SCOTLAND Lost and Found

[scots-gallivanter]

The pass [Glencoe]is an awful place. It is shut in on each side by enormous rocks from which great torrents come rushing down in all directions. In amongst these rocks on one side of the pass ...... there are scores of glens, high up, which form such haunts as you might imagine yourself wandering in, in the very height and madness of a fever.

Attributed to Dickens by JOHN FORSTER, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872)

FOUR YOUTHS in hoodies chase the Glasgow pigeons as we queue for the bus to Fort William, and two Irishmen behind us argue over whether knocking fish on the head facilitates landing them. It makes them jump higher, says one. His wife tells him not to put his sausage roll in his pocket, but to eat it there and then.

An elderly man stoops over a walking stick, of the kind issued in hospitals. He wears slip-on grey sneakers, and a cigarette dangles from the left of his mouth. He inhales hands-free.

It’s Buchanan Street. It could be Pyong Yang. The portrait of the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth is everywhere you look, her obituary emblazoned in LED on every bus.

A dozen comics waddle past us waving Union flags. We board the bus, for which there appears to have been a block booking for an Orange lodge.

Before long we’re making our way up the western bank of one of Europe’s most celebrated stretches of water, Loch Lomond. Luckily, I’ve a window seat on the right, and can savour the scenery rather than listen to the Rangers video one of the Masons is watching on his phone while his mates snore. Loch Lomond has 37 islands. One has escapee wallabies; another has a nudist camp; yet another’s yew trees provided the wood for Bruce’s bows at the Battle of Bannockburn. It is the only substantial yew wood in Scotland.

Sir Walter Scott’s influence on tourism was described by Alexander Smith in Summer in Skye as long ago as 1865: 'As soon as The Lay of the Last Minstrel appeared, everybody was raving about Melrose and moonlight. He wrote The Lady of the Lake and next year a thousand tourists descended on the Trossachs, watched the sun setting on Loch Katrine, and began to take lessons on the bagpipe. . . . . Where his muse was one year, a mail-coach and a hotel were the next.'

In September 2024, though, Flamingo Land was refused planning permission for a £40 million tourism complex on a disused shunting yard near Balloch at the southern end of the loch. There was a 175,000- name petition against plans for a resort that would have included woodland lodges, two hotels, a monorail, and a water park.

The Dumbarton Democrat ventured: 'Planning application for Flamingo Land is a preposterous proposal which should be refused. It would be like putting the Scottish National Orchestra on the same concert programme as the Bay City Rollers.'

In December 2017 the five-star Cameron House Hotel, on the western bank of the loch, was gutted by fire after a porter placed hot ashes in a cupboard next to kindling. Two people were killed, and the hotel, which had hosted Churchill, Princess Margaret, Mountbatten and Samuel Johnson, was closed for three years.

The original castle built on the site of Cameron House had been occupied by the Earls of Lennox. In 1763, it was bought by the family of Tobias Smollett, born in nearby Renton, whom George Orwell reckoned was ‘Scotland’s best novelist’. Smollett is quoted as saying: 'I have seen Lake Garda, Albana, de Visco, Bolsetta and Geneva. Upon my honour I prefer Loch Lomond to them all.'

What became the grounds of Cameron House were once home to 32 bears. The Cameron Bear Park, which opened in 1972, featured a zoo garden, which was very popular with visiting children. I recall, also, attending a rock concert there in the 1980s.

Back on the northbound bus I fall asleep and dream of tourists snapping marsupials on their mobiles as they hopped about the Scottish glens. The late Lady Arran Colquhoun, whose son now sits in the House of Lords, originally bred them on Inchconnaghan island in Loch Lomond in the 1940s. She later became famous as the ‘fastest granny on water’ after reaching 103mph in a power boat on Lake Windermere in the 1980s. Some of the wallabies managed to get to the mainland and were knocked down by vehicles whose drivers were baffled to see the outlandish creatures. They remain feral, although a petition has been raised to save them following the sale of the island to showbiz's Kirsty Young, who proposed relocating them.

As I wake up the bus begins to negotiate Rannoch Moor, east of Glencoe, through some of the most haunting scenery imaginable, although many writers have recoiled from it.

Glencoe, reputedly the birthplace of the poet Ossian, is reminiscent of Switzerland; and it evokes tales of buried giants and inconsolable ghosts. Its supernatural grandeur robs me of words, as it did Lord Cockburn: 'I will not attempt to describe what is so common, and is yet superior to all description. It is the Switzerland of Scotland.'

The literati loved or loathed the glen. Dorothy Wordsworth, who went on a six-week tour of the Highlands with her brother William, and the ailing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called it ‘a wild and solitary spot’. William Gilpin, a Cumberland curate who became one of the founders of the ‘picturesque’ school of travel writing, wrote: 'Glencoe is … one of the most interesting scenes in the whole country, hung with rock, and wood; and abounding with beauties of the most romantic kind' (Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1776, on several parts of Great Britain; particularly the Highlands of Scotland, 1789) .

In his book The Wild Places Robert McFarlane, the naturalist and travel writer, travelled Glencoe and wrote of Rannoch: 'Many know the Moor … but relatively few enter it, for it is vast and trackless and has a reputation for hostility at all times of year'.

And T S Eliot penned the following poem:

Here the crow starves, here the patient stag

Breeds for the rifle. Between the soft moor

And the soft sky, scarcely room

To leap or soar ...

‘Rannoch by Glencoe’

The poet Robert Southey recoiled from Glencoe’s ‘savage and terrible grandeur’: 'It admits of no comparison ; it has a grand character of desolation, not to be found in our happier Land of Lakes.'

The American travel writer Nathaniel Carter saw Glencoe’s ‘solitary, gloomy and romantic wildness’ and believed the scenery surpassed anything he had witnessed in Scotland. 'It is composed of perpendicular belts of dark cliffs, piled one upon another, till the top is literally lost in the clouds, which are constantly breaking upon the rocks and feeding torrents that tumble into the vale below,' he observed in his Letters from Europe (1829).

Charles Dickens considered it ‘perfectly terrible … an awful place’, and wrote to his friend, John Forster: 'If you should happen to have your hat on, take it off that your hair may stand on end.'

For the celebrated Dickens, Glencoe would live in his dreams for as long as he lived. The very recollection of it made him shudder. The Rev. James Hall, chaplain to the Earl of Caithness, was scared by it, too: he referred to Glencoe as ‘the dreary and dreadful pass’ with its ‘gloomy precipices and the ‘savage rudeness of the mountains’. Nor was the historian Thomas Macaulay impressed: 'The most dreary and melancholy of all the Scottish passes – the very Valley of the Shadow of Death.'

Passengers on the bus take photographs from their seats, as I avert my eyes from the wrecked house that the demonic Jimmy Savile used as an infrequent bolt hole. The cottage, on the approach to Glencoe, is vandalised and derelict, with slogans denouncing the disgraced paedophile, who died in 2011. Someone set it on fire in September, 2004. Harris Islam, the billionaire Kirkcaldy-based retail tycoon, who now owns it, wants to bulldoze it and erect a museum to the late mountaineer Hamish McInnes, who sold it to Savile, not knowing what he really was. Others want it to be ‘flattened and rewilded’.

The massacre in Glencoe is one of the most talked about atrocities in our bloodstained land: the culmination of a government plot to bring Highlands clans to heel in the years after William of Orange had ousted King James. Thirty-eight members of the MacDonald clan were murdered in February 1692 by soldiers led by a Campbell.

The massacre was condemned by several writers, including James Johnson, a verbose Irish surgeon and advocate of ‘climate therapy’, in his book, The Recess, or Autumnal Relaxation in the Highlands and Lowlands ; being the Home Circuit versus Foreign Travel , a Tour of Health and Pleasure to the Highlands and Hebrides (1834): 'There is no valley or spot in the Highlands that can make much pretension to the sublimity of Alpine scenery or solitude except Glenco. The cliffs, crags, and steeps that rise in rude and barren majesty, some two thousand feet , on each side of this narrow valley or ravine, appear like the gigantic ribs of some huge earth-born monster from which time and tempest had long swept away every thing but the solid granite bones.

'The scenic phenomena produced the annals of crime and the history of mankind (which are nearly synonymous) there is not a more revolting example of infamy and cruelty than this sequestered and romantic valley has put on deathless record! Even in these degenerate days , we can scarcely credit the astounding and tragic fact, that the hero of our ‘glorious revolution’ should have signed and countersigned worse than the edict of Nantes.'

In 2015 lines from Sir Walter Scott’s poem about the massacre were beamed on to hillsides by Edinburgh-based Double Take Projections to mark the 300th anniversary of the 1715 Jacobite uprising.

Rannoch Moor is a place of wonder: one of Europe’s last wildernesses – fifty square miles of blanket bog, lochans, rivers, and rocky outcrops.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s view of Rannoch Moor in the novel Kidnapped was: 'A wearier looking desert a man never saw.'

In his collection of letters to Sir Walter Scott, published as The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland (1824), John Macculloch, evidently not one for majestic scenery, dismissed the staggeringly beautiful moor as a Serbonian bog’: 'All, every beauty, every thing, vanishes before we reach the King’s House; where the hideous, interminable, open moor of Rannoch is spread before us, a huge and dreary Serbonian bog, a desert of blackness and vacuity and solitude and death; the death of nature.'

He must have found it on a bad day.

[scots-gallivanter]

TWENTY-FIVE

The sea was good night and morning,

the winds were friends, the calm was kindly –

the snow seeks the burn, the brown fronds scatter;

my dancing days for fishing are over.

GEORGE CAMPBELL HAY, Wind on Loch Fyne (1948)

THERE IS A weird phenomenon not unknown to me that scientists call hypnopompia. It’s that occasionally unpleasant period between sleep and wakefulness. I experience it this morning in Tarbert after a night spent crashing like a hobbit on a wafer-thin layer of polyester. I get it when, after an uncomfortable, spasmodic, arthritis-inducing snorefest, I crouch in the tent to don my boots and hurtle forward into a clump of bracken.

I stretch my muscles and rub the tick bite on my backside this morning. I feel like a small furry animal emerging from hibernation. I realise that the zip of the sleeping back has left its indentation on my face. Camping isn’t for me, I conclude but, after walking for a few yards, I demur. I gaze from on high upon the perfectly situated harbour town of Tarbert, and the dazzling East Loch Tarbert that beautifies it.

In 1843 Cockburn asked: 'How it is that I have never heard of that curious little bay? – there it lay, calm and silvery – a curve of about twenty or thirty small houses drawn round the upper end, all comfortable- looking – the ruins of an old castle standing on a rocky knoll at the left side of the entrance – a striking and beautiful spot like a scene from a theatre.'

And Guernsey-born geologist John Macculloch wrote of Loch Tarbert: 'The water was like a mirror, and as the sun reached the dewy birch woods, the air was perfumed by their fragrance, while the warbling of ten thousand thrushes on all sides, with the tinkling sound of the little waves that curled on the shore, and the gentle whispering of the morning air among the trees, rendered it a perfect scene of enchantment.'

I am enchanted too. I stand on the rocky knoll which Cockburn noted. There are none of Macculloch’s thrushes, but a cuckoo and meadow pipits vie for musical attention. A shag poses on a rock out on the fringes of this inlet of Loch Fyne, unperturbed by anchored yachts. A female sparrowhawk glides overhead. The lochside remains wonderfully wooded. The vista has an antihistamine effect; to blazes with my bites. Loch Fyne glitters over there and we can see the distant outline of lofty Beinn Mhor on the Cowal peninsula. The coffee is potable. All is right again in the world.

West Loch Tarbert is less than a mile away from its eastern brother. It is the land in between that prevents Kintyre from being an island. There is an oft-repeated story that King Magnus of Norway had his longboat dragged across this isthmus to bag the peninsula. According to the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson the king made an arrangement with Malcolm III of Scotland that he could take possession of land on the west coast around which a ship could sail. By taking command of his ship’s tiller and ‘sailing’ across the isthmus, he was able to claim the entire peninsula. Norway nobbled Kintyre for 12 years. That dragging of boats would be similar to the portages of Canada and the ‘diolkoi’ of Greece. There was a paved trackway on the Isthmus of Corinth, across which vessels were lugged. The shortcut allowed the Corinthians to avoid the long and dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnese peninsula. To avoid the perilous Mull of Kintyre, sailors likewise used the isthmus of Tarbert (Gaelic tairbeart means ‘carrying across’).

We had camped last night on the edge of a community woodland next to Tarbert Castle, on one wall of which conservationists have had to use modern brickwork and concrete to stop it falling down. The Annals of Ulster place a fortification on Tarbert hill in the eighth century. The first stone castle went up in the 13th century, Edward 1 seized it, and Robert the Bruce took it back. Bruce’s Exchequer Rolls dealing with the work at the castle is one of the oldest historical documents in Scotland. James IV built a tower house at the castle, which has been painstakingly restored by volunteers, and the castle is now owned and operated by the Tarbert and Skipness Community Trust.

Tarbert grew up as a fishing village, and Harbour Street used to be lined with ‘farlans’, long wooden troughs in which peripatetic women gutted, cleaned and cured the catches as they landed. They would travel around the ports for work, and there was the inevitable revelling. The local sheriff had told Cockburn it was ‘a profligate place’ . As forthright as he always was, Cockburn declared: 'Nonsense! I don’t believe it. The brawls, which are his only facts, must proceed from the stranger fishers who nestle in it. I won’t believe anything bad of the natives of that little Virgilian port.

“This Sheriff a worthy, ugly, sensible, cart-horse of a man, hideously ugly, and with a coarse, high-keyed, idiotical voice, at which the very stots stare. Sir Walter Scott once amazed us all by taking this strange, good, and most illiterate creature to Paris with him, the most incomprehensible fact in the history of either man.'

Tarbert is associated with father and son Hay, both of whom left their literary mark. John MacDougall Hay was born in Tarbert in 1881, the son of a steamship agent, and he became a minister. His dark, tragic, pessimistic powerful novel, Gillespie, was set in Tarbert and was praised by Thomas Hardy and likened to the classic House with the Green Shutters. Hay died, a mere 38. His son, George Campbell Hay, became one of Scotland’s most talented, but unsung, poets. His playground was the shore of Loch Fyne, where he hung around fishermen, and he wandered the idyllic woods and hills around Tarbert. He wrote knowledgeably about the natural world, and understood the world of nets and spindrift. He wrote in English, Gaelic and Scots, and translated from Welsh, Irish, French, Greek, Italian, Norwegian and Arabic.

In October 1940 Hay hid in the hills to avoid conscription. He was arrested in Arrochar the following May and jailed until he reported for duty in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps at Catterick, where he met the poet Sorley MacLean, who later recalled that they ‘had two splendid afternoons and evenings when we talked Gaelic poetry the whole time’. Sadly, Hay Junior was a complex man dogged by mental illness and alcoholism. He died in squalor in Edinburgh in 1984.

From Tarbert we took the bus down the western flank of Kintyre. The ferry to Islay ran from Kennacraig, five miles away, but we decided to proceed to the village of Tayinloan, whose boat connects with the island of Gigha. We waited in Big Jessie’s cafe, next to the terminal where we were entertained by the waitress, who makes a mean meringue and keeps axalotls as pets. Seemingly, they’re like salamanders.

[scots-gallivanter]

TWENTY-FOUR

Smiles in the sunshine and tears in the rain

Still take me back to where my memories remain

Flickering embers grow higher and higher

As they carry me back to the Mull of Kintyre.

PAUL MCCARTNEY & DENNY LAINE (1978)

THE ZOOLOGIST James Wilson stood on a boat not far from here one beautiful summer’s evening in 1841. It was calm. It was still. Lights gleamed along the shore, and there was ‘a peculiar concerto between sea and land’. He jotted: 'A shoal of porpoises was tumbling and blowing in the bay, while the dry monotonous craik craik of the land-rail was as distinctly heard as if we had been anchored in the middle of a clover field.'

Nikki and I are sheltering in the doorway of a disused shop in cold, wet Campbeltown. I’ve an electronic version of Wilson’s A Voyage round the coasts of Scotland and the Isles on my steamed-up phone.

There is a shower of the kind of rain that looks less wet than it turns out to be. There are no seabirds or cetaceans in sight. It’s a damp day at the stub end of April. We are in between showers in Kintyre, that arm of land that reaches down the map to meet the ocean beyond the Mull. I have mislaid my rain-proof trousers. Had my dear father, who died while I was writing this book, been standing beside me, he’d have advised me, as he had done during a storm when I was eight: 'If it disnae kill you, it’ll cure you, boy. Your skin’s waterproof, either way.'

For some folk Kintyre may be the road to nowhere, but Scotland was more or less born here: as dreamy Dál Riata, the kingdom of the Gaels from Antrim, who settled here at the end of the fifth century. John Macculloch wrote, of Campbeltown itself (The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, 1824): 'A more picturesque and beautiful situation for a maritime town could not well be found, and, from different points, it presents some fine views; uniting all the confusion of town architecture with the wildness of alpine scenery, the brilliancy of a lake, and the life, and bustle, and variety, incidental to a crowded harbour and pier.'

Visitors to Kintyre used to arrive by sea. Most now take that long and winding road from Glasgow to Campbeltown, but the last leg of it, down the A83 from Tarbert, is relatively straight: it edges a raised beach lashed by the Atlantic rollers of the west: a wild seaboard gashed by mini ravines that have no right to be so close to so sandy a littoral. A glacier maybe dumped them one after a jagged other to become rocky outcrops. Shards and larger boulders. Mini-pinnacles. Seabirds of several species perch out on a scar there today and I’ve counted, what, 20 cormorants. A sight to behold, as we unwind from jumping off the bus to help the driver release a lamb trapped in a fence.

Here, from the Glasgow bus, you can, in fair weather, marvel at the distant outline of the Paps of Jura undulating their strangeness out on the horizon. After a while the road turns inwards for a few miles to reach the ‘wee toon’, which is fringed by a sweeping horseshoe bay beneath hill-land. Wee Campbeltown was once the capital of the old Gaelic kingdom. At the end of the 19th century it was a boomtown – one of the richest towns per capita in the UK, and so full of distilleries that they called it Whiskyopolis.

In the game of snakes and ladders that is Scotland’s economy it wasn’t always that way. Campbeltown had been the chief town of the Lords of the Isles, and effectively the capital of Scotland before Edinburgh was thought of, although Pennant observed in 1772 that it had risen in less than 30 years from ‘a petty fishing town to its present flourishing state’:

'About the year 1744 it had only two or three small vessels belonging to the port: at present there are seventy-eight sail, from twenty to eighty tons burthen, all built for, and employed in, the herring fishery ; and about eight hundred sailors are employed to man them. This town in fact was created by the fishery.' (A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides)

By the time the Rev. Daniel Kelly penned his entry for the New Statistical Account of Scotland in 1843, 500 families fished here but he stressed that ‘the great staple commodity of this place is the distillation of malt whisky’. There were then 25 distilleries, 76 pubs, and an Excise Office that employed 50 people.

The deep harbour was ideal for whisky to be steamed out to markets in the UK and America. Whisky tycoons built villas as grand as any erected by shipping magnates elsewhere. But the distilling industry was ultimately a victim of its success. The demand for liquor was so great that the distilleries concentrated on quantity rather than quality. The killer blow was a series of rises in spirit duties. When the 1911 census revealed an eight per cent drop in population over the past 10 years, the Argyllshire Herald declared:

'The removal from town and district of the best and most virile of our youth continues. There is but one way to stem the tide; that is, by the promotion of some new local industries.

'It remains for somebody to take the initiative, to devise new industries and so resuscitate the trade of the town, otherwise the decline will certainly continue.'

The paper noted that 37 people were emigrating every week, mainly to Canada. The distilleries began to close. There are now only three – in a town that was identified in 2013 as one of the most vulnerable in Scotland, and one of the most remote in the UK. Fuel poverty rates were nearly double the national average then. Professor Cliff Hague, chairman of the Built Environment Scotland, stated in a report: 'Like so many small towns, Campbeltown has been the plaything of forces beyond its own control. Its traditional industries – whisky, shipbuilding, fishing, forestry and tourism – have all experienced restructuring, and the same is true for agriculture which was once the mainstay of the surrounding area.'

There are encouraging signs. Glen Scotia Distillery’s 25-year-old malt has been crowned the world’s best. In the 2021 SURF awards for best practice in regeneration, Campbeltown was judged to be ‘Scotland’s most improved place’ (As many as 40 industrial buildings had received investment that totalled £13 million).

In 2023 plans were lodged for a ‘net zero’ distillery in the erstwhile whisky capital. The Brave New Spirits brand will be distilled at Witchburn Distillery in the former RAF Machrihanish airbase, which the community bought for £1. Their target is two million litres of alcohol per year, powered by 100% renewable energy and heat and energy recovery systems. The former NATO base operated as an airfield for nuclear-armed V-Bombers, for maritime aircraft hunting Russian submarines in the North Atlantic, and during the testing of Concorde.

The local populace, moreover, successfully fought plans to convert Scotland’s oldest atmospheric cinema, Campbeltown Picture House, into flats. It opened its doors the year before a young Charlie Chaplin signed for Pinewood Studios. It is still showing flicks.

Paul McCartney’s association with Kintyre is well documented. In 1966 he asked his accountant to find him a hideaway from the world of autograph-hunters and Beatlemania. He came up with High Park, an isolated farm on the moors near the Mull of Kintyre, which became the subject of one of the best-selling songs of all time in Britain. Very few people visited the Beatle in his far-flung bolthole. But Peter Brown, who was best man at John Lennon’s wedding, revealed in his biography of The Beatles, The Love You Make (2002):

'Paul summoned Alistair [Taylor, his office manager] to High Park so that he could pay a visit to the local pharmacy for him. According to Alistair, Paul had the crabs and needed a pesticide to shampoo with.

'Being Paul McCartney, the neighbourhood celebrity, Paul was too embarrassed to ask the pharmacist in the small town for the pesticide himself, so he sent Alistair. There was also a sense of urgency to this mission, lest Paul give the tiny parasites to Jane [Asher], who would most certainly realize he had been unfaithful to her.

'The town pharmacist was baffled by Alistair’s request. He had nothing for that purpose other than "sheep dip", which was used to delouse cattle. Paul presumably made do with that.'

In August, 1887 an unnamed boater rowed ashore in Campbeltown loch to stretch his legs. He wandered into one of the seven caves that notch the south of Davaar island, struck a match to light his pipe – and fainted. The following day hundreds of townspeople ran along the shingle causeway to the island brandishing byre lamps and candles. There in the cave was a life-size mural of Christ on the Cross. The Campbeltown Courier informed its readers:

'Nothing could be more suitable for the contemplation of such a subject than the semi-darkness and rocky grandeur of the large cavern in which the picture is placed.'

An embarrassed local art teacher, Archibald Mackinnon, owned up to being the creator of the fresco.

Locals said Mackinnon, who attached a brush to his walking stick to paint the high features in the cave, fearing the consequences of having used the school’s raw materials to paint the mural, did a moonlight flit soon after press coverage. He turned up in Grantham, where he became an itinerant artist. There are reports that he used hair from his nagging wife’s head to make brushes. Journalists reported his subsequent return to touch the mural up in 1934 – a visit that featured in cinema newsreels. He died the following year, aged 85.

Davaar’s second claim to fame is that the island appears on the Mull of Kintyre album cover, and many latter-day seekers of weirdness visit Davaar, which is accessible along a shingle causeway at low tide. The walk takes about 40 minutes. The island, home to peregrine falcons, dolphins, basking sharks, otters and seals, is privately owned and is part of an organic working farm with holiday cottages. One pilgrim visited in 2006 with a can of red spray paint and stencilled an image of the revolutionary Ché Guevara over the painting of Christ. His identity remains a mystery, but his work was short-lived.

Along the jagged shore opposite Davaar, ‘coasters’ used to roam and squat, away from it all. Jamie ‘Loafs’ Moran, Jock Smith, and Teddy Lafferty often crashed out in a written-off ambulance; and the four Morrans brothers, Joe, Dan, Mickey and Archie, used to sleep in a converted Co-op grocery van. In search of worldly contentment they wandered through land that featured evocative names: Ru Stafnish, Johnston’s Point, Second Waters, Polliwilline Bay, Gartnagerach, and a hill called The Bastard. Journalist Freddy Gillies told the Coast Scottish heritage website: 'To aver that the coasters "roughed it"would be an understatement, but they were a breed set apart who found true happiness during their forays, either alone with their thoughts or in company, particularly in the surroundings of the Learside’s coarse grass and pebble-strewn beaches.

'Sustenance came in the form of dry or tinned stores, occasionally supplemented by rabbit stew or "wilk bree", a thin soup made from periwinkles. Tea, naturally, was taken regularly, as were certain stronger brews.'

For holidaying motorists a 66-mile circular road trip, Kintyre 66, was launched in 2021. From Campbeltown it snakes its scenic way up the east coast via the B842 to Skipness and Claonaig, one of the ferry points to Arran. On its way up the Kilbrannan Sound the route doesn’t veer too far from the coast. There are some stunning views of the Arran skyline from this narrow highway. The road is a single-track one for its last 18 miles.

En route, eight miles north of Campbeltown, lies Saddell Bay, along which a pipe band marched in a memorable video that promoted Wings’s hit single.

Kintyre, of course, has a long history of music-making, on top of McCartney and the ‘Campbeltown Loch I wish you were whisky’ that Andy Stewart once belted out. From his home in the south of England the Rev. Edward Bradley visited Kintyre most summers and he wrote books about its folklore, under the pseudonym, Cuthbert Bede. One of them was Argyll’s Highlands or MacCailein Mor and the Lords of Lorne, published posthumously in 1902, three decades after his research. In the preface John Mackay, the editor of Celtic Monthly, argued: 'It has been left to "outsiders" to produce the best books on Kintyre. Cuthbert Bede ….. has, by implication, shown what a native might do, if he only took the trouble to even note down the ceilidh stories which he heard told round the winter fire.'

Bede wrote warmly of pedlars, vagrants and assorted travellers doing their bit to keep the old Gaelic tales going by narrating them or singing them in the vernacular:

'The shining rafters of the peat-reeked roofs would vibrate to the reels and jigs and strathspeys danced by the barefooted lads and lassies on the earthen floor to the inspiring music that the beggar with the Jew’s harp blew from his pipes, or scraped out of his fiddle, or breathed from his Lochaber trumps.

“Then, tired from jigging, they would gather around the fire and listen to the beggar recite the mystical poems of Ossian. The beggar would relate wild legends and thrill them with stories of ghosts and warlocks and brownies and water-kelpies, told with dramatic power and an actor’s art.'

Bede added: 'Such wanderers as these were wondrous popular in the Western Highlands and Islands, and nowhere more so than in Cantire, where, at its veritable Land’s-end, the Mull was more thickly populated than it is in these sheep-farming days.'

A lady in white and a sinister monk are the resident ghosts of Saddell Castle near the aforementioned bay of the same name. Bede observed in the 1870s that it was one of only two castles in Kintyre in a reasonable state of repair, the other being Skipness further up the peninsula. In 1976, the Landmark Trust restored it to its former glory.

After a basking shark made a boat capsize in the Kilbrannon Sound in 1937 – killing three people – a shark processing factory was established at Carradale almost in revenge. The oil was used for Tilley lamps and candles.

A piece in The Scotsman in June 1939 tells of crowds gathering on Carradale Pier to watch sharks being harpooned. As soon as the harpoon was fired, the sharks dived and disappeared, but one was hit and it ‘made off at racing speed towards the Kilbrannan Sound but whirled back in its tracks and went round and round in the bay in a series of great circles’ towing the boat with it.

Not far away, in 2022, an Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, appeared overnight in a car park nearby to erect masts! Niall Macalister Hall, who owns the Torrisdale Castle estate, told the Daily Record:

'They were pretty arrogant and said they didn’t need permission to do anything. They design and operate drones and they are into weapons systems, so we’re naturally wanting to know what they are up to.'

Elbit Systems UK employs 600 people over 13 sites, many of which have been targeted by protestors from the Palestine Action group.

The novelist and socialist activist Naomi Mitchison lived in Carradale for many years, and Flora Drummond, the Arran-born suffragette ‘general’, who was one of the pall bearers at Emiline Pankhurst’s funeral, lived her final years at Carradale, almost opposite her childhood home in Arran. She is buried in the village cemetery. Drummond was jailed nine times and undertook hunger strikes to advance the cause.

Possibly the highlight of the eastern flank of Kintyre is Skipness. Skipness estate was once run by stereotypical gung-ho gentry. The shooting extended over 20,000 acres, and visitors could bag grouse, black game, partridges, hares, rabbits, wood-cock, snipe, plover, pheasants and roebuck.

Colonel Walter Campbell, the so-called ‘Old Forest Ranger’, owned Skipness when he wrote his Indian Journal in 1864. Campbell revealed that when he returned from the colonies, his tutor, the foxhunter Alan McIntyre was still creeping about with his long-barrelled gun under his arm in his 70s. Campbell reminisced:

'It was really affecting to see the poor old man with tears of joy pouring over his furrowed cheeks, as I displayed to him my Indian trophies of the chase, and reminded him that, but for his good training I should never have earned them.

'He patted me on the back, calling me "the calf of his heart", the pride of his old age, and would sit for hours gazing at the heads and skins which decorated the hall, as an old Indian chief might do upon the scalps taken in war by his only son, chanting the while a song of triumph which he had composed on my return from "the far-off hunting-grounds near the rising sun", where I had slain great wild cats larger and stronger than a Highland bull.'

In his 1853 book, The Old Forest Ranger: Or, Wild Sports Of India On The Neilgherry Hills, In The Jungles, And On The Plains, he had written longingly about spearing wild boar watched by ‘vulgar Hindoos’. That’s probably enough of Campbell.

[scots-gallivanter]

TWENTY-TWO

I shall never forget the fervour with which a sick young friend once exclaimed, when suffering severely from the high, sharp, arrow-like winds of Edinburgh, ‘Oh! What would I not give for one single gasp of Rothesay air.

CATHERINE SINCLAIR, Scotland and the Scotch (1840)

WHEN THE NOVELIST sailed into Rothesay, she considered it to be ‘the Montpelier of Scotland’ – where invalids with consumption could benefit from the soft, balmy breezes of the west; and Bute, of which Rothesay is the capital, was a prosperous and exclusive island during the Victorian era. Guidebooks of the period likened it to Torquay or called it ‘the Brighton of the Clyde’. Sinclair mentioned a budding entrepreneur who had talked for years of turning Rothesay into a Cheltenham or a Constantinople, but his intentions had ebbed and flowed for so long, she feared the sea would ‘cease to be salt' before he finally made up his mind.

Bute impressed Sinclair with its deep, intensely blue ocean framed in a circle of noble mountains: ‘... the church bells at Largs are distinctly heard chiming on Sunday, in pleasing unison with the loud dash of the ocean, while the wind blows a sort of trumpet accompaniment through the waving forests; and this, with the warbling of some hundred birds, must make a charming natural orchestra, which might find a ready echo in every heart.’

Skyeman Martin Martin, who included Bute in his book A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland in 1703, wrote of the locals: ‘They are very industrious fishers, especially for Herring, for which they are furnished with about 80 large Boats.’

Nowadays several shops in Rothesay are boarded up. The Scottish Parliament Information Centre says one in five folk left the island between 2001 and 2020. There is a dearth of housing, and few jobs and opportunities. There is dereliction.

As we walk along the waterfront’s Albert Place, we spot a plea to the local authority emblazoned beneath the dilapidated Royal Hotel. Someone has graffitied ‘Council help stop Rothesay crumbling’ on an empty shop window. Just up the road, the iconic Rothesay Pavilion – a traditional entertainment venue – remains closed more than seven years after it was shut for a £15m refurbishment. It was stalled by the collapse of the building firm that took on the project. Argyll and Bute Council says that as part of its five-year plan it will work with the Rothesay Pavilion Charity Trust to lobby for funding to complete the refurbishment.

In 2023 Argyll and Bute MP Brendan O’Hara (SNP) was furious that the UK government had snubbed the region for ‘levelling-up projects’. There was no money to save Dunoon’s iconic Victorian Pier or Rothesay’s crumbling Royal Hotel. More than £1.1 billion of the £1.6 billion was awarded in England to areas with a Conservative MP, including the Prime Minister’s Richmond constituency. O’ Hara told the newspapers:

‘This decision of the UK Government not to fund these projects is a major blow to Argyll and Bute, and it is doubly disappointing to then discover that our economically fragile, rural constituency has been overlooked at the expense of far more affluent constituencies, including the Prime Minister’s own in Richmond.

'It appears that in this round, funding has been disproportionately awarded to areas with Conservative MPs in England, whilst Scotland’s share of the fund has declined, with some of Scotland’s most impoverished areas nowhere to be seen on the list.’

The inequalities of wealth are easy to find in Scotland, not just in inner cities and rundown former mining, shipbuilding, steel or tourist centres. You only have to compare the slogan on the abandoned Bute hotel to glossy brochures advertising islands. In 2019 Strutt and Parker advertised the uninhabited 660-acre island of Inchmarnock off the west coast of Bute, albeit for what they called the reasonable price tag of £1.4 million. The talk of the pubs is that Rothesay’s drunks were exiled there in the 19th century to dry out.

Lord Smith of Kelvin, who owns a vineyard in South Africa, bought Inchmarnock in 1999, the year he was knighted. He became a life peer in 2008 and is a former governor of the BBC. Irene Adams is secretary and a fellow director of Inchmarnock Ltd. In 2001 she was criticised in national newspapers for having claimed £200,000 as a Labour peer in the House of Lords, although she had only spoken once in five years.

Back on the mainland of Ayrshire, the rain comes in fits and starts and we re-acquaint ourselves with the Clyde Flyer for Gourock. If Wemyss Bay station is Lionel Messi, then Gourock railway station is a pub bore who had an unsuccessful trial with a Sunday league football team. We see four gentlemen aged anywhere between 30 and 70 dangling their fishing roads off the station wall into the harbour. Each could be sitting on a tranquil and picturesque riverbank rather than on a concrete concourse in full view of the madding crowd. Each has come armed with alcohol. Their beverages appear to range from Carlsberg Special to Buckfast by way of Thunderbird and Co-op Strong Cider. For non-Scots, unfamiliar with ‘Buckie’, here are two appreciations from anonymous online wine buffs:

‘Barnyardy funk (in a bad way) almost like a dead animal in a bird’s nest. A mix of flat Coca Cola and caramel with a whiff of gun metal.’

‘You’re not drinking Buckfast properly unless that dinner was given to you in a polystyrene box and you’re eating it under a bridge.’

This is a convenient juncture to relate that the term ‘steaming’ originated from travellers who overdid the booze on the steamboats. Licensing laws introduced in 1841 meant you could only get a drink in Scotland if you were a bona-fide ‘traveller’. The angling hobbyists at Gourock are not noticeably steaming but, going by the heft of their carry outs, they may become so before their angling outing is finished for the day.

There used to be a grand mansion where Gourock Park now sits. Gourock House was built on the site of an old castle in the late 18th century by Duncan Darroch, who had made a fortune in Jamaica. His family eventually gifted the estate to the town. The mansion was an ARP HQ during the war and was demolished in 1947.

It is too cold today for Gourock Outdoor Pool, the oldest heated swimming pool in Scotland, which was chosen by Damon Albarn to grace the cover of one of Blur’s albums. There are some hardy souls within it, but I’m with Hippocrates, who believed:

‘If any person will heat himself very much, either by a hot bath, or a great fire, and afterward continue in the same place, and same habit, as he who was much cooled, he will appear more cold and will become more shivering than the others.’

Fishermen and sailors used to dance seven times around a neolithic standing stone in Gourock for good luck. Most megaliths go hand in glove with romantic scenery, but not Granny Kempock, who stands like a petrified hunchback in a hood, on a rocky crag among tenements and shops. Today the place from where she faces the sea is advertised by a black metal sign next to a bin for dog shit. In 1662, the god-fearers burned Mary Lamont for allegedly having attended a coven at which it was planned to topple Granny Kempock into the sea. Witchfinding was a fashionable skill set back then.

When a Swedish cargo vessel sank off Dunoon in April 1956 with the loss of her six crewmen, a story circulated that one man had been given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by an old female passenger who was never identified. The word on the street was that it had been Granny Kempock in human form. There is a long tradition, which continues, of people leaving trinkets, coins and flowers at the stone, but any recent tributes must have been pinched by a hard-up local.

We’re in town waiting for the boat to take us across the firth to ‘Scotland’s Secret Coast’, Cowal. The woman at the chipshop reckons:

‘It’s an old altar to a pagan god, where they used to offer sacrifices. A few years ago, they used to put clothes on her on Hogmanay and have a few cans. Salt and vinegar?’

In 1904 the Rev Walter Mathams wrote in the Greenock Telegraph: ‘If she would only speak, she would tell a tale unrivalled in the annals of Scotland.'

A letter in a later edition of the Telegraph referred the council to ‘a hillock of refuse and ashes three feet deep right across the path’ and urged the council to deal with it. They did. And their eventual successors in 2021 had to do so again. I’m not the superstitious kind and, even if I wanted to dance about it before our short voyage to Dunoon, I couldn’t. It is now surrounded by iron railings. We are off to catch a boat on ‘that Fyrth on the west side, with all the islands up towards the most northerne headland, being inhabited by the old Scotts or wilde Irish…… which live by feeding cattle up and downe the hills, or else fishing and fowleing, and formerly, till that they have of late been restrayned, by plaine downeright robbing and stealeing.’ (Report by Thomas Tucker upon the settlement of the revenues of excise and customs in Scotland, 1666.) Tucker was an official in Oliver Cromwell’s regime.

[scots-gallivanter]

TWENTY

I’ll sing of a river I’m happy beside

The song that I sing is a song of the Clyde

Of all Scottish rivers, it’s dearest to me

It flows from Leadhills all the way to the sea

KENNETH MCKELLAR, The Song of the Clyde

SCOTLAND HAS SOME mesmerising scenery, most famously in the Highlands and Islands: panoramas that move something inside you. It’s a feather in the cap of the Firth of Clyde, therefore, that in 2022 Glasgow to Largs was the only Scottish route to feature in the UK’s top 10 most scenic bus journeys, as voted by SunLife customers. The ‘Clyde Flyer’ came third in Britain. It runs regularly through Greenock, Gourock and Wemyss Bay en route to Largs.

The views you enjoy to the north and the west, to Arran, the Cumbraes, the Cowal peninsula and the Kyles of Bute, are indeed phenomenal – alpine in grandeur. The Gazetteer of Scotland (1847) declared: ‘No parish in the west of Scotland, and few in the Highlands, can surpass Largs in the beauty and romance of the landscape which stretches along its own area, or is hung out within view of both its uplands and its plains.’

In his 2013 guidebook, Gourock to Largs Coast Through Time, Bill Clark writes: ‘…the distance from Gourock’s eastern boundary at Cardwell Bay to the ‘Pencil’ memorial just south of Largs, is a mere 16 miles. The road that tracks the land’s edge between these two points, however, allows the traveller to experience one of the finest scenic journeys in the land.’ (The Pencil monument was erected in 1912 to commemorate the Battle of Largs in 1263, in which Scotland repelled a Viking invasion.).

These sublime views, of course, are what discerning daytrippers have always seen as they sail ‘doon the watter’, that age-old practice of travelling to Rothesay, Dunoon, Millport, Largs, Girvan, Saltcoats and other coastal resorts during Glasgow Fair holidays. Following the coronavirus pandemic, marketeers have americanised such trips around the Clyde coast as ‘staycations’.

Largs once hosted a huge annual horse and cattle sale to celebrate St Colm; and it attracted thousands of farmers and crofters from all over Scotland. There was no pier, only a jetty for landing passengers. The beasts were thrown overboard to sink or swim ashore. Travel writer John Lettice observed that the fair continued for several days. The vast concourse of people, who flocked there on foot, on horseback, in carriages, and in boats, almost covered the plain next to the sea:

‘All was movement, animation, clamour and din; and to have regarded this motley, and tumultuous scene in undisturbed quiet, from some of the neighbouring heights, must have been highly gratifying to a curious, or contemplative mind.’

As campsites were few and far between in the Largs area we pitched tent next to a busy flyover, near the shore and next to a couple of campervans from which Bon Jovi competed with The Carpenters into the small hours. In the morning a woman out walking her two Snautzers apologised for waking us up but we were already up with the larks. We were unable to use the toilets at the yachting club 50 yards off as a special code was required to access them and their undoubtedly hot showers.

TWENTY-ONE

The coast at this place, as it is with a few exceptions along the whole course of the Frith, is bounded at a short distance back from the shore with a range of hills, sometimes rising in gentle slopes, and at other times in abrupt rocky precipices, from which is to be had a continued succession of beautiful and varied views.

JOHN LEIGHTON, Select Views on the River Clyde (1830)

THE CLYDE Flier bus takes us past sheer sandstone rocks, honed and honeycombed on their well-wooded heights, out of whose crevices gnarled trees thrive. On the other side are the fairytale landscapes of the firth. We alight from the bus for the boat to Bute in an architectural theme park. With its Georgian-style timber frontage, its Chinese pagodas, and turrets; its Queen-Anne-style Italianate clock tower, and its soothing curved design, Wemyss Bay railway station is a glorious A-listed building. It has a pleasing feel, thanks to a group of volunteers who rescued it from dereliction. Now a vibrant place with a colourful community garden, book shop, museum, and multiple hanging baskets, this miracle of glass and metal architecture and engineering won the World Cup of Stations cup in 2023. It is a masterpiece from the golden age of rail, with a rare curving walkway that takes you down along a winding wood and glass ‘tunnel’ to the old steamboat terminal.

You get the notion that Wemyss Bay folk are rightly very proud of their station, but there are several other architectural wonders in the area that have not been so lucky. Beneath one of the picturesque precipices stood Ferncliff, a splendid villa built in 1851 that, along with the similar homes of very wealthy businessmen, earned Wemyss Bay the nickname New Glasgow. It was the home of the Danish consul in the 1870s and, in its heyday, was called Seaside Heights. It became the Rothmar Hotel in 1924; a convalescent home for miners in the 1940s; and a ‘Christian guest house and conference centre’, a Baptist church and then an evangelical centre from the 1970s until the 1990s. One of its rooms was known as ‘The Prime Minister’s Room’ after Clement Attlee stayed there. It was demolished in 2001 to make way for flats.

Kelly House was another country house not far from the station. Enriched by the slave trade in the West Indies, John Wallace, a distant relative of William Wallace, bought the ‘Kelly Estate’ in 1792, and built a gothic mansion with tall chimneys, ornate turrets and sprawling landscaped gardens. An earlier building, Kelly Castle, had burned to the ground in 1740.

Wallace’s son and heir, Robert, who became MP for Greenock, had ambitious plans for a marine village containing 200 luxury villas; a hotel, a school; three churches, terraced walks with a fountain and grass promenade; a harbour and quay for steamboats; a curling pond, a bowling green; heated baths, and a reading room and billiards room. However, he went bankrupt after slavery was abolished. In 1871 the estate came into the hands of James Young, the inventor of paraffin. Young was a friend of David Livingstone, the explorer, and he built a replica of his African mud hut in the grounds. It is long gone.

The house, revamped in the 1880s after Young’s death, was destroyed by arson in 1913 and the site was cleared during the war, when the Forces moved to the area to train for the invasion of Sicily. There is speculation the fire was the work of suffragettes unhappy with the house’s association with the slave trade, but no culprit was ever charged. It is now the site of a caravan park.

Castle Wemyss was the village’s pride and joy, a fascinating place with rare sea views, built by developer Charles Wilsone Broun in 1850. He also built 32 villas nearby, only one of which (Mansfield) remains.

The Cunard tycoon, Sir John Burns, later Baron Inverclyde, bought Castle Wemyss in 1860. It had a badminton court, a pier, greenhouses, Roman baths, and a monk’s cell. It was of great historical value as a fashionable destination for V.I.P.s, among them Henry Morton Stanley, U.S. General Sherman, Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Trollope, Peter II of Yugoslavia, Emperor Haile Selassie, and various members of the royal family.

Trollope wrote some of his novel Barchester Towers during one of his stays, and it inspired him to write of Portray Castle in his book The Eustace Diamonds.

The fourth and last baron was renowned for his parties, some of which according to local gossip, included midnight ‘skinny dipping’. He was briefly married to a daughter of the millionaire owner of the Sainsbury chain. Alas, however, wealth would appear to be transitory. He died in 1957, childless; and his heirs couldn’t afford to maintain the estate. His title came to an end. The estate went to a developer, and Inverkip Power Station was built on part of the grounds. The castle itself crumbled, and the roof was ripped off to avoid housing rates. It was bulldozed in 1984, and a housing estate was built on the site. A flight of steps and a flagpole are all that remains of a priceless and elegant mansion, and gardens likened (in a biography of George Burns) to the Babylonian gardens of Nebuchadnezzar. The powers that were even removed an age-old monkey puzzle tree that stood at the entrance to the drive (‘for safety reasons’).

I had a look in Wemyss Bay station bookshop for anything by a writer who spent her last years in nearby Skelmorlie, and who set almost half of her many children’s books along the Clyde coast. Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s work was incredibly popular from the 1920s to the 1940s. In her Springdale series she renamed Ayrshire, Brigshire, and called Largs, Redchurch.

I pick up a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists instead, bringing my tally to four of them; I have a peculiar habit of giving them away.

I walk around the station waiting for the next boat and come across the bronze statue of a boy. There’s a far-fetched story that Wemyss Bay was named after an 18th-century boatman called Bobby Wemyss. It seems unlikely but it didn’t stop marketing folk calling the statue Bobby. It stands in the station for the world to see – without the mask that was placed on its face during COVID.

 

[scots-gallivanter]

EIGHTEEN

Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses, For honest men and bonnie lasses

ROBERT BURNS, Tam o’ Shanter (1791)

BURNS IS UNDOUBTEDLY Scotland’s most electrifying literary figure, but it would be way beyond the scope of this undertaking to do justice to his links with Ayrshire. He was born in Alloway, which is now a suburb of Ayr. The house where he was born, and in which he lived till he was seven, is a place of wholesale pilgrimage, part of a well-trodden tourist trail.

On his travels, John Keats thought the approach to Ayr ‘extremely fine’, but he was disappointed with the old caretaker of Burns’s House in Alloway. He called him ‘a mahogany-faced old jackass’, who talked too much. (Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, Maybole, July 11, 1818). In mid-summer, Alloway is invariably chock-a-block with coaches and buses, from which camera-wielding Burns lovers emerge. Many of them hail from Japan and other countries where the bard is revered. Many of those who immortalise him at boozy haggis-stabbing bashes here in Scotland would have wandered to the other side of the street to avoid him had they been contemporaries.

From his wanderings in 1634 Brereton described Ayr, the county town of Ayrshire, as ‘a dainty, pleasant-seated town, most inhabiting in which are merchants trading into and bred in France’, but a century later Defoe found: ‘It is now like an old beauty, and shows the ruins of a good face, but is still decaying every day; and from having been the fifth best town in Scotland, as the townsmen say, it is now the fifth worst; which is owing to the decay of its trade.’ (Tour through Great Britain, 1745).

After presiding over a murder trial Lord Cockburn spent one of the last days of his life enjoying the shore at Ayr. He stated: ‘The beautiful bay of Ayr could scarcely have been more beautiful. The advancing sea was insinuating its clear waters irresistibly, yet gently, into the innumerable little hollows and channels of the dry sand. It was quiet, apart from seabirds playing and a couple of pale boys paddling.’

There was no sound, except of an occasional hammer by a few lazy masons who were pretending to be repairing the point of the pier, the ring of whose implements only deepened the silence Cockburn enjoyed. He watched a couple of old anglers dozing off as their corks bobbed in the sea. It hadn’t rained for six weeks, so they caught nothing.

Cockburn, one of my favourite early travel writers, had found it all a refreshing contrast to ‘the heat and the crowd of that horrid court’. He took ill the following day and died four days later.

I find Ayr a tad tatty now, and public facilities leave a lot to be desired; the bus station has no toilets. To Stagecoach’s shame the toilets it purports to have on board certain vehicles are often closed.

I am sure a lot of people are doing a lot of work to improve the appearance of the town of ‘honest men and bonnie lassies’. Not so the Malaysian Ung Eng Huat, though, who bought Ayr’s Station Hotel in 2010, and closed it in 2013, leaving it to rot while he has swanned around the globe. Gallingly, Huat, who calls himself Sunny Ung, has regularly flaunted his wealth, luxury cars, designer clothes and expensive watches, on social media from several countries, as well as selfies with V.I.P.s such as the Formula One star Lewis Hamilton.

Officials have tried to contact Ung for years. He is yet another absentee owner, who has allowed Scotland’s built heritage to decay, and remains incommunicado, although vandals set fire to the prominent listed building in the centre of town in September 2023. The blaze closed Ayr Station in the run-up to Christmas. Meanwhile, the man who boasts of his philanthropy in the Far East has posted photos of himself in Switzerland, Madrid, Marcella, Rome, Venice, and the Greek islands.

South Ayrshire Council has published a feasibility study into a compulsory purchase order. Its chief executive Mike Newall, said the owner hadn’t acknowledged any correspondence, not even in 2013 when the council tried to serve the first dangerous buildings notice. The bottom line is that Ung has walked away from any responsibility to conserve a building of historical and cultural importance.

Ayrshire itself has an absorbing mixture of history and heritage, some exceptional beaches, plenty of indisputably beautiful landscapes, and a popular horse racing venue that hosts the Scottish Grand National. But Ayrshire, and Ayr itself, has faced great challenges. In 2022 a Scottish Government bulletin stated that its economy was lagging and diverging significantly from Scotland’s.

In the year to March 2020, Ayrshire had the second highest unemployment rate in Scotland and some of the highest deprivation levels (27% of children lived in poverty).

NINETEEN

Beinge of that countrie, of a place not farre from Are, cawled the Truyne, leinge harde upon the sea, so commodious as the lyke was not to be found upon the weste seas.

Report by THOMAS RANDOLPH to Marie of Guise on a possible landing place for French troops (1559)

TROON WAS NEVER invaded by French forces but, like many resorts in the Firth of Clyde, it was besieged by sea-bathers, thanks to the phenomenal popularity of hydrotherapy in the 19th century. Its development was aided first by the arrival of steamboats, and then by the establishment of the first passenger rail service in Scotland, from Kilmarnock to Troon, in 1812. Troon Golf Course was founded in 1878, and the town is renowned for its golfing heritage: the Open has been played there on several occasions.

Troon was in the vanguard of sea bathing in Scotland, which evolved from ‘taking the waters’ at a mineral well or spa. Troon and other resorts became tremendously popular and were painstakingly marketed when the steamers and then the railways made the coasts more accessible. I must rewind, though, to some early 18th-century quackery and to Sir John Floyer’s History of Cold Bathing (1702). According to Floyer, Scots women bathed their children in cold water in the winter: ‘....by these instances it appears that the Northern People have found cold baths very useful to their bodies.

‘I remember that a lady of very great quality of Scotland, and nearly related to His Grace, Duke Hamilton, told me about four or five years since that several of her sons, though born strong, lusty children, yet pined, dwindled, and fell into convulsions …… that a Highland Woman advised her either to wash or bathe them in cold water ….and accordingly the Lady did so and ever after her children thrived, and did well, and are now lusty strong young men.’

Then there was the redoubtable Dr Richard Russell, whom the French historian Jules Michelet hailed as ‘the inventor of the sea’. Russell wrote Glandular Diseases, or a Dissertation on the Use of Sea Water in the Infections of the Glands in 1750, and it became a best-seller. Brighton grew on the back of it, and owing to Russell’s ambitious philosophy on the connection between health improvement and seawater (bathing in it and even drinking it). Many doctors were sold on the new craze.

Michelet reported in The Sea (1864), with a hint of eugenics: ‘This whole grand theory may be summed up in a very few words: It is necessary to drink sea-water, to bathe in sea-water, and to eat sea-weed; clothe your children as lightly as possible, and let them have plenty of air. The Ocean breeze, and the Ocean water; there you have the sure cure.

‘That last advice seems very bold. To have the half-naked child exposed to the open air in a damp and variable climate, is, no doubt, anticipatively, to lose the weak; but the strong will survive, and their posterity will be the better brought up.’

Sea-bathing grew in popularity in Scotland. Robert Heron visited Edinburgh in 1793 and noted that in high summer it was empty of people of ‘gaiety, of study or of business’, who had betaken themselves to some ‘fashionable watering place’. By the next century saltwater therapy had evolved into swimming and – for the ‘lower orders’ as well as the Victorian gentry and wannabe gentry – sea air blew away the angst of the daily grind. The Kilmarnock nobility built or bought summer houses in Troon. From 1839 the second railway line enabled visitors from Glasgow and Paisley to reach Troon by rail.

Before the launch of Henry Bell’s Comet, the Clyde’s first ever steamboat, in 1812, only the wealthiest of Glaswegians could enjoy going ‘doon the watter’. By the beginning of the 20th century city folk were going on day trips.

We bus it up the A78 towards Largs, passing the turn off to Portencross, where a pier was built during the heyday of tourism but was never well customised, although in ancient times the deceased monarchs of Scotland were brought to Portencross before being conveyed to the holy island of Iona for burial. Their bodies lay in state at Portencross Castle, an earlier castle than the 14th-century fortress which stands there today.

The Social Marketing Foundation think tank revealed in 2017 that seaside communities had some of the worst levels of economic and social deprivation in the UK. North Ayrshire was one of 10 local authorities in Britain with the highest unemployment – 10.8 per cent, compared with the UK average of 4.8 per cent. To cap it all, in 2023, North Ayrshire had 12% of all vacant and derelict land in Scotland, one of the highest proportions of any Scottish local authority. Gone were the days of thriving lidos, sedate pavilions, packed dance halls, and esplanades devoid of walking room.

In an article on the deteriorating fortunes of Saltcoats, written by Annie Brown in the Daily Record in 2017, the Saltcoats-born author Janice Galloway was quoted: ‘There was a sense of adventure that was there, which is fairly absent from young people’s lives now.

People looked active and engaged with their lives and the town. Recently I went on a visit and could have wept.’

Annie Brown concluded: ‘We sneer at how old-fashioned and obsolete seaside towns seem now. But they were the beauty of their day and if only the tide would turn – if only people were prioritised over profit – they could be once more.

 

 

[scots-gallivanter]

SEVENTEEN

Even Naples in imagination cannot efface the quiet fertile comeliness of Penkill in reality, and when, beyond the immediate greenness, a gorgeous sunset glorifies the sea distance, one scarcely need desire aught more exquisite in this world.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, Letter to Anne Gilchrist (1870)

ONE OF THE ‘Ayrshire Alps’, Dersalloch Hill, is crowned by 23 wind turbines which dominate the horizon, and the ecotycoons want more, and bigger. Nearby, in irony, sits the 18th-century conservation village of Straiton, the realm of the Save Straiton for Scotland pressure group formed in 2013 to object to their being insidiously surrounded by giant turbines 50 metres higher than Blackpool Tower.

Despite the turbines, Straiton advertises itself as walking country, The village signpost even sports the slogan ‘Rambler Territory’. Like turbines or loathe them, it is worth a ramble to Lambdoughty glen and its chain of gurgling waterfalls up in the foothills. One of them, Tairlaw Linn, even features in the annals of English literature. It is here, during a day out with his friend, William Bell Scott, in the summer of 1869, that the troubled painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, contemplated suicide. Rossetti’s wife had died of an overdose of laudanum, and he had become an alcoholic. He was prone to thought disorder and addicted to whisky and chloral hydrate (‘knockout drops’, an ingredient made famous by one Mickey Finn, a crooked saloon owner in Chicago, who drugged customers with it, and then robbed them.).

William Bell Scott recorded in his Autobiographical Notes (1830 to 1882): ‘Never shall I forget the expression of Gabriel’s face when he bent over the precipice, peering into the unfathomed water dark as ink, in which sundry waifs flew round and round like lost souls in hell.’

Rossetti had told Scott: ‘One step forward, and I am free!’ He decided not to throw himself down the burn, however, although he would try to kill himself three years later, in England. He saw people staring at him from hollowed-out walls. He heard voices and was a hypochondriac. One doctor diagnosed ‘effusion of serum on the brain’ and said he was beyond all hope. If he recovered, he would have brain damage.

Penkill Castle, ensconced in cutely wooded Penwhapple Glen, was a summer haunt for such as Scott, Rossetti, his sister Christina, and William Morris, with whose wife Jane, Rossetti was conducting an affair. Rossetti wrote the poem The Stream’s Secret at Penwhapple Burn near the castle, which was a shrine for the Pre-Raphaelite movement. During a visit to Penkill, half a mile from Dailly, Rossetti wrote sonnets in a cave named after a covenanting fugitive. Wrote Scott: ‘Here I used to find him face to the wall lying in a shallow cave that went by the name of a seventeenth-century Covenanter, Bennan’s Cave, working out with much elaboration and little inspiration.’

Rossetti tried to get Jane Morris to spend what has become known as a dirty weekend with him (his friend William, who was so close to him that Rossetti named his pet wombat after him, wasn’t invited along).

I looked for the cave along Penwhapple glen, but it seems it vanished long ago as a result of some landslide. Penkill is still there, however. Campaigners fought to ‘buy it for the nation’ in 1995 but its American owner, Elton Eckstrand, a wealthy drag racing driver and lawyer, sold it to Scots-Canadian businessman Don Brown, who then sold it to a Chile-born film producer Patrick Dromgoole.

The previous owner, Evelyn May Courtney-Boyd, a descendant of Scott’s mistress, had become involved financially with the local milkman, Willie Hume, who reputedly told her that he and his wife would feed her if they moved into the lodge. He then asked to buy it. Later they moved into the 25-bedroom castle. Paintings from the collection began to appear in Scotland’s salerooms, including The Night-Hag, which now lives in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of them, painted by Scott, remained fastened above the mantelpiece with an inscription, ‘Move not this picture. Let it be. For love of those in effigy’.

Apparently, Hume tried to prise the painting from the wall with a poker, but he choked, and then died of angina. His wife suddenly left the castle and bought a pub, which failed. She then became a cleaner in a hospital. For the record, Penkill Castle appeared on Channel 4’s Come Dine with Me in 2011. I’ve no idea what happened to the milkman’s spouse.

[scots-gallivanter]

SIXTEEN

As King Robert the Bruce was raised at Turnberry Castle, it is just possible that he owed some of his mental and bodily strength to the rye-scones of his youth.......sandy fields on a fragment of raised beach on the coast of Ayrshire were the salvation of Scotland and started Scotsmen on their mission of annexing England and inheriting the earth.

Ayr Advertiser, August 7th, 1902

MY FEET HAVE squelched through mud; they’ve crunched through shingle and gravel; they’ve felt the comfort of soft sand. Now for a maze of serrated rocks and caves beneath Robert Adams’s Culzean Castle, which sits in majesty on a clifftop south of the village of Maidens. There is a story about a piper who entered one of the caves playing his bagpipes to exorcise any bad spirits. He never came out. His dog did, but it had lost all its hair. In 2018 archaeologists found a medieval doorway that connected the cliffs to the caves, adding weight to the theory that the Kennedy earls had been involved in an enormous medieval smuggling racket.

In his account of a visit to Culzean in the 1630s, the clergyman chronicler, William Brereton, scribed: ‘There is either a notable imposture or most strange and much to be admired footsteps and impressions which are here to be seen of men, children, dogs, coneys, and divers other creatures. These here conceived to be Spirits, and if there be no such thing, but an elaborate practice to deceive, they do most impudently betray the truth; for one of this knight’s sons and another Galloway gentleman affirmed unto me that all the footsteps have been put out and buried in sand overnight and have been observed to be renewed next morning.’

Culzean is one of the most popular castles in Scotland, notwithstanding Brereton’s bad review from almost four centuries ago: ‘A dining-room or hall, a fair room, and almost as large as the whole pile, but very sluttishly kept, unswept, dishes, trenchers and wooden cups thrown up and down, and the room very nasty and unsavoury. Here we were not entertained with a cup of beer or ale.’

The castle was the seat of the powerful Kennedys, one of whom, Hugh, had fought alongside Joan of Arc. Nowadays it displays several intriguing artefacts, including a ‘ship of bones’ made from the beef rations of captured Napoleonic sailors; more than 700 flintlock pistols; around as many swords; and a sizeable teak and brass airplane propeller, which hangs from the ceiling. It came from the plane that downed a Zeppelin during the First World War. From 1972 until 2015 Culzean featured on Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound notes; and President Eisenhower visited the castle several times, and had a room named after him.

Culzean was the setting of some of the scenes in the 1973 cult film, The Wicker Man. It was the Castle of Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), although most of the interior shots were filmed at Lochinch Castle in Galloway.

Culzean is magnificent but not half as creepy as Dalquharran Castle, in which Dracula would have felt at home. Dalquharran, another Robert Adam building owned by the powerful Kennedys, was the inspiration for Buchan’s novel, Huntingtower, and Violet Bonham Carter recorded in her diary on August 5th 1905:

‘Oh for Dalquharran with its Raeburns and ruins and long green garden full of clematis! And the fishless stream and the beech trees!’

It was a youth hostel in the late 1930s and later occupied by evacuees from the Glasgow Deaf and Dumb Institution. It was eventually abandoned, and the roof came off in 1967 to avoid taxes. And, of course, the customary vandals have been at work further despoiling a wonderful old castle.

There is planning permission for two golf courses, a hotel, conference centre, country club, and hundreds of holiday homes, but no progress has been made since the grant in 1990. The property was sold to developers Kezia DCM Ltd in 2001. In June 2019, it went on the market for £800,000, and locals say there are signs that a new owner is tidying it up a bit.

There is much darkness in Ayrshire records. After the assassins of James 1 were hanged, drawn and quartered, in 1437, their body parts were sent around the country for display. Thomas Kennedy, 1st Laird of Bargany & Ardstinchar, and Bailie of Carrick, signed off payment of eleven shillings for ‘the carriage of a quarter of Robert Stewart, traitor, from Edinburgh to Ayr’. Stewart and his accomplice, Chambers, had been tied naked to a ship’s mast in Edinburgh High Street and pelted with stones and filth. Their flesh had been torn for an hour with iron pincers. They had been tied to the tails of horses and dragged through the town, then dragged to a scaffold to be beheaded and quartered with a rusty axe.

In 1569 another Kennedy, Gilbert, wanted Crossraguel Abbey, so he kidnapped Alan Stewart, the recently installed ‘commendator’ and began to barbecue him. He bound him to a spit, poured oil on him and roasted him slowly over a fire in the black dungeon of Dunure Castle (A Dunure kebab?)

According to Louis Yeoman, of the National Library of Scotland, in her book Reportage Scotland: ‘A sensational case of violence such as this fitted in nicely with the general 19th-century idea that before the Union of 1707 Scots were barbarous, violent and backwards, and not fit for civilised society.’

(That idea wouldn’t, of course, have been helped by Sir Walter Scott’s use of the scene in Ivanhoe.)

Stewart, who would never walk again, signed the abbey over. The Privy Council fined Kennedy £2,000 and had the abbey handed back to the commendator. Kennedy had previously got away with grabbing Glenluce Abbey in Galloway by faking signatures. One wonders how many other gruesome stories of land grabbing remain untold.

(Just as Bannockburn had been a springboard for Robert the Bruce to stop switching allegiances, and to increase his property portfolio, the Reformation was another field day for the land-hungry nobles of Scotland. Commendatorship was one of the biggest cons in medieval history: the choosing of a yes man to have custody of a stolen abbey or other piece of church land until a proper incumbent was provided – which was usually never – and the enjoyment of the revenues from such a holding.)

Since 2014 the resort of Turnberry, if not the castle, has been in the hands of Donald Trump. An investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections scrutinized the financing of Trump’s outfit there. After the well-publicised attack on the Capitol in January 2021, the organisers of the championship announced that The Open would not be held at Turnberry as long as its links to the Trump Organization remained. In February 2023, the company that managed the golf course reported pre-tax losses of 3.7 million pounds.

Hugh Taylor, a broadcaster and travel writer, who was born and bred along the Ayrshire coast, told me:

‘During a trip to Turnberry I was with the comedian Janey Godley, who was famous for the placard she put up. I got into the Sunday Herald. A journalist interviewed me, and I told her I’d grown up locally, that I had learned to swim in the pool at Turnberry Hotel.

‘I said my parents had taken me to see Eisenhower arrive at Culzean Castle where he’d been given the top floor. I told him that my folks revered Eisenhower as a hero. Trump on the other hand was a Bawbag. Bugger me, they published it. Must have got onto Canadian TV too, as a relative messaged me about it.’

We sit on the bus marvelling at the vista of Ailsa Craig and the Isle of Arran and feel that we are freewheeling uphill. The bus driver is used to it all. We are on the Electric Brae, an optical illusion. The inland end of this stretch of the A719 is six yards higher than the coastal end, but because of the way the topography slopes, the road seems to incline the opposite way. It’s a gravity hill, fascinating, but without the religious connotations of its big cousin in Tibet, above which aeroplanes reputedly jerk in mid-flight.

[scots-gallivanter]

FIFTEEN

You can have your Greek islands, son. Girvan had one of the cleanest beaches you’d get. And sometimes you could count two dozen fishing boats hooked up to the pier, and boxes stacked sky high. On top of that you’d Paddy’s Milestone out on the water. What more could you want? Rare chips they were, into the bargain?

Andy Campbell, my grandfather (c. 1980)

THE SKY IS a tall, bright, nippy blue now, cracking to white at the edges. There is a soft marine roar, and I smell seaweed. Girvan’s gulls wheel about in their yellings today. Glaswegians used to sail ‘doon the watter’ for their summer sojourn in places such as Girvan, where they got to spend the weekend wearing Kiss Me Quick hats and feasting on candy floss. They fired guns with twisted barrels, rode on the dodgems, posed for Kodak cameras on the waltzers, and tried their luck at the slots. There were donkey rides on the sand, helter skelter, crazy golf, wall-to-wall one-armed bandits à la Brighton, a paddling pool and boat trips; and an attractive indoor swimming pool was built in 1972.

When Robert Heron travelled through Ayrshire, he saw low huts more like ‘caves dug in the earth than houses built upon it’, and there was no room at the inn for him.

‘Some whisky was brought us which tasted strongly of turpentine; and some pease bannock too tough to be eaten,’ he wrote in his Observations made on a journey through the Western Counties of Scotland (1793).

The coming of the railways in the 1850s made the Ayrshire coast more accessible to the central belt and encouraged the development of Girvan as a seaside resort with sandy beaches, cliffs and craggy outcrops. And it became prosperous enough. It isn’t Dodge City yet, but it is no longer flourishing: in 2021 its high street was voted the worst of 1,000 high streets and town centres in the UK. The survey was undertaken by a retail real estate consultancy, which publishes a ranking every two years and bases its conclusions on shop vacancy rates, and the number of discount stores and ‘low value’ units like bookmakers. They call it their ‘vitality ranking’.

And yet Girvan, at least the site of it, was once the location of Knockushion (the Hill of Justice), the courts of the ancient jurisdiction of Carrick, where Robert the Bruce judged, ruled, and granted charters. (Ironically, the motte hill that once marked the region’s importance is long lost to town development. However, in the 1960s the pillar that marked the site was removed to the public gardens of Knockushion House in Knockushion Street and restored.)

From Girvan harbour today we have a ringside view of Paddy’s Milestone. Ailsa Craig, its Sunday name, is a volcanic pluton that looks both comical and creepy. It sits on the meniscus of the Atlantic, halfway between Belfast and Glasgow as the seagull flies: a giant Christmas pudding or a sinking oil rig, or the head of some monster emerging from the deep. The ancients believed witches had dropped Ailsa Craig from the sky. Heron found it ‘covered on the summit with verdure; having a well of fresh water; stocked with goats and rabbits; and frequented by innumerable sea fowls’. Keats wrote a sonnet about this ‘craggy ocean pyramid’ with its ‘sea fowls’ screams’. His editor, Lord Houghton ventured: ‘That fine object appeared first to them [Keats and his companion, Brown] in the full sunlight like a transparent tortoise asleep upon the calm waters; then as they advanced, displaying its lofty shoulders, and as they still went on, losing its distinctness in the mountains of Arran and the hills of Cantire that rose behind it.’

Sadly, Burns, though an Ayrshire man, only mentioned Ailsa Craig in passing (his Duncan Grey tells us, Meg was ‘deaf as Ailsa Craig’). It is said, though, that, when he married Jean Armour, Burns ordered bird feathers from the island for a new bed. In Sweeney Astray – Seamus Heaney’s translation of an ancient Irish legend – Suibhe, a king of Dalriada, is cursed by St Ronan and is destined to fly around the world naked and insane. He spends upwards of a month on Ailsa Craig lamenting the absurdity of life:

‘I tread the slop/ And foam of beds, / Unlooked for,

Penitential/, And imagine treelines/ Somewhere beyond,

A banked-up, soothing, / Wooded haze.’

Ailsa is a sanctuary for many thousands of guillemots, fulmars, kittiwakes and razorbills. It has Europe’s largest gannet colony. Puffins used to be abundant, and they are making a comeback after the descendants of rats that had swum across from a Swedish cargo ship that foundered in 1971 were destroyed in the 1990s.

The island was owned by Crossraguel Abbey in the early 1400s, and misbehaving monks were banished from there to here to reflect on their deeds. There’s a ruined castle on Ailsa too that was built by the Hamilton clan as a bulwark against the Spanish armada. It became a haven for Roman Catholics escaping the rigours of the Reformation, and later a prison. Granite was mined on Ailsa Craig from the early 1800s until 1971 for kerb stones and curling stones. (One factory in Mauchline, Ayrshire, is licensed to extract from here; and Wales is the only other source of the microgranite that goes into the business end of curling stones.)

Ailsa is now uninhabited, a ghost of an island occasionally explored by tourists from the mainland, who come to look from somewhere that is used to being looked at. They come in small pleasure boats that ply from Girvan, Ballantrae and further afield. When you land, you’re in for an afternoon in an open-air museum that fluctuates from forlorn to fascinating.

A derelict winching station, windowless. The ruins of the engine room for past quarrying works. All seized up. A capstan left to disintegrate. Rusted skeletons of old rail track with their weathered sleepers. The bones of a bogie line heavily weeded; they hauled coal along it to the lighthouse (now solar-powered).

A branch line leads to a disused gasworks, eaten by rust. The tracksman’s house is crumbling. The foghorns are long voiceless. No visitor should underestimate the climb to the summit of the Craig. The drops are steep and deep, and I’ve just read that a young lady once fell over the cliff near Craig Na’an; but her petticoat caught the wind and acted as a parachute. All she sustained was broken bones.

The island has changed hands several times: the late Jack Bruce, who was bassist with Cream, bought Ailsa Craig in 1969, but sold it to James Gulliver, the retail baron, in 1976. The Marquis of Ailsa put it up for sale in 2014 but couldn’t get a buyer. The RSPB now has a lease on it until 2050, and Glasgow businessman Bobby Sandhu owns the lighthouse keepers’ cottages. The authorities turned down his plan to turn Ailsa Craig into a five-star hotel complex!

As I look at alluring Ailsa from Girvan seafront, I wonder what my grandfather would have made of it all. A lot has changed ‘doon the watter’. Like Saltcoats, Rothesay, and other once-popular resorts along the Clyde coast, Girvan’s fortunes declined in the 1960s and 1970s when cheap holidays to Spain and Greece became fashionable. The swimming pool closed suddenly in 2009 and was then, without consultation, demolished, although a multi-million-pound leisure centre with a pool went up eight years later.

There is hope for regeneration. As I write, Girvan is one of eight communities in Scotland that will receive a total of £863,050 from Historic Environment Scotland and the National Lottery Heritage Fund for regeneration. Girvan hosts a traditional folk festival on the first weekend of May each year, a festival of light with a lantern procession and shorefront performance in October, and a Lowland Gathering in June. I thought I’d read on the chippie notice board that a psycho event would be held as part of that gathering, but it had stated ‘psychic’.

In an article in The Herald in 2015 Kevin McKenna argued that the beachfront was slowly coming alive again with concerts, dances and themed children’s shows:

‘Perhaps then, someone could wake up the staff of sleepy VisitScotland, which receives millions of pounds of our cash to promote our holiday destinations. On its website this is what it says about Girvan: ‘Girvan’s attractions include the Stumpy Tower, originally built as a prison and today displays fascinating historical exhibits. The McKechnie Institute is also found in Girvan’s town centre, as is a variety of restaurants, cafes and shops to enjoy’ The writer of that scrap of joyless, cheerless prose obviously got the job after several years working on Tirana: The Wilderness Years.’

Come back, Fifth Dimension, all is forgiven. Staid Girvan landed that strange tourist attraction in the Flower Power days. In 1969 Keith Albarn, the father of Blur’s Damon Albarn, designed a futuristic, fibreglass fun house. There had been several possible names for the black, blue, yellow, red and salmon-pink construction, including Coloured Plastic Dream, Dream Circus, Metal Orchid, and even Girvana. Tourists were apparently bedazzled and enthralled by the nod to psychedelia, and by a hippie environment of uncanny sounds, weird textures, glowing lights and fabulous colours within a series of sensory chambers or ‘wombs’. In a vox pop in the summer of ’69, one young woman told the Carrick Herald that she had been ‘a little nervous about what I might encounter in this weird place. I looked up and, to my great amazement, saw what looked to be a dalek … I continued to walk through these narrow passages which were lit up colourfully and I had a feeling of wonder and fear mingled together … I didn’t really know whether I was glad or not to get out’.

Another offered: ‘It looks ludicrous. No wonder the older people turn to each other and say, more teenage rubbish’.

Yet another respondent thought: ‘It looked like something out of Doctor Who or Quatermass, an alien craft which had landed from a parallel universe … I put off going inside it, mainly because it looked like it would be an overwhelming experience, something that would blow your mind … my [older] brother Alex had been round it by himself and came out crying!’

The Fifth Dimension Fun Palace lasted five years: a storm damaged it beyond repair, and it was consigned to landfill. In an article for the Shetland Times in 2012 Tom Morton, a native of Ayrshire, reported: ‘It was like Dark Side of the Moon made out of Lego, with soft furnishings by Timothy Leary. Two bob to get in. At 14, I was absolutely fascinated by it.

Two birds of the seagull family dive round a postbox as I wait for a bus out of Dodge. Onto the box a loyal burgher is duct-taping two crocheted effigies of Charles and Camilla. I watch one of the gulls ratch through a KFC carton. I wonder what my grandfather would have made of it all. I leave Girvan to its coronating.

[scots-gallivanter]

FOURTEEN

The Stinchar, descending from its interior heights, winds through a vale of which the scenery is, in my mind, unequalled, in wild beauty, by anything else in Scotland; and falls at last into the sea at Ballantrae.

ROBERT HERON, A Topographical Description of Scotland (1797)

AS OUR BUS rattles up the road that hugs the western sea, a large vehicle with four laughing men in it whistles past us towards Kennedy’s Pass, fishing rods sticking out of a side window like aerials. They may well just be off the Irish boat.

Fanning its tail behind it like a hand of cards, a kestrel floats on the breeze above the raised beach of Ballantrae and rides the sky beyond one of the oldest industrial buildings in Scotland, a windmill built in 1696. The weather here on the south Ayrshire coast has downgraded itself from unsettled to changeable and six stolid cows gather at a gate, clearly expecting rain more than the Met Office does.

A madcap aristocrat used to fly a biplane on the breezes here. In March 1928 Time magazine wrote of the daughter of Viscount Inchcape, head of P & O Ferries:

‘Dark, not unattractive, graceful, habitually well-gowned and bejeweled, Miss Mackay was the envy of most women. Her silver Rolls-Royce flashed by at breakneck speed. Her horses invariably galloped.’

Elsie Mackay was born in colonial India and was bred on the family estate at Glenapp castle, a mile and a half south of Ballantrae (the castle is reportedly where Churchill and Eisenhower planned D Day). In 1917 she eloped with Denis Wyndham, a South African actor, and after the war she became the silent screen actress Poppy Wyndham. The marriage lasted five years, whereupon she was welcomed back into the family fold. Her father prayed she would buckle down to the cushy life of an aristocrat, but she gained her pilot’s licence in 1923 and, five years later, she made off with a one-eyed war hero, Capt. Walter G. R. Hinchcliffe, to fly across the Atlantic against the prevailing winds. They took off from snowbound Cranwell aerodrome in England, but they were never seen again beyond the Irish coast. A crowd of 5,000 stood all night at Long Island, New York, waiting for them, but they never landed. Only a slither of debris was ever found. While they were missing, the New York Times stated: ‘Every luxury money commands has not satisfied Lord Inchcape’s daughter in her thirst for adventure.’

Time reported three months later: ‘Since the death of Elsie Mackay is now presumed, her father, mother, brother and sisters presented her residual estate of £500,000 to the British Exchequer, last week, announcing that they ‘have no desire to profit from her death’.’

Shrubs were planted in Glenapp, so that the name Elsie could be read from the sky. Nature has erased her name, but she is commemorated in a stained-glass window in the chancel of the church at Ballantrae. There is the inevitable ghost story. There are some who claim the steel-nerved socialite haunts the corridors of Glenapp Castle. The industrialist James Hunter built the castle as his home on ground he had purchased from the Earl of Orkney. It passed to the wealthy Mackays in 1917. In 2015 the castle was acquired by Paul and Poppy Szkiler. Paul is the Chairman of the Truestone Group. They have upgraded it into a luxury hotel.

As if to pay homage to the late aviatrix, the Monte Carlo rally passed through Ballantrae in 1961. It was the one and only time: the fact that an over-zealous policeman charged 10 drivers with speeding may have had something to do with that.

Nowadays visitors to the hotel can sail up and down the rugged coast accompanied by the resident falconers and Ripley, the resident sea eagle.

Fishing and farming fed the villagers of Ballantrae for generations, as did wholesale smuggling, and Robert Burns met many local smugglers when he was a boy in Ayrshire; he wrote to Dr John Moore, of Mauchline, of the smugglers’ ‘swaggering riot and roaring dissipation’. In his History of the Counties of Ayr and Wigtown (1863) James Paterson tells us boats with 30 guns had once landed their cargoes in Ballantrae, while a hundred ‘lintowers’, some of them armed with cutlass and pistol, conveyed the goods ‘by unfrequented paths through the country and even to Glasgow and Edinburgh’. Cellars were dug in kitchen floors along the coast and there were holes and caves stuffed with contraband. There is an apocryphal story that a farmer’s wife made porridge with brandy one morning and only realised her mistake when there was a noisy demand for seconds.

Ballantrae, whose original name was Kirkcudbright-inner-Tig, is a now a one-horse town along the A77, albeit with a sand and shingle beach and hulking dark rocks haunted by terns, sandpipers, cormorants and kittiwakes. The laybys here attract twitchers in quest of rare birds. Porpoises, grey seals and basking sharks pop up too now and then, but they are hiding today.

I’d a nap in a layby along this bracing shoreline after watching shags shimmying across sea-sculpted stones; I woke to a seabird symphony, and the daybreak splendour of the islet of Ailsa Craig surfacing from the water. Alas, I hadn’t dandered ten yards along the foreshore before I stood on a blackened heap of empty pop cans, wet wipes, polystyrene receptacles, half-consumed packets of a snack called Ringos, and what looked suspiciously like a condom. Who would defile this splendid coastline? What bampottery drives you to set fire to lemonade tins? And what would Elizabeth Anderson Gray have made of it all? It was along these picturesque shores that this local heroine spent her whole life collecting and classifying fossils. By the time of her death in 1925 she had extensive collections in several British museums.

Think The Wrong Turn meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets The Silence of the Lambs and you’re getting close to the tale of Sawney Bean, who, tourism marketeers have long informed us, lived in a cave north of Ballantrae; that he was the head of a family of mutant monsters who waylaid travellers, robbed and murdered them, and then ate the evidence. There are tales of caves full of pickled and salted arms, legs, and other human body parts. Reportedly the male fiends were finally dismembered in front of the women, then the women and girls were burnt in a bonfire, but there is no historical record. There is a theory that the arch-Unionist and English spy, Daniel Defoe, put the story out to disparage Scotland.

An anonymous contributor to the online history group Ayrshire Notes observed in 2002: ‘The story cannot be traced beyond the 18th-Century equivalent of the Sunday Sport, so is it worth pursuing at all? I can think of no sound reason for doing so other than gratuitous and morbid titillation. What is most reprehensible about all this is that the myth is popularized as part of a despicable conspiracy of the heritage industry, tourist agencies and local authorities to turn parts of Scotland into little more than gruesome theme parks. If peddling the Sawney Bean story attracts tourists to Carrick, surely, they are the wrong kind of tourists.’

Ouch!

There is a long history of tramps, misfits, and disillusioned loners giving two fingers to the rat race to reinvent themselves, to become hermits; and several have found their havens in caves along Scottish shores. For 30 years, for example, Henry Ewing Torbet lived the quiet, simple life of a troglodyte in Bennane Cave, which is a stone’s throw from the one associated with the Beans. He was tall, straight-backed, with a long black beard and shaggy eyebrows – a colourful character, so well-liked that the locals put up a small cairn above his beloved shore as a memorial to him when he died of pneumonia after freak weather in 1983. He’d been a refugee from banking (and marriage), who had drifted around Scotland, and been in and out of jail for begging, at one time throwing a bag of flour and two bars of soap at a shopkeeper who had refused to serve him when he did not have ration coupons. At Ballantrae he was treated kindly, although he never spoke much. He lived on rabbits and potatoes, built fires from driftwood, and did odd jobs, although, in his Travels in Galloway, Memoirs of South-west Scotland, Donald McIntosh tells us: ‘He was as cunning as a hill fox and the very mention of the word work was enough to make him physically ill.’

McIntosh had heard that Torbet, who called himself Snib Scott, was offered soup and scones for chopping firewood. He had told the housewife: ‘Missus, when a man’s belly is empty, he doesnae have the strength to work.’ Two plates of broth and 10 cheese scones later, he got up and made off, remarking with a belch: ‘Missus, when a man’s belly is fu, he doesnae need to work.’

It is said that, after trudging across the hills of Glenapp into Galloway, he tried to cadge from a young farmer at Newton Stewart. The farmer and his friends washed, scrubbed, shaved, suited and booted Snib, and plied him with food and whisky. They took this clean-shaven, well-dressed gentleman to the young farmers’ ball and introduced him as a wealthy visiting farmer; and many ladies swarmed about him. The day after the night before, the joke was on the farmer; Snib was off on his wanderings again with four bottles of Johnnie Walker whisky crammed into his haversack.

In a layby down from Snib’s cave stands a monument to the former Russian Imperial Navy cruiser Varyag, which ran aground while being towed near Lendalfoot for scrap in 1920. The first memorial to the crew, who had years previously defied a Japanese siege, was unveiled in 2006 in a ceremony attended by Russian top brass. A year later a bronze monument was added. I’m told the then harbour master fell foul of Westminster for unilaterally inviting the Russian visitors.

Over the centuries travellers have reported screams around Lendalfoot, none of which was ever caused by birds. The ruins of Carleton Castle are reportedly haunted by John Cathcart, a Scottish Bluebeard, and by the eight heiresses he flung from the cliffs in order to augment his estate. His ninth chosen bride and victim, Mary Kennedy of Culzean, escaped by preemptively propelling him down to the rocks below.

 

[scots-gallivanter]

THIRTEEN

[The sandbank at the Scar in Loch Ryan] abounds with oysters of a most excellent flavour. They are found indeed all around the shores and might be got in great quantities would people drag for them.

REV. JOHN COULTER, Statistical Account of Scotland, Parish of Stranraer (1791)

STRANRAER STATION IS an ugly low-slung affair with a blend of concrete, sheet metal and girders straight out of the Cold War almanac of industrial architecture, where Harry Lime might hide from the Stasi. The last time I saw an eyesore this sore I was watching a film noir set in an abandoned steel town in backwoods Belarus, or somewhere similar, where they’d steal the passengers’ shelter if it wasn’t bolted down.

A bus driver had warned me as I blethered with him during a pit stop on the way from Dumfries: ‘Stranraer has been a ghost town for too long. I was born and bred there and have lived there all my life. You look at the weeds that grow along the harbour and it breaks your heart.’

The station is a woeful sight in a town that, for generations, was the gateway to Northern Ireland, and its sprawling, weed-happy concourse is on Dumfries and Galloway Council’s vacant and derelict land register.

Although the station is overdue a flattening, trains stop at Stranraer for Ayr, Glasgow and Kilmarnock. From here you can travel indirectly to Dumfries, Carlisle. London Euston and other destinations such as Manchester Piccadilly, Crewe and Birmingham New Street.

Limmy, the Glasgow comedian, was so shocked by the state of the station that he was lost for words. So he used a lot of adjectives beginning with F on his 2022 YouTube stream instead. The equally astonished Elaine C Smith, actress and comic, asked the audience during a show at the Millennium Centre: ‘Why do you put up with this?’

In fairness, Stranraer’s development trust has worked hard to reinvent the town, and to attract several million pounds of funding for an overhaul, and it published its ten-year plan in 2023. The author of the document admitted: ‘The East Pier with the railway station at its tip is a bleak arrival point for visitors, with a ten-minute walk to the station. The Pier’s ghostly presence is experienced locally as a symbol of the town’s declining fortunes and lack of vision for an investment in the town’s future.’

Stranraer has suffered emotionally, physically and environmentally since the ferries moved to Cairnryan in 2011. Since the first paddle steamer in 1863, ferries had been Stranraer’s raison d’ etre; in his contribution to the New Statistical Account in the 1840s, the Rev. David Wilson wrote of Loch Ryan having once had 300 sail boats in the bay at the same time.

Notwithstanding this monstrosity of a station, which is owned by the Crown Estates and leased by Stena Line, the area has so much potential. It always has had, not least because of its strategic location on a sea that has witnessed a fair bit of history and mystery and is 20-odd miles from Northern Ireland.

Coulter wrote in the Statistical Account for Scotland at the tail end of the 18th century something that could have been written today: ‘Strangers, struck with the beauty of this situation, and the many advantages that forcibly obtrude themselves on their eye, are surprised to hear that no manufacture is established here; but the scarcity and high price of fuel must be an eternal barrier to the establishment of any extensive manufacture in the town or neighbouring country, yet there are very good artificers of every kind, who supply the demands of the inhabitants and neighbours.’

In 2003, Stena Line ferried 1.4 million passengers on the Stranraer route. But the port of Stranraer died on the 11th of the 11th, 2011 with a big-money move up Loch Ryan to Cairnryan. Every year now Stena transport almost the equivalent of the population of Northern Ireland from Belfast to Cairnryan. There’s also P & O, which has operated from Cairnryan since 1973.

The sinking of the Princess Victoria roll-on, roll-off ferry in gale-swept seas on January 31st, 1953, is remembered by a memorial in Agnew Park, Stranraer. One hundred and thirty-three people perished when the ship went down off the Copeland Isles near Belfast Lough, having first sent out a distress signal off the Galloway coast north of Loch Ryan. There were only 44 survivors, all male.

In the 19th century Cairnryan, once called Macherie, had been an important staging post on the coach route to Ayr, with half a dozen inns along a short stretch of coast, and the hamlet had also gained the unwanted reputation as a hotspot for highwaymen.

Innermessan was a burgh of barony, a thriving medieval settlement near Cairnryan, of which there is now little evidence. Andrew Symson, a minister and historian, described it in 1684 in his Large Description of Galloway as ‘of old the most considerable place in the rinds [sic] of Galloway and the greatest town thereabout, till Stranraer was build'. It may well also have been the site of the Roman town, Rerigonium. Nowadays, there’s nothing to highlight its erstwhile importance: it is a farm and a caravan park with a motte and tower nearby.

Loch Ryan, the Abrauannus of the cartographer Ptolemy, once teemed with herring, oysters, skate, cod, lobster, crab and turbot to the extent that boats came down from the Highlands to get a slice of the action. Even ministers wanted a cut. On November 16th, 1762, George Blair, minister of Clayhole, a village that has since been swallowed up by Stranraer, won a case at the Court of Session against the inhabitants. In a throwback to the days when herring were used as currency, Blair claimed five per cent of all the fish caught, as part of his stipend. This system of ‘Christ’s dole’ was so controversial it caused riots in Eyemouth.

Loch Ryan is renowned as the domain of one of the world’s most precious native oyster beds, which is celebrated in an annual oyster festival in Stranraer.

Today I have a ramble around the Stena ferry-point to Northern Ireland (there are two, one for P & O and one for Stena); a pigeon coos from the lea of a fir tree off the main drag, next to an abandoned pier from which (I had read) someone had to be rescued while out fishing beyond the No Entry signs. I try hard to visualize a thousand warriors clamouring up the loch in 18 boats, thirsty for the blood of ‘traitors’, as happened in 1307 during the wars of independence. The patriots were captured in Stranraer, and executed, and the heads of two brothers of Robert the Bruce, Alexander and Thomas, were sent to Edward 1st as trophies.

It is conceivable the Vikings had sailed the loch too: the ninth-or tenth-century Kilmorie cross, found on the west bank, has carvings inspired by both Christian and Viking ideologies.

At the time of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 William of Orange’s fleet sheltered in Loch Ryan, and Winston Churchill used it when he departed from Stranraer in a Boeing flying boat in 1942 en route to America; and at the end of the war, as part of Operation Daylight, dozens of U-boats were taken there to be scuttled in the North Channel.

Cairnryan was the nerve centre at which over a million tons of surplus munitions were loaded onto boats for disposal at sea. The railway wagons that brought them there were labelled ‘Davie Jones’s Locker’. The cocktail of armaments was dumped over many years in Beaufort’s Dyke, a subterranean sea trench several miles west of the peninsula. Crewmen who had worked on board the ships that disposed of shells, bombs, landmines, grenades, and rockets later claimed that hundreds of thousands of tons were dropped short of the deep water to save time. Munitions regularly wash up on Scottish beaches. In 1995, when British Gas was laying the Scotland-Northern Ireland gas pipeline, phosphorus bombs washed up in Kintyre. Anti-tank grenades have made their way to the shores of Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man. (This didn’t stop Boris Johnson backing a plan for a bridge to Northern Ireland, which died a death.) The operation was handled by 13th Company, Royal Pioneer Corps, based at an army camp which is now a holiday campsite behind the Loch Ryan Hotel.

In 1957 and 1958, Cairnryan was used for Operation Hardrock to build components for a rocket-tracking station on St Kilda, to serve the South Uist Missile Range, but military activity came to an end in the early 1960s, when infrastructure, such as cranes and railway tracks were abandoned, then dismantled, leaving a post-industrial landscape that didn’t quite square with my thoughts about Bruce’s beheaded brothers.

Latterly, Cairnryan was a base for breaking ships, even Russian submarines. HMS Centaur, HMS Bulwark, HMS Eagle, and HMS Ark Royal were all sent there for decommissioning. The Ross Revenge was saved from the scrapyard when Radio Caroline bought it and took it to Santander to be converted to a radio broadcasting ship, which stayed permanently at sea from 1983 until 1991.

For collectors of useless information:

(1) the comedian Tony Hancock had a lowly position with the RAF at Wig Bay on the opposite bank of Loch Ryan. He told people he was fuel controller when all he did was kindle the braziers.

(2) In 2018 the thighbone of a woolly mammoth was found on the shore of Loch Ryan, 45,000 years after it died: proof that the species had found its way to Scotland.

[scots-gallivanter]

TWELVE

I spied a rickety ladder leading up to the loft. Climbing up, I found myself looking out of a broken skylight at the vast expanse of Luce Bay with the Mull of Galloway stretching into the distance. I shouted down to Bill: ‘This is where we are going to live.’

TESSA KNOTT SINCLAIR, owner of Glenwhan Gardens

NATURE PROBABLY INTENDED the Mull of Galloway to be an island but decided against it at the last minute. This lofty, precipitous headland, landlocked by an isthmus, is none the worse for it, however. It has a rare island feel about it that switches clock time off, so that a watch means as much as a hill of beans. Even the onomatopoeic placenames may soothe: Mary Wilson’s Slunk, Sheep Hank, Stinking Bight, Nick of Kingdom, Lagantulluch, Muldaddie, Cairnie Finnart, Scarty Head and Killantringan. We tramp the beach at West Tarbet, only a few hundred yards from East Tarbet, although the two might be on different planets. On the west we have sheer cliffs hammered by waves, while East Tarbet is less dramatic and greener.

On the eastern side, on Mull farm, at the foot of a cliff that faces Luce Bay, is the oldest ecclesiastical building in Galloway, the medieval Chapel of St Medana, partly built out of a cave. Nearby are the Chapel wells, which are filled with sea water at high tide. Bathing in them as the sun rose on the first Sunday of May was considered a cure-all. Most of the parishioners would congregate there on ‘Co Sunday’ to bathe and leave gifts.

We fall in with David Green, an engineer, who is wild-camping on the western shore, and scuba diving. Disarmingly, he introduces himself as ‘a spectrum dweller’ and brings me back up to speed with our slipshod times: ‘There are so many idiots coming up from the northeast to fish off the rocks here. The first thing they do is build a fire and get their carry outs out. We had them here last night. At four in the morning the wind blew their pop-up tent down, so they just burned it. It has got really bad the last few years. They leave their mess everywhere.’

We discuss jetsam that was battered into a slippery crag years ago. David, who has dived around here for years, knows about it: a gigantic, rusting gas heat-exchanger, which fell off a ship some 15 years ago and has been left for the archaeologists of a future time to fight over, to supplement the wreck of a tanker that ran aground in gales near Killantringan lighthouse in 1982 and still sits, half-submerged.

We are at the southern end of the Rhins of Galloway, that 25-mile-long hammerhead peninsula you see on maps of western Scotland. The Rhins itself would have been an island but for the flat throat of land near Stranraer. The Mull, half a mile at the most from the tarbets, is where the peninsula juts into the Irish Sea: Scotland’s Land’s End, crowned by a lighthouse built by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather in 1830. Today we haven’t the foggiest where the lighthouse is. It’s pea soup: visibility is down to the length of your shadow. On a clear day there are spectacular views of Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man and Cumbria, and you can see thousands of gannets diving on the cliffs. The RSPB has a nature reserve there and porpoises and dolphins often swim in the sea below. Way beneath the lighthouse the currents of the Solway and the Clyde meet in a maelstrom. From what I hear a Galloway 'witch', spurned by a sailor, wove nine tides to entrap him at the Mull. But the sailor heard about her spell and always lugged his boat over the tarbet. He was never doomed but the spell is still in place today.

Creepier still is the true tale of three lighthouse keepers who vanished from their post at the remote Flannan islands in 1900. Their disappearance remains one of the most puzzling enigmas in maritime history. The unsolved mystery was the basis for The Vanishing, a 2018 film, starring Peter Mullan and Gerard Butler, much of which was shot at the Mull and up the western crags of the Rhins. The crew tidied the old lighthouse garden. With wood left over from the set, volunteers built raised beds and restored it to its former glory.

The Mull of Galloway became a public asset thanks to £300,000 from the Scottish Land Fund in 2013. The sale from the Northern Lighthouse Board included a community-run lighthouse museum, three letting cottages, coastal heathland and cliffs – not the lighthouse itself, whose foghorn has been painstakingly restored to functional order.

Picture-postcard Portpatrick was also the subject of a community buyout. It is the main village on the west coast of the Rhins with its pastel houses running down to a small harbour with a multitude of boats. There is a local tradition, but no documentary evidence to support it, that Peter the Great lodged overnight here in 1698.

A ferry service ran from Portpatrick to Donaghadee (the Dover of Ireland) on the coast of County Down for some 300 years until 1867. At its peak 80,000 people a year sailed the route. But strong westerly winds took their toll on Portpatrick pier. Traffic switched to the longer but safer route along Loch Ryan, from Stranraer to Larne. And in 1871 the lighthouse at Portpatrick was removed stone by stone and shipped to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

On July 3rd, 1834, the Caledonian Mercury wrote of an entrepreneur who dived for sunken treasures between Portpatrick and the Irish coast, describing it as 'a remarkable instance of ingenuity and enterprise': a new apparatus that allowed men to walk on the seabed: 'The people on the coast, envying him his rich harvest, have come off in boats and impeded his labour by throwing stones and other missiles, to his vexation, annoyance and interruption.'

The Mercury added: 'He employs several men, who descend in turn - can stay five hours at a time with the utmost ease, as a proof of which we have heard it said, that one of the divers who was tipsy the day before, on going down yielded to a propensity to sleep, and a companion had to descend to raise him from his slumbers.'

In 2007 the private owners of Portpatrick harbour applied to build a 57-berth marina and pontoons, but the council deemed it ‘completely inappropriate for the conservation of the area’. Locals formed a trust, and by 2012 they bought the harbour for £350,000.

South of Portpatrick (where the Southern Upland Way begins) there are umpteen caves and indentations. William Purves, a Victorian traveller, clown and strongman, shunned the world for Sheep Rink cave. There are two photographs of this hirsute hermit, in one of which he is holding a cup in his left hand and what looks like a kebab in his right but is probably a good helping of bannock. He did odd jobs for farmers and, ever the performer, sold postcards of himself. He even had a cave visitors’ book. As he got older, he flitted into a summerhouse near Ardwell before ending his days in the poorhouse in Stranraer.

The gulf stream warms the Rhins, and at Port Logan Botanic Gardens, there are groves of gunnera and eucalyptus, and numerous plants from Australasia, the Americas, and Southern Africa. These gardens famously doubled as Christopher Lee’s in The Wicker Man.

Walk along Luce Sands on a hot day and you could, if you’re a dreamer, imagine yourself in the Caribbean. The beach, which unknown copywriters dubbed ‘Scotland’s little secret’, is sweeping, long, shallow and gorgeously situated. At low tide you could walk the six miles between Sandhead and Ringdoo Point along sand. Its dunes made it an official Special Conservation Area, but, as usual along south-west Scotland, there is a caveat.

Yes. War games and the physics of death again. Red lines on the map. Danger Area. West Freugh has had a military presence of some sort or another since the First World War. Now the MoD is considering the 800-acre site for a UK deep space monitoring station. It is already a land and sea, weapons testing and training base. (In April 1957, a UFO was seen on radar 50,000 feet above RAF West Freugh. It was stationary for around 10 minutes and then took an impossibly sharp turn. It was described as being as large as a ship, and bigger than a normal aircraft. )

Fifty years ago, nearby Glenwhan was wild moorland, but it is now an impressive garden with plants from around the world: a slice of heaven, with winding paths, tasteful sculptures, tranquil ponds, and wonderful sea views. Hungry for sandeels, kittiwakes breeze down the coast, and terns steer east. Tessa Knott and Ian Sinclair bought Glenwhan over the telephone in 1971 after exploring Galloway ruins during a visit.

Now many years on, the garden they created is, I would agree with Tessa, ‘a small piece of Nature’s magnificence’.

[scots-gallivanter]

ELEVEN

You can see five kingdoms from here: Scotland, where we’re standing; England over there, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and the kingdom of Heaven up there

THE REV. ANDREW PATTERSON, during a walk with the author along a Wigtownshire promontory in 1987, as quoted in the Irish News and The Herald

WITH ITS MANY drumlin hills the gorse-glad Machars peninsula of Galloway has a gentle, timeless beauty; and for me Lord Cockburn was winding readers up when he rated the Solway ‘the stupidest of all firths’ with few rocks, no islands and ‘no edging of picturesque mountains’. He wrote: ‘For to point, as the natives always do, to the dim ghosts of some distant hills, of which only the outlines are visible, and to explain with an air of triumph, these are the English mountains, is mere stuff.’

A reincarnated Cockburn should chum me up Windy Hill to get some sense into him. Okay, at less than 100 yards high it’s a hillock, but, although the views of the Cumbrian peaks and those of the Isle of Man are not to be sniffed at, there is undoubtedly magical scenery to behold north of the border. From the summit of this hill that has Wigtown, Scotland’s National Book Town, below it, your payback is an expansive swathe of hills; and the copses, coves, cliffs, bays, lochs, standing stones, forts, cairns, and tumbledown ruins, of these firth lands. You can take in the bay’s nature reserve and, if you are lucky, spot an osprey. In 2004 the first pair in a century visited Galloway and liked it. Wigtown now has CCTV cameras linked to an osprey’s nest.

Wigtownshire was Covenanting country during the ‘Killing Times’. Covenanters were either freedom-fighters battling against absolute rule by bishops, or theocrats worthy of the Taliban, who wanted a fundamentalist Scotland. You could argue either case, if you had the time and inclination. An obelisk on a lower contour of Windy Hill remembers two covenanting martyrs, Margaret Maclaughlan and Margaret Wilson, who were tied to stakes in Wigtown Bay on May 11th, 1685, and drowned as the tide advanced. A commission had condemned them as Presbyterian activists, and a pardon, issued in Edinburgh on April 30th, was ignored.

According to the records of the parish of Kirkinner, MacLaughlan’s head was ‘held down within the water by one of the town officers by his halberd at her throat, til she died’. Storytellers say he had an unquenchable thirst for the rest of his life. In History of the Hereditary Sheriffs of Galloway (1864), Sir Andrew Agnew, stated:

‘If going on an errand his unnatural craving obliged him to carry a huge pitcher on his back; if he crossed a stream, even before ribald companions he was irresistibly compelled to kneel down and, like the men chosen by Gideon, to lap water like a dog.’

Karma may also have dealt with the constable, Bell, who had tied the victims to the stakes. He had three sons born with webbed feet. Agnew observed:

‘We have a female relative, aged 92 years, who assures us that she has seen three of Cleppie Bell’s descendants in the district, who were all afflicted with this deformity of the fingers and toes.’

Provost Coltrane, who had been a ‘witch tester’, and was chief magistrate at the execution, was commonly said to have sold his soul to the devil. According to J Maxwell Wood in Witchcraft and Superstitious Record in the Southwestern District of Scotland, when he died in 1708, the windows of his house looked as if they were on fire, and for long afterwards his ghost, a terrifying figure, walked the earth, snorting fire from its nostrils. Even the house where he lived and died was for many years avoided after nightfall. When kirk sessions put adulterers in neck manacles and sackcloth, publicly humiliated Sabbath-breakers, and hanged petty thieves, it was a fitting end to a Holy Willie who had lurked on the streets looking for drinkers to punish.

THE CURSE

That simmer’s day the king’s dragoons hung three men

Fae the gibbets fur no renouncin their hatred o bishops,

An twae Mairgarets wur mairtyred tae the ocean –

fixit ticht tae stakes tae droon as the tide rose abune the bay o Wigtown.

They were aw merkit oot as malaperts, troublemakers

whae listent tae meenisters preach frae beneath their blankets

in amang the hills o Gallowa’,

Loth even in the face o daith itsel tae stoap bein the foot sodgers o god:

freedom fechters railin against Episcopalianism

Mairgaret Maclauchlan an Mairgaret Wilson wir laid oot

on the mudflats at Bladnoch, clingin oan tae their crates like crabs.

Yin o them sang hymns but the sat watter dried them in her mooth.

An offecial pullt her heid up, giein hur a last chance tae recant her creed

but she speired instead fur a gless o watter.

There’s plenty o watter there fur ye, said he,

an pushed her back unner.

It’s said he’d a son, whae was born wi webbed feet.

Luckin fittit his hale life, he wuz, an aye thirsty forby.

(From The Magician’s House by Andy Murray, 2023)

The Machars has a myriad of antiquities: cup and ring markings, old homesteads, and standing stones. Three miles west of Wigtown on a bank of the river Bladnoch stands Torhouse, the reputed burial place of the mysterious king Calgacus, who fought against the Roman invasion and is mentioned in Tacitus’s Agricola. It is one of the best-preserved stone circles in Scotland.

Down the eastern flank of the Machars sits Garlieston which, because of its similarity to Normandy, was the location of the top-secret Mulberry Harbour project that prepared troops for D-Day. Secluded Cruggleton Bay, one of the most pleasing beaches along the Solway, is a sheltered arc of sand fringed by mature trees, a short stroll from Galloway House, the ancient seat of the earls of Galloway. To the south on an outcrop of shale are the crumbling remains of Cruggleton Castle, known by locals as the Arch or the Black Rock of Cree. An arch is all that is left of an English garrison from the time of Robert the Bruce.

Ninian built Scotland’s first recorded church, Candida Casa, at Whithorn around 400 AD, and spread Christianity across Scotland. He was described by Blaeu’s Atlas in 1662 as ‘A tutelary god in the furthest corner of Galloway, whither of old men from distant parts undertook pilgrimages, for the sake of religion, to see the relics & church of Ninian, and to carry away a portion of sacred dust, which was in these days considered a signal evidence of sanctity.’

James IV made several pilgrimages to the cradle of Christianity after his queen recuperated from ill health following a visit to the shrine. I thought my haversack was heavy, but the royal couple didn’t travel light. In Wigtown and Whithorn Historical and Descriptive Sketches (1877) Gordon Fraser stated: ‘It would appear that in this journey the queen travelled in a litter, sometimes called in the treasurers’ books the “Quenis chariot.” Seventeen horses were required to carry her majesty’s wardrobe and baggage.’

According to the eighth-century Miracula Nynie Episcopi, Ninian ‘studied heavenly wisdom with a devoted mind in a cave of horrible blackness’. There is a stimulating cliff-top walk to this much-visited cave from Whithorn’s neighbour, the Isle of Whithorn, which is not an island, but an old fishing port on a headland near to which cruel Coltrane had a farm. Seven crosses are cut into the face on its west side. Eighteen stone memorials and crosses that were found there are now in the museum at Whithorn Priory.

The finale of the 1972 cult film, The Wicker Man, was shot here and at the dramatic Burrow Head, where Sergeant Howie, played by Edward Woodward, was burned at the stake within an enormous wooden structure, as the pagan villagers danced and chanted. The remains of the wickerman’s legs were visible for many years but were eventually moved.

John Kincaid McNeillie, who was brought up in the Machars, left a legacy of more than 40 books, including a number of cult classics, such as The Wigtown Ploughman, which follows the life of Andy Walker, the son of an abusive father. It was an exposé of the appalling living conditions of Scotland’s rural poor under ruthless landlords in Scotland in the 1930s. McNeillie also turned out weekly nature journalism in Country Life. One wonders what he would have made of one Dale Maclauchlan, a roofer, who shelled out £5,500 in 2021 for a jetski to meet his girlfriend in the Isle of Man in contravention of COVID lockdown regulations. Maclaughlan set off from the Isle of Whithorn on a 27-mile trip to Ramsey. The media called him ‘the jetski Romeo’ but the courts weren’t impressed: he was jailed for four weeks. He recalled: ‘One minute I was staring at the sky going up a six-foot wave and the next I was staring down into the abyss. The water was black and was getting in my eyes and mouth. But the thought of Jessica kept me driving on.’

Due west is another cave that was once inhabited, along from startling sand dunes at St Medan’s beach, from where the views across Luce Bay to the Mull of Galloway are superb. We stand now on a ‘go stargazing’ site, chosen for its pristine, open dark skies.

‘Och, I wish I was back in ma ain wee cave’, Johnny Logie told the Sunday Post in April 1958 when he was in hospital with pneumonia. Logie, a former Ayrshire miner with hearing and sight problems from a pit fall, had lived in Sheep Cave for 30 years, gathering all the furniture he needed from driftwood, and collecting rainwater. He practised his own version of the good life, was renowned for his seaweed-fed vegetables, and was virtually self-sufficient. He died in 1962, although there were signs a few years ago that his cave was often visited: stacked kindling, an upturned drum with a candle on top, a bed made from pallets, and fish crates for seats.

The naturalist and writer Gavin Maxwell, who is famous for Ring of Bright Water, was also a seeker of solitude but was no cave-dweller. He was born near Port William; his mother was a daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, and his father was heir to the Galloway baronetcy. A life-size bronze otter sits on top of a rock overlooking Luce Bay as a memorial to Maxwell, whose blue-blooded forebears founded the village of Port William, but don’t get so laid-back by the tranquillity that you chat to the man who forever leans against a wooden fence looking out to sea. He won’t reply: he’s another statue cast in bronze. In front of him there is a plaque with the first verse of the poem Leisure by W. H. Davies:

‘What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?’

Twelfth-century Glenluce Abbey is worthy of stares: it stands in magnificent disrepair in the north-west of the Machars, surrounded by pastureland and lapped by the meandering River Luce. There is a peculiar theory published in MacTaggart’s Gallovidian Encyclopedia that one of the abbey’s vaults (evidently long-buried) contained the library of Michael Scot, the wizard:

‘Here are thousands of old witch songs and incantations, books of the ‘Black Art,’ and ‘Necromancy,’ ‘Philosophy of the Devil,’ ‘Satan’s Almanacks,’ ‘The Fire Spangs of Faustus,’ ‘The Soothsayers’ Creed,’ ‘The Witch Chronicle,’ and the ‘Black Clud’s Wyme laid open,’ with many more valuable volumes.’

In the 16th century Gilbert Kennedy paid a monk to forge a signature on the title documents of Glenluce Abbey, then paid an assassin to murder the monk. He duly hanged the assassin for the murder.

The abbey stands on the banks of the Water Luce. In 1836 Sir James Hay of Park formed an islet in the river just before it reaches the sea.

When his son, Captain, later Admiral, Dalrymple Hay returned from visiting St. Helena, he named the island Helena and planted willows from cuttings of the tree at Napoleon’s grave. The willows are still there.

 

[scots-gallivanter]

TEN

In the far-off days, when Superstition, in close association with the ‘evil sister’ of Ignorance, walked abroad in the land, the south-western district of Scotland shared very largely in the beliefs and terrors embraced under the general descriptive term of witchcraft. Active interference in the routine of daily life on the part of the Prince of Darkness and his agencies was fully believed in.

J. MAXWELL WOOD, Witchcraft and Superstitious Record in the South-Western District of Scotland (1911)

TWO SIBLINGS ZOOM along a zipwire, smiling and laughing in the mid-day sun while the grown-ups sit on benches with ice creams. Chaffinches chirp cheer into Silvercraigs park in the artist’s town of Kirkcudbright on a glorious Spring Saturday full of light; but something very dark happened here. Elspeth McEwan, who had tried to live a free-spirited life communing with nature in the Galloway countryside, was strangled and burned at the stake where caravans now sit. A spiritual woman, she healed with herbs and had a way with animals, but Scotland’s satanic panic was at full pelt, and there are many column yards in old records that tell of the holocaust that a paranoid, misogynistic and propagandist Church meted out to so-called witches. She was executed in August 1698 and, while she burned, her executioner, William Kirk, drank a pint of ale that cost the burgh two Scots shillings. The provost pocketed £2, 16 shillings for his input. They spent two pounds on peat and coal to burn her, one Robert Creighton received eight shillings for beating the drum, Andrew Aitken pocketed £1, 4 shillings for ‘ane tarr barle’, and Hugh Anderson got six shillings for carrying the ‘peits and colls’. Such was the arithmetic of municipal murder.

Before the world enlarged for rural communities many people thrived on stories of ghosts, warlocks, witches, kelpies, spunkies, carlins, and brownies. Cattle were protected with pieces of rowan wood as charms against witchcraft. Long before television and the internet, most Scottish folk believed in tall tales and added to them around a cottar’s ingle or in one of the inns. At a time when the Church played God, devils appeared as hares or crows. Witches were seen going through keyholes or riding on broomsticks. Odd-looking people, eccentrics, loners, herbalists and nonconformists were all fair game to individuals who took a dislike to them and accused them of having the evil eye. Disgruntled cottagers would blame an easy target when livestock died or were ill.

Daniel Defoe had passed through Kirkcudbright in 1725 and moaned about local indolence: ‘Here is a harbour without ships, a port without trade, a fishery without nets, a people without business.’ If the gentry, over whom Defoe fawned, had concentrated on economic development rather than the murder and persecution of vulnerable and innocent souls, the English spy and provocateur might have left a more meaningful reportage.

Defoe passed by long before Kirkcudbright was talked of as ‘the St Ives of Scotland’. Artists, notably the so-called Glasgow Boys, were drawn to the light of the harbour town and it inspired them to paint rural subjects in the open air. In 1901 Edward Hornel bought Broughton House in Kirkcudbright and lived there the rest of his days. His house and library are now administered by the National Trust for Scotland. Jessie M King also made her home in Kirkcudbright and Charles Oppenheimer, William Mouncey, and several other artists had strong local connections.

The denizens of present-day Kirkcudbright recently converted a disused primary school into a ‘dark sky planetarium’ for skygazers. We saunter from there down a pleasant peninsula of old woodlands carpeted with hyacinths and campions. A woman in jodhpurs walks an unknown breed of dog on the longest lead I’ve ever witnessed and mouths a hello. The peninsula divides the bays of Manxman’s Lake and Goat Well Bay in the estuary of the River Dee. Up in the wild blue, two buzzards claim the sky, soaring on the thermals past bulging birches and born-again oaks on the peninsula of St Mary’s Isle, where John Paul Jones tried to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk and Burns first spoke his ‘Selkirk Grace’.

The ancient name of St. Mary’s Isle was Trayl, but it was renamed after a priory was built by Fergus, First Lord of Galloway, in the 12th century, and dedicated to St. Mary. There is very little left of the priory; all the buildings were removed long ago for Selkirk’s mansion and pleasure grounds.

Lord Cockburn called Kirkcudbright ‘the Venice of Scotland’, although he preferred it at high tide rather than in ‘a world of squelch’. But the tide is low as we traipse, and it looks splendid. A single red kite floats above as we munch oatcakes and gaze out at Little Ross Island lighthouse, whose keeper, Hugh Clark, was murdered by his colleague, Robert Dickson. According to M. M. Harper in his Rambles in Galloway (1876), there is a cavern or underground chamber on the islet, and King William’s fleet anchored in the bay out there on its passage to Ireland.

A stroll among the requiescats in Kirkcudbright cemetery reveals the grave of Billy Marshall, the king of the gypsies, who is said to have lived till he was 120. People still place pennies on top of gravestone, along from Scotland’s most southerly pagan Viking grave. Here lie rich merchants, Covenanters and benefactors, five of the 501 victims of the torpedoing of RMS Leinster in 1918, and also local boy John McClure, who became an admiral in the Chinese Navy during the first Sino-Japanese war.

From his cell in Newgate prison in the 1790s travel writer Robert Heron, who was Burns’s first biographer, hailed Gatehouse-of-Fleet one of the finest villages in Scotland. Nowadays it is within an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and is itself an Outstanding Conservation Area. It is hard to credit that the gentry spent a century or so trying in vain, via cotton mills, breweries and a shipyard, to turn Gatehouse, which the Cromwellian spy Thomas Tucker had described in 1655 as ‘not worth the nameing’ into a new Glasgow. It has a medieval fortress on its doorstep, an imposing greystone streetscape, a sylvan scarf of woodland, and a decent-sized hill next door. Even Cockburn admitted 40 years after Heron’s Scottish tour, that (although it was ‘too visibly the village at the Great Man’s Gate’) Gatehouse was clean and comfortable. He added: ‘.... with its wood, its well-kept home ground, its varied surfaces, its distant bounding hills and its obvious extensive idea of a great and beautiful domain it is one of the finest in Scotland.’

Cardoness Castle, an impressive 15th-century tower, which stands prominently on a bluff off the A75 just outside Gatehouse, has a chilling history. For generations it was held by the McCulloch family, who were notoriously lawless. The McCullochs, descendants of a king of the Britons of Strathclyde, were engaged in a vendetta with the Gordon family. Sir Godfrey McCulloch murdered William Gordon and fled to France. But he was finally tracked to a house in Edinburgh where he was masquerading as a Mr Johnstone; he was brought to justice after 13 years at large and was one of the last people to be executed on the Iron Maiden, a Scottish version of the guillotine. (There is a fanciful tale that a gnome saved him from the executioner.)

Until November 12th, 1909, a famous beech tree stood in the castle park, but it was destroyed in a storm. The MacCullochs had planned to cut it down in 1800, but there was considerable protest and the poet Thomas Campbell penned a poem he called The Beech Tree’s Petition. It was reprieved – for Nature eventually to take its course.

Thomas Carlyle is reputed to have told Queen Victoria that the road from Creetown to Gatehouse of Fleet was the most beautiful in her kingdom, and the road back was second best. Sir Walter Scott, the man who invented Scottish tourism, gathered a lot of smuggling tales and myths in these parts, many of them from Joseph Train, an exciseman, who worked in Dumfries and Galloway.

In 2012 archaeologists unearthed artefacts that proved that Trusty’s Hill, near Gatehouse, was the site of a sixth-century royal stronghold. Historians had hitherto assumed that the lost Dark Age kingdom of Rheged had been in Cumbria. Here was evidence that Galloway was at the heart of Rheged, the post-Roman Brythonic kingdom that was part of the Hen Ogledd of the Old North.

Gatehouse is the Kippletringan of Guy Mannering, and Dirk Hatterick’s cave is on the nearby Heughs of Barholm, which you can reach through Ravenshall Wood from a layby on the A75. (Cockburn called the cave ‘a narrow, wet, dirty slit in a rock, produced by the washing away of the loose matter between two vertically laminated rocks, and answering Scott’s scenery in no one respect, either outside or in’.) Scott had based Hatterick on the real-life Captain Yawkins, a vicious Manx pirate who operated along the Solway.

Burns is reputed to have written ‘Scots Wha Hae’ at the Murray Arms Hotel; much of John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps was based on the moors beyond Gatehouse; Dorothy L Sayers based The Five Red Herrings in the town, and a John Buchan trail has been established in the area.

The demon drink was a frequent cause of moral concern among ministers and other moralisers in those days. Not so with the more proletarian Heron, who observed: ‘Tippling houses are wonderfully numerous. I was informed by the excellent Exciseman of the place [Gatehouse], that no fewer than 150 gallons of whisky alone had been consumed here for the last six months.’

But Heron’s fondness for liquor shortened his life and impoverished him, which is why he had been imprisoned in Newgate for debt.

The bohemian maverick Alexander Trocchi had an addictive personality too. That future bad boy of the literary world, and pornographer, was evacuated to Galloway during the war, to be schooled at what is now Gatehouse’s Cally Palace Hotel. Hugh McMillan, author of McMillan’s Galloway, told me Trocchi might have been expelled but for the fact that his great-uncle Tito was a cardinal on the shortlist to succeed Pope Pius XI.

‘He became obsessed with the number of UFO sightings in the area and, with a group of mates, started a secret society to discuss and speculate about them,’ said McMillan. ‘They dressed in tin foil suits and formed a ‘Martian Party’, which romped home in the school elections, beating Labour to a distant second.

‘Due to his many escapades, Trocchi nearly left school without the vital leaving certificate, but the headmaster relented and stuffed it through the bus window as he was leaving for Glasgow. I’m presuming that it’s easier to commemorate Jim Barrie because he didn’t pimp his wife out for heroin like Trocchi. However, a plaque would be the least we could do.’

Another obscure Galloway anecdote: if you walk the old railway line between Creetown and Gatehouse of Fleet you will come upon a bridge on which one Polish Joe, a refugee mason, inscribed the name of Hitler and a coffin when he repaired the bridge on August 15th, 1940.

[scots-gallivanter]

NINE

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,

Standing Stones on the vacant wine-red moor,

Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,

And winds, austere and pure!

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, To S. R. Crockett (1895)

YOU GET OVER having the breath taken from you by haunting scenery worthy of the Hebrides or Cornwall, then you round a headland and there’s something even more picturesque: this is the Scottish Riviera, an appellation dreamed up by an anonymous copywriter of the 1930s. During his Voyage Around Great Britain Richard Ayton likened Galloway to Caernarvonshire. When John Keats toured in 1818, he called it ‘very beautiful, very wild with craggy hills somewhat in the Westmorland fashion. The county is very rich, very fine, and with a little of Devon.’ For the Rev. C. H. Dick, a Galloway minister, who wrote Highways and Byways of Galloway and Carrick (1916), it had something of Bavaria about it.

Today two ravens patrol one of Keats’s ‘craggy hills’. We hear them on the scree before we spot them tumbling and rushing. For me their call is closer to a quack than a croak. A gronk? Scottish gamekeepers nearly pushed them to extinction to safeguard pheasants, grouse and other birds which people pay to shoot for ‘sport’. In some areas pheasants are almost tame and, therefore, easier to kill. The lobbying power of the new gentry is such that they are fast turning some beautiful parts of Scotland into private playgrounds. More than four thousand ravens were ‘culled’ in Scotland between January 2015 and July 2018.

The Norwegians revered ravens as wise messengers, prophets and protectors. Not so in Scotland, where a flock of ravens is, unkindly, called an ‘unkindness’ possibly because of their association with the macabre. The ravens we see today swirl above Screel, which affords a spectacular panorama that would quicken the unkindest of hearts.

We spot the wind-whipped skeleton of a tree downhill from Screel; something extremely macabre happened there – one of the most spine-chilling episodes in the annals of Scottish demonology. There are records of a vicious poltergeist, which hounded a family here for three months in 1695. It hurled rocks, slapped several people, made objects move, and finally burned the farmstead of Ringcroft of Stocking Hill down. In 1957, Tom Phin, who once edited the Galloway News, wrote in The Scots Magazine of ‘a row of trees conspicuous on the sky-line near Auchencairn. The trees, reduced from four to three by a recent storm, grow from the site of the cottage, the foundations of which are still there.’

More than 60 years after Phin’s piece only one of the so-called Ghost Trees remains, and it’s hard to find the foundations of the building. The first O.S. map showed it as ‘Ring, a ruin’, on ‘Stocking Hill’, but there is no mention of either on recent maps. There’s a local rumour that the poltergeist will return if the last tree dies.

Alexander Telfair, the local minister, published the story of the poltergeist in a pamphlet authenticated by several ministers and elders, some of whom spent the night on the farm:

‘It came often with such force upon the house that it made all the walls to shake, it broke a hole through the timber and thatch of the house and poured in great stones.’

The Saturday Review, albeit many years later, denounced the pamphlet as a practical joke – propaganda against atheism. And Sacheverell Sitwell, in his book, Poltergeists, dismissively reckoned one of Mackie’s children had mastered the art of ventriloquism!

A ventriloquist would twist his tongue throwing some of the placenames of this district, many of which have Norse, Viking, Gaelic and Scots etymology. And although the maps of the Solway coast have dropped many evocative place names and features, there is still a lexicon of strange nomenclature that harks back to old-world customs and characters. Torrs Warren, Peter’s Paps, the Gauger’s Loup, the Doukers’ Bing, Adam’s Chair, Lot’s Wife. It could almost be a poem. Spouty Dennans, Witchwife’s Haven, Raven’s Nest, Thunderhole Bay, Rascarrel Moss.

Wealthy Kippford across the bay, whose lone hawthorn was voted Britain’s best tree in 2021, didn’t appear on any map until 1750. Ayton observed during his wanderings there that he was now in ‘a very rude and unfrequented part of the country where a traveller was an object of some curiosity’. The village had once been called Scaur. Samuel Murdoch Crosbie, under the byline, Scauronian, wrote in the Kirkcudbrightshire Advertiser & Galloway News, in 1923: ‘Within living memory the Scaur has changed from an out of the world little hamlet of some eighteen cottages, most of them thatched, to a thriving little village of more than double the number of dwellings. In those earlier days the Scaur was cut off from the outside world by the tide for a portion of each day as the only road into it was along the beach, which was covered twice every 24 hours. There was no post office, there were three public houses, there was no shop worthy of the name and, generally speaking, the village was considered to be quite a century behind the times.’

However, the nearby ancient hill fort of the Mote of Mark on the summit of a low hill by the estuary testifies to ancient occupation.

Many Galloway beaches are a pleasure to see and explore, but three of the five of Scotland’s 85 tested beaches that failed European safe-bathing standards in 2021, are around here: Brighouse Bay, Dhoon Bay and Rockcliffe. That this can happen in a designated National Scenic Area nicknamed the Riviera is appalling. Testers even found traces of human faeces. The water quality at Rockcliffe was rated ‘poor’ for four consecutive years. It’s high time slurry spreading was banned, too. What happened to good old-fashioned, weathered cow shit?

Ruins are uplifting. They have energy; their grandness cuts you down to size. Dundrennan Abbey has survived since the 12th century, despite the iconoclasts of the Reformation. This peaceful sylvan location appealed to the Cistercian ideal, described by Abbot Ailred of Rievaulx as: ‘Everywhere peace, everywhere serenity, and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world.’

In 1839 the blunt Cockburn castigated landowners again for dereliction, for using historic buildings as cow sheds:

‘They gaze on the glorious ruins of noble buildings, over which time and history delight to linger, and which give their estates all the dignity they possess, with exactly the same emotion that the cattle do, to which these impressive edifices are generally consigned. It is a humiliating, national scandal.’

On May 15th, 1568 Mary Queen of Scots spent her last night on Scottish soil at Dundrennan, probably in the commendator’s house; next morning, she boarded a fishing boat bound for Workington in England, for imprisonment and eventual execution.

Jackdaws nest in the abbey heights today, opposite a raucous rookery. A nuthatch whistles from the ivy thatch, and wagtails dart about the grass foreground this side of the unsightly ring of railings erected to keep us out. It is temporarily closed to the public, pending close tactile inspection of every stone. But it’s not just Dundrennan Abbey that is subject to closure. A goodly swathe of the coast is often a no-go area to allow the military to practise shooting and blowing things up. We might very well be on the wonderful Scottish Riviera, but 20 tons of depleted uranium shells have been rocketed into the sea from Dundrennan: land acquired by the Army in 1942 on which to train forces for the liberation of Europe. There is now a danger area 15 miles by 19 miles.

Gulls and waders congregate in their cacophonous thousands on the guano-blotched crags of Hestan Island, which is only accessible along a cockleshell causeway. An hour before low tide the occasional human walks across to this 33-acre island, which was one of the settings of Samuel Rutherford Crockett’s book The Raiders, although Crockett called it Rathan. Smugglers from the Isle of Man hid their contraband in a shelved cave that is now colonised by washed-up tree trunks, plastic debris, sand, spiders and pigeons. The Rev. Beryl Scott and her husband lived for years in a former copper miner’s house on the island without mains water, electricity or gas. They built church organs. Edward Balliol, former king of Scotland, also exiled himself to Hestan and built a manor house there more than a century after the monks of Dundrennan had come to fish. You must know the tides before crossing to Hestan from Almorness Point. Tobias Smollett wrote in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) that the Solway sand was ‘quick in different places’ and the tide ‘rushes in so impetuously, that passengers are often overtaken by the sea.’ And Walter Scott warned in Redgauntlet: ‘He that dreams on the bed of the Solway may wake in the next world.’

Crockett set much of his work in his native Galloway, including The Black Douglas, which Tolkien credited as an inspiration. Although Crockett sometimes rearranged the geography of Galloway, and in fact enlarged the cave on Hestan, he described the area vividly. ‘There were many tales about these caves,’ he wrote in The Raiders. ‘They were miles long, according to the ignorant. They were inhabited by the most terrible of sea-beasts, by mermen and sea lions of fearsome presence and exceeding ferocity.’

[scots-gallivanter]

EIGHT

‘Huge Criffel’s hoary top ascends

By Skiddaw seen,

Neighbours we were, and loving friends

We might have been.’

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, At the Grave of Burns (1803)

THE BUS TRUNDLES into Dumfries, picks us up, and takes us west, out past the entrance road to Kirkconnell House, the oldest continuously inhabited house in Scotland, which was in the Maxwell family until 2000. The original mansion was granted to that powerful clan in the 13th century. One previous laird was Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s aide-de-camp at the Battle of Culloden. The 1760 extension is thought to be Scotland's oldest brick house. The house itself is now a very upmarket holiday home.

Soon larks rise like little helicopters above the changeling hill Criffel, which seems to rise straight out of the Solway Firth. Below Criffel stands ivied Sweetheart Abbey, which is caressed by spring-evening-pink sunlight; it was built by Lady Devorgilla, the lovelorn widow of Lord John Balliol. When he died in 1268, she had his heart embalmed in an ivory casket and carried it everywhere with her. When she too died, in 1289, she was laid to rest in front of the altar, clutching her husband’s heart to her forever.

Bravo to Scotland’s Tacitus, Lord Cockburn, a 19th-century circuit judge and later Lord Advocate, for noting with exasperation in his fascinating Circuit Journeys (1839) that the abbey had been sold in the 1810s to be demolished for dyking material:

‘I grieve to say that another specimen of our unworthiness to possess such relics is to be found in the disgraceful state in which it is kept. It is a byre. Beasts.’ 

(However, Cockburn later purchased Bonaly, south-west of Edinburgh, and demolished much of the village to improve views from his new house! There is no record of what became of the inhabitants of the village.)

Peter Kormylo, a retired head teacher, was as creative as the stone thieves had been destructive. He spent 10 years renovating the Abbot’s Tower, a 16th-century building that had stood roofless for 400 years:

‘I have been interested in towers since I was a child when I liked castles, spiral staircases and dungeons. ...I scoured Dumfries and Galloway for three years and eventually came across one that was on a farmer’s land.....

‘I sank every copper of my life savings into it...it’s a punter-built tower, an ordinary bloke sinking all that he had into architectural conservation.’

Abbot’s Tower was built in 1540 and Gilbert Broun, the last abbot, lived in it for nearly 50 years. It stood empty after it was burned during the Reformation. Broun had defended Catholicism and planned to march on Dumfries if the Spanish armada landed at Kirkcudbright. The ships didn’t come. Broun fled to France and eventually died of a gangrenous foot, aged 103.

The only travellers on the bus today, a family in flipflops and sunglasses, sit solemnly up the aisle, rubber buckets and spades protruding from their carrier bags. Fifty years ago, any bus to Southerness would have been packed fit to topple, as it was a popular spot for weekenders, but human traffic seems sparse now. The descendants of those bygone passengers may well be packing airports en route to the Mediterranean, although staycations have increased in popularity since the coronavirus pandemic.

Between the villages of Kirkbean and Southerness there was once a medieval settlement that had its own jail and courts. The lost village of Preston was probably a ‘burgh of regality’ that belonged to the Regent Morton during the 16th century. By 1795, when the Statistical Account was published, there were only three farmers in Preston; the New Statistical Account counted only one inhabitant in 1844. The freestone Preston market cross toppled shortly afterwards but was later unearthed and placed on a granite plinth. The age of the cross, which now has ivy twining up it, is unknown. There is a tale told of the young James VI visiting a poor local family when he lodged with the Regent at the nearby Castle of Wraiths (now Wreaths). He was fed flounders by a poor family nearby. They filleted the fish, to make them look like two – one brown, one white. The king expressed a preference for the white ones. All that is left of this historical building, which had four storeys, are fragments of the southern and eastern walls, and the remnants of a turnpike stair and doorway.

Our bus rattles past a championship golf course, above which a buzzard quarters for young voles. I hear the soft whistle of waders, and the word ‘fore’ being yelled. Here in Southerness the Vikings established saltpans that were later run by monks. (It was originally called Satterness but, like so many other places, its name was anglicised.) The second lighthouse to be built in Scotland stands on the skerries opposite the pub, the Paul Jones, which was named after a pirate who became an admiral in both the American and Russian navies. Jones was born in a cottage on nearby Arbigland estate, which is now a museum, on the next block from a caravan park that wouldn’t look out of place in Blackpool.

Southerness was founded on blood money by a man described by the Dictionary of National Biography as a ‘peacemaker’. Richard Oswald owned Bunce Island, a slave fort in Sierra Leone in West Africa, and was responsible for capturing around 13,000 Africans and transporting them to slavery in the plantations of America and the Caribbean. He trousered an estimated £60 million in today’s money from this ‘trade’ and, when slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833, his son was awarded compensation of £5,645 18s 6d for the loss of the 297 slaves he owned jointly with his wife in Jamaica. Such a scenario was not unfamiliar among the Scottish upper classes of that time, and many huge estates were built on the back of slavery.

From Southerness lighthouse you can turn left or right into superlatives. On the right are the wide sands of Mersehead that sweep towards the well-heeled and entirely double-yellow-lined village of Sandyhills, along from geological miracles such as the Needle’s Eye, Lot’s Wife, and the Piper’s Cave. On the landward side of this broad strand is a reserve run by the RSPB. Turn left at the lighthouse instead and you have an invigorating and varied walk over glistening sand and then through terrain redolent of fairy tales. I’m not a Krypton Factor fiend, nor am I into ‘bagging’ Munros or ticking off the many long-distance pathways that have been branded by committees. I’m more into communing with the elements and peering into corners. It may well be my natural laziness, but I’d rather watch the world happening than be an athlete who walks 30 miles a day and is hungry for another ordeal before he hits the hay.

Today Nikki and I jump around shell shores and scramble up, down, over and past jagged and water-smoothed rocks, and haphazardly folded limestone. Three cheers for the magic of sea air, the wonders of glaciation and seismic burps. Here is a whopper of a boulder called the Devil’s Stone. Lore tells us the devil bit a chunk out of Criffel, didn’t like the taste of it, and spat it out. The Thirlstane is the star of the show, a natural arch beloved by rock climbers and boulderers. There are children abseiling down it today. We dander among bluebells and a profusion of wild garlic as thick as a fresh fall of snow. We walk the meandering path by twisted trees and behold a gate flanked by two stone lions.

And here we have the House on the Shore, where an Oscar -nominated film, The Wife, starring Glenn Close, was filmed. James William Beauchamp Blackett is the laird. On the online blurb for Arbigland estate Blackett admits that his great-grandmother built the house in 1936 out of stones she obtained from demolishing part of the village of Carsethorn! He also boasts that the house is ‘one of the most architecturally important houses to be built in Scotland in the 20th Century’.

Blackett, a regular commentator on the GB news channel, co-founded a fervently anti-Scottish-independence party with George Galloway, a presenter on the now proscribed Russia Today channel. He parted company with Galloway after Putin invaded Ukraine. Both were concerned that Scotland was being ‘ulsterised’.

Blackett was the keynote speaker at a public meeting in 2024 which opposed the imminent designation of Galloway as a national park. He was quoted as saying: ‘We live in a 21st-century Scotland run by socialists and separatists from Central Belt-istan. And Dumfries and Galloway is a client of Central Belt-istan.’ National parks, he declared, were the preserve of ‘the NIMBY tendency and environment tendency’.

Blackett’s father, Captain ‘Beachie’ Blackett, an ill-starred Lloyds name, acquired Ashdowns, a purveyor of fine fish, oysters and game, in London in 1966. For more than 30 years he presided over his business wearing a straw hat, a bow tie and rubber boots. He opened a restaurant, Beauchamp’s, above the shop, and above that a private luncheon club. When business was bad, Blackett had a tendency to parade up and down the street wearing a sandwich board that declared on the front, ‘The End of the World is Nigh But …’ and on the back, ‘Beauchamp’s is Still Open for Lunch’. The world did come to an end for his business. It went under in 1999.

When you see sensible-looking folk in anoraks walking their pets along the pebble beach at Carsethorn, due south, it’s almost impossible to believe that this village once had five pubs and three brothels. It swarmed with industry, and boats left its jetty regularly for Liverpool and beyond. Convicts were marched along the cobbled causeway and shepherded onto vessels bound for Australia. Some 22,000 people, facing famine, depression and recession, sailed voluntarily. In 1872 the whole hamlet of Busy Bit, near Dunscore in Dumfriesshire, moved to Sydney, and the Clydesdale horses they took with them were reportedly Australia’s first. The jetty, now a jagged lattice of half-sunken sticks, recently declared an ancient monument, is visible from the beer garden of the Steamboat, which is now the only pub in the village. As far as I’m aware there are no brothels.

[scots-gallivanter]

SEVEN

The Thames flows proudly to the sea.

Where royal cities stately stand

But sweeter flows the Nith to me.

Where Comyns ance had high command

ROBERT BURNS, The Banks of Nith (1789)

CORMORANTS PERCH OUT on their favourite island: a tongue of silt and shingle anchored by half a dozen willows in the River Nith – an islet that isn’t there in most photos of old Dumfries. Four men sit on the left bank today, laughing and sharing a carry-out a yard or two from where their dogs relieve themselves. I flap pushy seagulls away and a woman resting her shopping bags on a bench tells me: ‘The only thing Dumfries hasnae lost, son, is the gulls.’

I wonder what has happened to the town in which I was born. Dumfries’s ancient tenements and closes are gone. Several old buildings have buddleias and other trees growing out of their pointing. The street architecture is homogenous. There is a scruffy look about it at times, though not quite as bad as in 1785 when the Perthshire minister William Thomson, posing as an English gentleman by the name of Captain Newte, passed by. Newte wrote in his book, Tour in England and Scotland, that the ‘lower class of females’ were ‘exceedingly dirty’; and, in his turgid travelogue, Northern Memoirs, in 1697, Richard Franck recalled the nauseating halitosis of the ‘rabble’ who sat around the tollbooth. Onions, seemingly.

Brighter pictures have, of course, been painted of ‘the Queen of the South’, including Defoe’s description of it in 1711 as ‘a prosperous town of merchant adventurers’. Thirty years later Bishop Pococke was impressed by ‘one of the neatest towns in Great Britain’, and, as recently as 1842, Fullarton’s Gazetteer hailed the town as ‘the metropolis of south-west Scotland, a place of elegance, importance, and great antiquity’.

We go for a stroll in the Dock Park, along the riverside – the site of a medieval castle, demolished soon after Defoe came spying, to provide stone for a church that is no longer there. Today, wayfarers push prams or walk dogs, probably unaware of the significance of a granite obelisk that stands near the play area. It’s in memory of John Law Hume, of Dumfries, and Thomas Mullin of the adjacent village of Maxwelltown, now swallowed up by Dumfries, who went down on the Titanic in April 1912. Hume, who was 21, was a violinist, and part of the band that famously played on as the great ship sank. Mullen, a ship’s steward the same age as Hume, was also among the victims, and both are buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

An eight-iron would probably be enough to propel a golf ball from the Dock Park to Robert Burns’s marble mausoleum in St Michael’s cemetery, a place of pilgrimage extensively written about, and visited by tourists from many countries. The bard had lived in or around Dumfries for the last eight years of his short life. He was buried in a simpler grave, but his body was exhumed in 1817 to be placed in its present tomb. John McDiarmid, who was editor of the Dumfries Courier, wrote a piece that claimed the poet’s head separated from his torso when workmen tried to move him, and then, ‘with the exception of the bones, crumbled into dust’.

Not many years later MacDiarmid was one of the ringleaders who took Burns’s skull from his grave in the dark of night, put it in a sack and took it to a local plasterer for a mould of it to be made. It is said that several of the crew took their hats off and tried them on the bard’s skull. All of this in the interests of the pseudo-science of phrenology.

When William Wordsworth visited the first grave of Burns with his sister Dorothy in 1803, he wrote a poem that includes the following verse:

The tear will start, and let it flow;

Thou ‘poor Inhabitant below,'

At this dread moment--even so--

Might we together

Have sate and talked where gowans blow,

Or on wild heather.

In her Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland AD 1803, Dorothy Wordsworth opined, unfairly I’d say: ‘We were glad to leave Dumfries, which is no agreeable place to them who do not love the bustle of a town that seems to be rising up to wealth. We could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on that unpoetic ground.’

Two well-known hotels used to stand opposite each other down the High Street past the Midsteeple. The County Hotel, which now houses Waterstones book shop was the headquarters of Prince Charles Edward Stuart for three days in 1745, during which his Jacobites demanded shoes from the populace. Over the road stood the Kings Arms Hotel, which now accommodates Boots the chemist. The serial killer and body snatcher William Hare, of Burke and Hare fame, was put up there in February, 1829 after he turned king’s evidence and was granted immunity from prosecution, and Burke had been executed. A crowd of eight thousand bayed for Hare’s blood outside the hotel, but he was spirited away, nobody knows where.

In his History of Dumfries William McDowall wrote: ‘The news spread rapidly; and under its excitement a vast crowd, estimated at eight thousand people, collected on the streets, the greatest concourse being in the vicinity of the King’s Arms Hotel, where Hare was located, waiting the departure of the Galloway mail. At first, several gentlemen were freely admitted to see him. When, however, the crowd outside increased, and began to use threats of violence, he was removed for greater security to a closet adjoining the tap-room. There he was traced; and a fierce band of intruders, with cries of “Burke him! Burke him!” burst in, who would undoubtedly have made their words good, had not several policemen arrived and cleared the room. The time for the Portpatrick mail to start (eleven o’clock) having come, the inn-yard was cleared with difficulty, the horses were yoked, and the coach was drawn out.

‘Hare did not make his appearance. If he had ventured forth, no trembling quadruped with the name he bore ever experienced a worse fate than that which awaited him. The wrath of the “Monument rangers,” of the “Kirkgate blades,” and all the nameless rabble of the town, from the Moat-brae to the Cat’s Strand, was fairly up: they would have torn him to pieces without mercy; and it is scarcely exaggeration to say, in the words of Shakespeare:

“Had all his hairs been lives,

Their great revenge had stomach for them all.’’’

On the opposite bank of the River Nith stands the disused Rosefield Mill, with its magnificent Venetian palazzo frontage. Tyres, car parts, carpets, cans, an old microwave oven, and other rubbish were removed from the mill in 2022 after a trust bought it for a nominal sum. The Norwegian army-in-exile used the mill as a transit camp and it’s now earmarked as a cultural venue in a town with many associations with Burns; as well as with Bruce, who killed the Red Comyn in the former Greyfriars Church in the town centre. A plaque on the wall at Gregg’s bakery at the top of Friars Vennel now marks the spot of the murder of the English king’s lackey.

Over 2,000 Norwegians were stationed in and around Dumfries after the Germans invaded their country. In 2023, to commemorate the link, a huge ‘stone of friendship’ was unveiled on land off the Whitesands – next to the bus stances where we hope to catch the bus that will hurl us down to the ‘Scottish Riviera’.

(There is a long-standing myth that nine witches were strangled and burned at the stake here one Spring afternoon in 1659, but a minute of the trial reveals that they were killed at 'the ordinar place of execution for the burghe of Drumfreis', which appears to have been at Marchfield out off the Moffat Road. )

I peer at the adjacent Auld Brig, a 17th-century stone bridge, which was built on the site of the 15th-century one that was destroyed in a flood, which was itself built on the site of a wooden one given by Lady Devorgilla in the 1260s. The aforementioned Franck wrote: ‘...you may observe a large and spacious bridge, that directly leads into the country of Galloway, where thrice in a week you shall rarely fail to see their maid-maukins dance corantos in tubs.’ John Macky described the brig in his Journey Through Scotland in 1723 as ‘the finest I saw in Britain, next to London and Rochester’.

Burns would have crossed this bridge many a time; less well-known was the journey across the brig by the poet Robert Fergusson who, some say, might have eclipsed Burns had he not died at the age of 24, when Burns was 15.

Somewhat tattered and dissolute from virtual alcohol poisoning, Fergusson staggered into town on September 26th, 1773, with his companion, Wilson, first name unknown, a naval officer. The poet wore a long white flannel jacket that had been blackened during their arduous journey from Edinburgh, pub by pub. To an eyewitness he looked like a young recruit done in by the mother of all walks, rather than ‘a gay minstrel on pleasure bent’. They’d drunk all night in an Edinburgh howff before deciding in the middle of the night to shank it all the way to Dumfries to see Fergusson’s ‘bosom cronie’, Charlie Salmon, who’d moved there to work as a compositor with Dumfries’s first printer, Robert Jackson, the provost.

In Dumfries the duo resumed their pub crawl, sampling a few of the ninety-odd drinking dens that operated in town at that time. (Most of them are long gone.) From verses penned by Fergusson in the pubs, and published in the Dumfries Weekly News, it seems he was so pleased with his trip that he longed for ‘some orra pence, mair sillar, and a wee bit mair sense’, that he might be able to ‘bide a’ simmer.’

William McDowall wrote in Memorials of St Michaels:

‘Soon afterwards, alas; the unfortunate poet had to exchange all scenes of revelry, mirth, and beauty for a bed in that dark inn, the grave.’

But not before Fergusson had written this:

‘The gods sure in some canny hour

To bonny Nith ha’e ta’en a tour

Where bonny blinks the caller flow’r

Beside the stream

And sportive there ha’e shawn their pow’r

In fairy dreams.’