Largs, Ayrshire

‘I’d never been to Ayrshire…’

I’d never been to Ayrshire
I hitched down one Saturday
I went sixty miles to Kilmarnock
To see Hibernian play
The day was bright and sunny
But the game I won’t relay
And there was no Kilmarnock bunnet
To make me want to stay
(‘Joyful Kilmarnock Blues’ – The Proclaimers)

The main thing I remember about the first week in Scotland is that I was hysterically over-excited, even though I was exhausted.

We picked Largs, Ayrshire, as our first destination partly because because it was close to Glasgow airport, so we wouldn’t have far to drive on that crucial first day. Also, my parents lived in the South Australian equivalent, Largs Bay, and also because it sounded kitsch and unusual and off the beaten track in the guidebook. Once we’d made a preliminary decision about it, it just stuck.

We got into Heathrow on a Saturday morning, but we had made the classic mistake of taking too much cabin luggage into the airport and now had to join a queue a mile long to check it onto our ongoing flight. It took us five minutes to even find the end of the queue. This was during the ‘liquid bomb’ scare, when thousands were stranded for days.  In fact, if I hadn’t demanded to jump the queue (by pointing at my crying wife and distressed small children) we might still be there. Thank you, crying wife.

So, we got out of the hall in good time, and then all we had to contend with was a delayed London-Glasgow flight and our incredibly whiney kids, who had just done 30 hours plus in transit. And then we got the hire car, and drove to Largs down a back road, and it was all right, although Louise and the kids were so knackered they tumbled into bed as soon as we arrived, and left me to it for the remainder of the afternoon. I was not exhausted. I was hysterical. I had been waiting years for the chance to be here. But where was here? I found myself standing in a pokey little flat in a run-down seaside town, staring up out of the window at the green-grey hills above it. I loved it, actually. But it wasn’t really what I had been expecting.

I wandered up and down the narrow, randomly-angled streets and drank some Tennants Ember, or another one of the local brews, and tried to calm down. The rest of the afternoon of that first day is a blur. I had been pouring over map images of the area for the longest time, without having any real idea of what it would look like. Now I was in it, in the dim light and cool / warm air, looking at the mucky stone beaches on the Firth of Clyde; seeing the signs in Gaelic but mostly English; hearing the Herring Gulls, and breathing in the smell of the leaking gas mains and cigarette smoke, chip fat and sea air. I came eight thousand miles for this?

After a day pottering about in Largs, laughing at the ancient amusement park on the foreshore, we got up on Monday morning and headed south though central Ayrshire and the main towns there. A huge mass of them stood between us and our destination, Dumfries and Galloway, where we wanted to walk in the Forest Park, see wild deer and then photograph them. Unfortunately we didn’t have a proper map, just some print-offs from the internet, so we got sidetracked off the main highway and had to wind our way southward through the seaside towns.

So, we saw what Ayrshire is really like, in Ardrossan, Saltcoats, Ayr and on the Prestwick junction; miles and miles of brown and grey pebblecrete houses from the 50s, when these seaside resorts were in their boom. Pubs, warehouses, yacht havens, nuclear reactors; seaside gambling parlours with faded pink neon lights looking sickly in the daylight; cheap amusement rides and sideshows; working class folk from Glasgow trying to soak up the sun, even in the drizzling rain; fish and chip shops and ice cream parlours, with giant models of ice cream cones out on the pavement for the kiddies and the semi-literate; and all of it covered in the muck from the Herring Gulls that crowd everywhere. This is what southern coastal Scotland is actually like. If you ever find yourself in this part of the world, leave.

We finally got out, came by chance to the most northerly section of Forest Park, and decided to pretend that it had been our destination all along, so we had a decent walk at Loch Doon, and although there were few trees in sight, the place was beautiful, but in a more desolate way than I had been anticipating. It said it was a forest, so I wanted forest, with trees, damn it, and deer too, like there were on the sign. But never mind.

Then we got a map at a service station, so our trips out in Ayrshire were considerably more efficient from then on. But my general impression of Ayrshire is still of those brown endless seaside terraces.

Then to finish the day, we went to Culzean Castle, built by the famous Robert Adam, who built Culzean Castle. And we had an Arran ice-cream and it was nice. But who cares, really? Now, I had been to Ayrshire (and need never do so again, by the way). And I never found out what a ‘Kilmarnock Bunnet’ is.

That Billy Preston’s been sniffing around my bank accounts!

The people of Ayrshire: tall, bored young men with short hair and high cheekbones; tired, stooped old men with bellies swollen from drinking; older women with straggling hair and varicose veins; and weary bleach-blonde girls with kids, hard-faced and tight-lipped. They were a grim lot. Each one could have been a MacCallan or a Dalgleish, but was more probably a Tipton or a Stockdale. This was basically a buggered up bit of England, with less tax revenue.

I was sitting outside the apartment block while Erin played with the Buddleias in the garden. A group of lads came past on the way from the off-licence with bags of cans. One of them saw me and waved a greeting. “All right mate?” “OK” I said. Obviously I did not come off as macho-friendly as he would have liked. “Hey, I see you!” he said, acting tough. “I’ve got my eye on you now. I’m watching you!”, and with that he swaggered off. “Righto, mate,” I said, unfazed, as it would have been very difficult to break into our flat and I knew he wasn’t going to attack me on the street.

Then a rather odd, distracted girl walked past and began talking to me, or to the air around me, about a lad whose name I can’t remember, but let’s say it was Billy Preston. “You watch out for that Billy Preston. He’s been sniffing around my bank accounts!” “I see,” I said. “That’s terrible.” (She may have actually meant her bank accounts for all I know.) “You watch out for him”, she said again, and continued down the road. Then she ran into the fellow who was ‘keeping an eye on me’ and his gang of mates. This must have been Billy Preston. They began shouting after her and calling her all sorts of names which I can’t remember, but wish I could. I think ‘batty’ was the least of them. She responded with much more restrained stuff like “You’re no good, Billy Preston. You stay away from me!” which made them laugh.

Then a voice called out from a top window over the road from me. “You should leave tha’ poor wee girl alone. She’s only a bairn at heart, and going crazy coz of youse! Youse are nothing but beasties!”

She really did say that. But there was no response from Billy Preston and co., who were around the corner and probably out of earshot.

Another time I got drinking in a bar with a fellow who could talk a tight sentence if he wanted to, but whose eyes would glaze over as soon as I engaged him with sentence of their own. “I drink a lot, Steve,” he said as he explained the merits of cheap house whisky over the single malt I was buying. I tried to tell him that I was trying all the malts I could. That was where the drunkenness kicked in. He nearly fell of his chair in the effort of ignoring my incredibly boring conversation. Then when he started telling me about his friends in Australia that I might know, he was suddenly sober again. He was obese, and out of work, and without family. He went there every day. I think about one in every five guys his age was like him.

A third fellow I met talked in a rasping voice. He asked me if I could understand him. “Yeah, I can understand you OK,” I said. The barmaid chipped in, one of those older women forever calling everyone ‘Love’ and ‘Pet’. “Only if we talk slowly, love!” she said. And then to prove it she rattled out some Scots, speaking fast to prove her point, and then he joined in and they all laughed because I couldn’t understand a word of it. They are into their ‘Scots’ in Ayrshire too, being the home of ‘Rabbie’ Burns ‘an a’ that.’ It’s part of their heritage. They can keep it.

The guy went on to explain that his rasping voice was the product of cancer, but it was all right, because it wasn’t throat cancer, just a ‘touch of lung cancer’ that was pushing his throat out of shape. He had come up from London to see his sick mum and take in some sea air. “Oh, good” I said. “And you could always stop smoking, too!” He gave me look intimating that I should shut up now. You couldn’t tell him not to smoke, they all smoked. You could smell people’s living rooms from outside on the street.

They were a grim lot.

Up the Knock

Although Tuesday and Wednesday were decent days, and we had seen Great Cumbrae and done a woodland walk at Castle Semple, by the Thursday morning my excess adrenaline had become unbearable. We were only able to do so much on a given day, because of the kids. But I was hyped up and I wanted more Scotland for my dollar. So, to tire myself out, I got up at 4 in the morning to take on a local hill walk called “Going up the Knock.”

‘Cnoc’ means ‘Conical Hill’ in Gaelic, and they were very literal about place names, so there are a great many pointed hills in Scotland simply bearing the title ‘The Knock.’ This one is an old volcanic spur that looms up above Brisbane Glen and is visible throughout Largs. I had been staring at it with longing the whole first four days. It was not quite my archetypal ‘really pointy hill in Scotland’, but it would do.

It took me a while to get going on the walk – Largs had expanded since my guide book was written, and the pleasant loop road it spoke of now ran past a housing estate called Sheckington Keckle or some other rubbish. But once I finally got out onto Brisbane Glen Road I started enjoying myself. It was just light enough to see in the pre-dawn. I walked through Brisbane Farm and up onto the muddy tractor trail, and then scrambled up the side of the hill so I could get to the top just as the sun was coming up.

My timing was excellent, and the idea had been a good one. The Knock was the highest point in the area, so as soon as the sun got over the mountains behind me, the top of the Knock was the first place it hit. I sat in a little island of sunlight that slowly spread down the sides of the hill and into the valley below. Then it hit other hilltops, and out in the Firth, high places on Cumbrae, Cowal, Jura and Kintyre began to light up, too. It was very beautiful.

I took swigs from my little bottle of White and MacKay – suitably rough stuff – and thought about the makers of the hill-fort, seeing the same sight as me, on a morning thousands of years before, but with even worse whiskey. There was a hill-fort up there, they say, and it was a very obvious location for one, although I must say my ability to spot a hill-fort has been diminished with increased exposure to them; the more hill-forts I see, the less I am able to distinguish them from piles of rocks, which in fact, they are.

But once I have it in mind that there might be ancient monuments in a place, I tend to see them all round me, building imaginary prehistoric landscapes out of bumps in the rocks and grass. “That little hillock over there used to be part of a hill-fort”, I’ll say to Louise, and be right about a third of the time. Now I could see them everywhere. Little flat green indented areas, quite obviously man-made, littered the hillside below me, near my chosen route back to the road along the Firth and home to Largs. Odd hillocks lined the sides of the longer ones, probably burial chambers. ‘Look, that one there absolutely must be part of a cursus of some kind,’ I thought. I was still swigging away on the White and MacKay as I went down there to it. ‘Oh, there is even an interpretative display, naming the site! And you know how much I love an interpretive display.’ I hastened over to it.

Skelmorlie Golf Course. Hole 9. Par 3.

So it was man-made, all right. It wasn’t a Neolithic cursus, it was a golf course. Oh, that’s right, I remembered now. As well as the home of Burns, it’s gowf territory around here too. Troon and Prestwick an’ a’ that.

Oh well, at least this was going to be a quicker way home than travelling all the way through Brisbane Glen again. I made my way through the prehistoric golf course and down in the farm fields below. I was all right on the course pathways, but then came the cow field, which I had no choice but to travel through. Preparing to quote what I could remember of the Scottish Right of Way and Access Code (which is basically the name of it), I headed along the side of the field down to the dirt farm road.

In the end, it was not the challenge of a farmer or a bull I have to contend with, but the mud. The path by the fence got thinner and thinner and then ran out entirely, leaving me no choice but to clamber up a pile of dirt to get through the gate on the other side of it. But it turned out this pile had been made only yesterday, by a tractor, and it was still very soft. By the time I was at the top, I was up to my knees in it, and as I tried to leap away, each leap took me in deeper. The last one took me in up to my thigh.

My legs were covered in mud as I wandered down the dirt road to the highway, swigging the last of the White and MacKay, giggling. But I still got nods from the farmers as I went down, perhaps for being a decent enough lad to get up this early.

I was happy, and finally, I was tired.

All that way for a walk in the damn forest…

Later on the Thursday, I persuaded Louise to make another expedition southward to Galloway, this time bypassing the towns and sticking on the highways so we could get to some actual forest with actual trees in it. We made our way to Glen Trool and took the obligatory photograph next to the ‘Stane’ where Robert the Bruce rested after defeating the English in an important battle here in – I’m guessing –1066, and saw the nice oak forest on the other side of the gulley where we we couldn’t get to it.

Then we went for short and very silly walk in a forestry plantation. Afterwards I worked out that forestry gets marked on the tourist maps by those dark green conifer signs, rather than the nice light green deciduous signs of the original forest. There is a lot of plantation in Scotland, as I was to learn, and not enough of the original forest, which mostly survives in gullies and riverbanks and other steep places that are too hard to bulldoze, and also in the grounds of old estates where it has been maintained first by the gamekeepers, and now by the Scottish Wildlife Board or whatever they call themselves.

Determined not to enjoy myself until I had been on a proper forest walk, I fussed and panicked at Louise until she agreed to drive me on in search of a more appropriate  bit of woodland. Round and about we drove, trying to find our way to a particular patch of the light ‘deciduous’ signs that was clearly marked on the map, but torturously inaccessible in our hire car. A combination of rivers and ‘4-wheel drive only tracks’ meant it was ‘just over there’, yet there was no clear route to it.Finally, we saw off to the side of the road a patch of trees that turned out to be Knockman’s Wood, a birch forest of an old estate whose garden walls were still standing in some places. Leaving Louise in the car with the sleeping children, I ventured in and spent about fifteen minutes trying to jam in as much peace as I could into that serene moment. Ah, woodland.

Actually, it was fine, and calmed me down no end. Also, I’m pretty sure that the lump of rocks I saw is a Bronze Age burial chamber; so therefore there is about a 1 in 3 chance that it actually is one.

Guardians of the Ancient Lore

Throughout our whole time in Scotland I kpet running into these charcters I could only describe as “guardians of the ancient lore.” The first guy, we met during our second trip down to Galloway. We came across a potter’s studio, in a valley with a large number of villages all called Pin-something. We stopped to let the kids stretch their legs and found that the woman there had studied in Canberra Art School with some people I knew. Small world. Anyway, her father-in law, also a potter, offered us tea to eat with our picnic, which we had in their back garden. The tea was poured out of one of their homemade teapots. It was very twee.

The guardian was an English chap, neat beard, hearty looking, who didn’t like cities, or his homeland much, and was in the process of becoming a naturalised Scot. He turned out to know a fair amount about the history of the local area. “This isn’t Q-Celtic here”, he said, “This is a P-Celtic area. It’s all different this far south. Take the name ‘Pin’, for example, a form of Welsh ‘Pen’.” And we chatted about the Gwyr y Gogledd. He told me there were several hill forts in the area and I dutifully imagined piles of rocks that might have been buildings once. Then, I asked him if he knew much and he described himself as a dabbler. He suggested that the local tribe had in fact been the Cornovii, which surprised me as I had always associated them with Cornwall, but he said they ranged as far as Caithness. I asked him a lot of dumb questions, such as “what was the local tribe in this area?” when he had just told me it was the Cornovii, and “have you been to Dunadd?”, when he had just been telling me that this area was unconnected with Dalriada and was associated with the northern Britons, whose base was probably around Carlisle.

After that he went away, no doubt disgusted by my ignorance. If I’d been in the mood to be social, I probably could have made more of this encounter but the forest walk beckoned and so we kept on. Besides, I had already asked too many dumb questions.

The next guardian I met was in a more predictable place. At the Museum of the Old Kirk in Largs I met him, on our final day. I had gone to take photos of Skelmorlie Aisle and the Old Kirk graveyard, which we had been able to see through the locked gate every time we walked from our flat down to the main road. Finally I got around to going down to the gate on the opposite side, near the main road, and finding out how to get in.

“You used to be able to walk right through” he said with a pained look. “But the vandals come in and ruin every thing so we keep it all locked now. It’s one of the oldest Kirk sites in Scotland!” He was a neat grey man, who could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy, and had that well-preserved look that comes from countless hours spent not sitting around in the pub with the other lads. He told me about his passion, to write a biography of Sir Thomas Brisbane, local landowner, he of the Brisbane Glen I had been waking through the previous day, and who had been later made governor of Queensland, had the city named in his honour, civilised the natives, and still found time to practice astronomy. His family were all buried in the Kirk Yard.

It may be the oldest Kirk in Scotland for all I know, but it may also be that he had gotten used to stressing the antiquity of everything in his beloved yard to the ignorant Glaswegians who stuck their heads in every so often, as a break from the amusement rides and Herring Gull poo. “No-one cares about this place anymore!” he said. “It’s one of the oldest and most important sites in Scotland, right in the middle of Largs, and people just don’t bother.”

I left him chatting to the old woman who was working in the museum store with him, as they prepared for the big Viking Festival in the week to come. Largs is big for Viking memorabilia because the Scots beat the Vikings here one time, rather than the other way round. We took the kids to Vikingar and they loved it – guys dressed up in beards and furs and so on.

People actually pay attention to the past when it’s presented like that, don’t they? Because it’s actually fun, rather than being a bunch of old rocks that might have been a building once.