It must have been the summer of ’59 or ’60 when I first went to Arran.  The more upmarket ‘doon-the-watter’ destination for Glasgow’s West-End. The Clyde coast isle that rightly claims to be Scotland in Miniature, at least geologically. A highland granite grit north and a rolling southern upland south. The memories are a coagulation of images that might be from one event, or are a mishmash of a few. I was given a bath early afternoon, then was dressed. A confusion, and I guess that’s why it has stayed, for ordinarily you bathed then donned pyjamas to be in bed by 7pm. I then went with my Gran….. and here I need to surmise, for the next recollection is of being told we were about to stop at Craigendoran pier. So we must have bussed into town, made our way down to the Broomielaw and sailed in one of the Caledonian Steam Packet Company’s ferries. The next recollection is standing on the leeward side of the ferry, and waves breaking over the upper superstructure. I was ecstatic as each successive wave broke over. Gran was very quiet. The final recall is of a bus heading down to Lagg, and the driver offering to reverse down the track at Brennan Head farm to save us from walking – and Gran’s emphatic refusal. As to what time of year, as to why I were there, or what we did…. nothing remains.

For holidays we stayed on a farm; fourteen milking cows that by the time I was five, I would stand watching in the byre, echoing the noise of the compressor: “blink-blank…blink-blank”.  I must have been annoying.  By the age of six I had been charged with the task of unhitching the their neck yokes, probably to stop the ‘blink-blank’, but I couldn’t yoke them, being not tall enough.  Disregarding the instructions not to go between the cows, went up the blind side and got the full impact Maisie’s right hoof, then picking myself out of the glaur and carrying on.  Lesson learned.  It was around this time that I was able to carry a full milk can; probably with hindsight it was only a gallon, and a smaller one of cream down to the St. Denis’ hotel.  I got a half-crown tip at the end of the holiday from Mrs. Bannatine, the head cook.  For conversion purposes that would have been five weeks’ pocket money; riches indeed.  Forbye the cows, there were hens and a cockerel, from whom I concluded that impregnating to make chicks occurred due to jumping on the back and pecking the neck.  The vet did the artificial insemination of the cows and I got my sex-ed straightened out.  I still have clear memories of the hired hands using hand scythes to open up the oat crop for the tractor-hauled reaper-binder, and my ankle scratches from the shorn stubble whilst ineffectually stooking sheaves.  Then there was dragging a zinc pail behind the spud pickers, collecting the undersized chats that no adult seemed particularly keen to peel.  Remember, at that time all potatoes had to be peeled.  Of sitting perched on the mudguard of a grey Fergie tractor attached to the reciprocating blades of a scythe at haymaking.  I was driving that tractor two years later, when my leg could reach the clutch.  Safety legislation was all in the future.

A seed had been sown early, one that was only going to grow.  Asked by the related and unrelated aunts and uncles that ubiquitous, inevitable question “what are you going to be when you grow up?”.  I didn’t resort to the ‘Ladybird Book of Labours’ answer, ‘train driver’, I used ‘farmer’.  I must have realised that a consistency of response was required, such that at every family occasion thereafter I found myself obliged to give the same reply: ‘farmer, farmer, farmer’.  It was to became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Not all the recollections were farm based.

One is of standing on a crowded pier waiting to wave ‘someone’ off, and hoping that the not infrequent ritual would literally unfold. As the ‘Glen Sannox’ cast off, a toilet roll, think Izal shiny side up’ would unwind over the heads of the shoreside throng, then another and another; it’s only now that I understand the error. Anyone needing to attend the onboard facilities was in for a surprise. Another family ritual was to go deep sea fishing, as opposed to the disappointingly midge infested loch fishing where a measly six inch trout was considered a triumph. Three generations would be crammed into a rowing boat on one flat-calm evening and dad would row out into the bay. Long lines would be dropped over the side and you sat with your finger on the line awaiting a nibble. Success was a guarantee; we never came back in catchless. Cod and haddock were two to three pounders, flounders ten inches across and if we were lucky a mackerel on the troll as we rowed back. Nobody thought a catch of ten fish was unusual. Hindsight says we were overfishing.

By the age of fourteen we were staying on a hill sheep farm. I now had the body mass to be able to handle a blackface ewe effectively and could work productively in the fanks at dipping and clipping time.  But in summertime, agriculture was competing with those northern granite grit hills.  I had discovered ‘Munros’ the previous winter and now I needed to prove to all that I was perfectly capable to navigate, literally as well as metaphorically, in wild high country.  I’d discovered something that I could achieve at.  Of course it was ‘high’ country; who wanted to walk along a tame, signposted path down by the sea?  Running down from the top of one hill, bouncing from rock to boulder and enthusiastically greeting the puce-faced tourists in their flip-flops and sunburn toiling their way up.  I was well on the way to becoming a ‘hill-snob’.  A professional hill-snob.  Angus and Stewart from the farm, and myself, were tasked with climbing Goat Fell so we could be filmed on top from a helicopter for a promotional production for Clyde coast tourism.  I was to get a colourful arty envelope a few weeks afterwards with a cheque inside for £15.  Conversion rates equate that to more than I earned for my first taxed proper job, for a forty-four hour week, one year later.  The opening scene featured one Mr. Billy Connolly riding a bicycle out of the Clyde.

So it would seem that the Isle of Arran exerted a major early influence on me, maybe one even greater than Glasgow, school, or any event in the other ninety-two percent of the year.

By now I had found a new response to that demented query; gone was ‘farmer’.  I now offered ‘doing agriculture’; I knew I needed to get to college.  The phrase ‘land-based industries’ wasn’t in common parlance then, which was unfortunate as it was a far more useful descriptive for a city-bred youth whose agricultural experience was limited to an island and an evolving agrarian system.  

My last extended visit back to Arran was as a student. I needed to get lambing experience onto my CV, to stand alongside milking relief as both were useful for seasonal contract work to support a further education.  

The oft quoted advice is to never go back to a house that you once lived in.  The door will be painted a colour you don’t approve off, the climber you nurtured and left in its winter nudity will be gone; presumed dead.  

So it was with Arran. 

Don’t look back.

A decade later we went on a day return to collect an Irish Wolfhound pup (it was already 20kg, filled a holdall bag and should probably have garnered a child’s fare on the ferry). But that fleeting visit was enough to note the changes.  A self-serve supermarket had morphed out of the grocery store, gone the wooden counter, the loose biscuits, the divi number.  Alexander’s newspaper shop was an office and the Purdie’s no longer sold their pottery and hand-knit woollens. That which was once considered permanent turned out to be ephemeral.  It was an irrational thought, for I could see only the losses but not the gains.  

Decades passed. We wandered the globe on planes and bicycles. Arran didn’t feature. 

I wasn’t looking back.

“Do you ever travel at home?”.  I can’t recall where we were when we were asked that pertinent question.  Of course I answered “yes”.  Later I began to wonder if it was true.  A wee white fib.  I thought I knew my own country, but it was only the airts that coincided with areas of work-related activity and a hill over 3000 feet.  It was time wander at home. 

One of the best ways to go west from our base to the east of Edinburgh is along the canals through to Glasgow, over the Ayrshire hills and down to the Clyde coast.  From where The Isle of Arran is the only real option, for it is the perfect ‘stepping stone’ for a ferry-hop to a host of Hebridean islands.   

We’re off to cycle to northern Europe and in the ethos of ‘no-fly and land-sea’ travel with a dose of ‘convoluted-routing’. We step out the front door and turn west.  A firth, a canal, a city, an Isle of Arran.  We camp at Middleton’s in Lamlash, ride around the south coast and back over the Ross road.  Ride over the String road and on to Lochranza, finding an hotel that won’t serve coffee because it’s a Monday, or as I could consider it the NeoSabbath, (and a fine example of Scots tourism circa 1970).  Then to discover an artisanal bakery with a warm sourdough loaf that my historical memory says just shouldn’t exist.  Ride down a slick smooth blacktop road that’s part of the government’s sponsored timber extraction network; pine trees that I remember as saplings are now stacked on a truck.  Ride Main Street and suddenly realising that the MiniGolf has disappeared, where when you played the 18th your ball disappeared down a tube and into the club-shack, so frustrating a ‘freebie’ second round.  The chaperoning adults were always delighted.  

It’s been a rolling panoply of fading images, ghost shadows, being overlaid by the evolving new.  But that expanse of molded painted concrete that was once considered ‘modern’ is possibly the final departing manifestation from my childhood Arran, a demise that now has to offer a closure, for the past really is a foreign land.

Isle of Arran can now be two entirely distinct spaces, places that will always be connected by those never changing high granite grit hills.