The Electric Brae
By Stuart Waterman
I spent the first few years of my life living in Scotland, and after moving away the family would go back pretty much every summer to visit relatives (and test our ability to sit in a car together for eight hours without eviscerating each other). One of the numerous lovely things about the south-west of Scotland is a wee place in Ayrshire called The Electric Brae (pronounced “bray”). The Electric Brae is a place where, seemingly, the laws of physics have gone bye-bye. On a fairly nondescript stretch of the A719, locals need to take care when driving about their business for fear of crashing into tourists dicking about in the middle of the road. Why do fools from all over the world come to do this dicking? It is because, if you turn off the engine of your car and release the handbrake, it will roll uphill. If you drop a ball onto the road, it will bounce up the incline. Pour some liquid onto the surface and it will duly trickle away - up the slope. This is thrilling enough for adults. It achieves that result magicians aim for, recreating in their cynical, jaded husk of a body the ability to gawp and grin with glee at something which just shouldn’t happen. In children, it almost literally makes the brain implode. It would be interesting to know how many mischievous nippers have attempted to push the pram/buggy containing their younger sibling up the hill, in the hope it will continue rolling and eventually just take off and fly into space. Not that I ever did that, you understand. I’d also love to know who first discovered the phenomenon, and whether they managed to survive the inevitable ensuing accusations of witchiness. There’s a frustrating lack of decent video of the phenomenon on OoToob, but this in-car snippet captures it quite well, I think: How does this enchanted A-road work? Well, the stretch is called The Electric Brae (“brae" meaning slope) because for many years it was thought to be some kind of manifestation of electromagnetic jiggerypokery. You know, like Lost but without the whispering and polar bears and murderous black vapour. The truth, as truth will often insist on being, is a bit more drab. The Electric Brae is an example of that magic-trashing spoilsport, the “optical illusion”. You can’t imagine how disappointed I was to learn this, especially since for many years I’d been telling my schoolfriends that while they may be going to Disneyworld that summer, I’d be frolicking in a magic road thankyouverymuch. Thankfully the truth is as difficult to understand as if the phenomenon was caused by spectral dragonflies pooing on gravity. Every time I try and get my head around the explanation - which you can read here - my eyes glaze over at the mentions of degrees, perspective and topography. In my version of the world, if the truth is too hard to understand you’re fully entitled to use your God-given ignorance to disbelieve it. I think it is such wilful ignorance that will allow magic to exist FOREVAAAH. It might also mean David Blaine becomes president, but that seems a small price to pay.
