GAELIC road signs in the Highlands have been misspelt as disgruntled speakers of the language complained to the Scottish Government about the errors.
Signs on the road to Fort William have been the subject of complaints but the there are problems having them fixed due to legal issues, the Scottish Daily Express reports.
Correspondence to Transport Scotland released to the paper under Freedom of Information laws showed that signs on the A82 southbound were littered with mistakes.
Both signs had the Gaelic phrase Meadhan a’ Bhaile, meaning town centre, wrong, with the first reading “Meahdan” while the second one had “Bhal” instead of Bhaile.
Another sign had rendered the Gaelic name for Crianlarich as “Chrion Lariach”, with the proper accents omitted.
The Express reported that other errors had been rectified however Bear Scotland, which manages roads on behalf of Transport Scotland in the north west of the country, has claimed there are legal issues preventing the firm from accessing the signs on the A82.
A spokesperson for Bear Scotland said: “The sign at North Road Roundabout, Fort William, which have incorrect Gaelic spelling, was installed by the developer within private property during the construction of the retail development at this location.
"The owner of the land has informed that a formal legal agreement requires to be put in place before Bear Scotland can be given permission to access to the sign to correct the Gaelic misspelling. This has delayed matters and we apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.
“Bear Scotland had planned to make best use of resources by attending to both signs at the same time. However, as the formal legal agreement is still ongoing for one of the signs, we are not wishing to delay rectifying the spelling of the other sign any further and are currently arranging for this sign to be attended to."
The paper also found correspondence between Transport Scotland employees with one member of staff urging others to be careful with Gaelic spellings.
They wrote: “Please send PDF proofs of any signs before they are printed to avoid typos.
“There have been a handful of signs appearing across Scotland with typos which are in particular related to the way Microsoft uses the apostrophe key these days that we need to watch out for.”
