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.
