#catherine sinclair

Catherine Sinclair (1800-1864) was a Scottish writer, the author of several novels and children's books. She also engaged in extensive charitable work in her hometown of Edinburgh.

Honoring the Legacy of Murray Sinclair This week, a national memorial service paid tribute to the extraordinary life of Murray Sinclair, who made history as the first Indigenous person to serve as a judge in Manitoba. Sinclair’s influence extended far beyond the courtroom; as a former senator, he became a prominent national figure through his pivotal role in leading the Truth and Reconciliation…

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.'