needed to be left alone.

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