Highland councillors need to find up to £130 million to build a new route around two-and-a-half miles of road that have been prone to rockfalls for the past 40 years.

The A890 Stromeferry bypass, which runs along the south side of Loch Carron, is a Highland Council road, but the authority only has £10m to spend on making it safe.

It will now be approaching the Scottish Government, Transport Scotland, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the Europe Union and other bodies for financial support.

Although the avalanche black spot involves less than three miles of the road, there is no easy way to circumnavigate it.

Nine routes were recommended for consideration by the council, but these have been whittled down to three options.

The first is a new road behind the village of Lochcarron, across the loch from the rockfall site. There would then have to be a bridge or some kind of crossing at the Strome Narrows. This would cost up to £109m.

The second would relocate the existing railway that runs beside the A890 road, on to a viaduct constructed in the sea loch. A new road would then be built on the land vacated by the railway, with the original road acting as an area to catch any ­falling rock. This would cost £69.55m to bypass just the site of the rockfall, but £132.13m to do the whole route.

The third is to build a new road through Glen Udalain, diverting the existing route to the south through Attadale Estate, with phased costs of between £57.16m and £85.83m.

The road was closed for two full days last week. It will remain closed overnight from 7pm to 7am until further notice as further geological assessments are undertaken.

Audrey Sinclair, Independent councillor for Wester Ross, Strathpeffer and Lochalsh, told the council's Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee that meetings had been held about the road 15 years ago and the local residents affected needed to see the council was now moving forward.

"We do need to go back to the local communities to give them an explanation," she said.

Another Independent ­councillor in the same ward, ­Richard Greene, said the closure of the A890 last week, along with the closure of the A835 Ullapool road near Garve on the same day, underlined the problem.

He said anyone in the area served by the Stomeferry bypass who went to Inverness for an appointment or business faced an enormous detour.

"Starting in Lochcarron they would have had to go north to Ullapool, east across to Bonar Bridge and south then down to Inverness - a journey in the region of 170 miles, 340 miles round trip," he said.

"That is the stark reality of what is happening on the west coast at the moment."

Other councillors warned the road could hinder the revival of the former fabrication yard at Kishorn as a hub for offshore renewable energy projects.

The road was built in the 1960s, but even before it opened to traffic in 1970 there was a major rockfall.

In 1989, there was a landslide just minutes after two school buses passed carrying pupils from Lochcarron and Applecross to Plockton High School.

Concerned parents condemned the road as the worst in Britain.

Three days before Christmas 2011 it was closed again, and did not fully reopen until the end of April 2012.

That meant a 130-mile detour by Beauly and Loch Ness just to get from one side of the sea loch to the other until a ferry service, withdrawn more than 40 years ago, began running again.