#girvan

You can have your Greek islands, son. Girvan had one of the cleanest beaches you’d get. And sometimes you could count two dozen fishing boats hooked up to the pier, and boxes stacked sky high. On top of that you’d Paddy’s Milestone out on the water. What more could you want? Rare chips they were, into the bargain?

Andy Campbell, my grandfather (c. 1980)

THE SKY IS a tall, bright, nippy blue now, cracking to white at the edges. There is a soft marine roar, and I smell seaweed. Girvan’s gulls wheel about in their yellings today. Glaswegians used to sail ‘doon the watter’ for their summer sojourn in places such as Girvan, where they got to spend the weekend wearing Kiss Me Quick hats and feasting on candy floss. They fired guns with twisted barrels, rode on the dodgems, posed for Kodak cameras on the waltzers, and tried their luck at the slots. There were donkey rides on the sand, helter skelter, crazy golf, wall-to-wall one-armed bandits à la Brighton, a paddling pool and boat trips; and an attractive indoor swimming pool was built in 1972.

When Robert Heron travelled through Ayrshire, he saw low huts more like ‘caves dug in the earth than houses built upon it’, and there was no room at the inn for him.

‘Some whisky was brought us which tasted strongly of turpentine; and some pease bannock too tough to be eaten,’ he wrote in his Observations made on a journey through the Western Counties of Scotland (1793).

The coming of the railways in the 1850s made the Ayrshire coast more accessible to the central belt and encouraged the development of Girvan as a seaside resort with sandy beaches, cliffs and craggy outcrops. And it became prosperous enough. It isn’t Dodge City yet, but it is no longer flourishing: in 2021 its high street was voted the worst of 1,000 high streets and town centres in the UK. The survey was undertaken by a retail real estate consultancy, which publishes a ranking every two years and bases its conclusions on shop vacancy rates, and the number of discount stores and ‘low value’ units like bookmakers. They call it their ‘vitality ranking’.

And yet Girvan, at least the site of it, was once the location of Knockushion (the Hill of Justice), the courts of the ancient jurisdiction of Carrick, where Robert the Bruce judged, ruled, and granted charters. (Ironically, the motte hill that once marked the region’s importance is long lost to town development. However, in the 1960s the pillar that marked the site was removed to the public gardens of Knockushion House in Knockushion Street and restored.)

From Girvan harbour today we have a ringside view of Paddy’s Milestone. Ailsa Craig, its Sunday name, is a volcanic pluton that looks both comical and creepy. It sits on the meniscus of the Atlantic, halfway between Belfast and Glasgow as the seagull flies: a giant Christmas pudding or a sinking oil rig, or the head of some monster emerging from the deep. The ancients believed witches had dropped Ailsa Craig from the sky. Heron found it ‘covered on the summit with verdure; having a well of fresh water; stocked with goats and rabbits; and frequented by innumerable sea fowls’. Keats wrote a sonnet about this ‘craggy ocean pyramid’ with its ‘sea fowls’ screams’. His editor, Lord Houghton ventured: ‘That fine object appeared first to them [Keats and his companion, Brown] in the full sunlight like a transparent tortoise asleep upon the calm waters; then as they advanced, displaying its lofty shoulders, and as they still went on, losing its distinctness in the mountains of Arran and the hills of Cantire that rose behind it.’

Sadly, Burns, though an Ayrshire man, only mentioned Ailsa Craig in passing (his Duncan Grey tells us, Meg was ‘deaf as Ailsa Craig’). It is said, though, that, when he married Jean Armour, Burns ordered bird feathers from the island for a new bed. In Sweeney Astray – Seamus Heaney’s translation of an ancient Irish legend – Suibhe, a king of Dalriada, is cursed by St Ronan and is destined to fly around the world naked and insane. He spends upwards of a month on Ailsa Craig lamenting the absurdity of life:

‘I tread the slop/ And foam of beds, / Unlooked for,

Penitential/, And imagine treelines/ Somewhere beyond,

A banked-up, soothing, / Wooded haze.’

Ailsa is a sanctuary for many thousands of guillemots, fulmars, kittiwakes and razorbills. It has Europe’s largest gannet colony. Puffins used to be abundant, and they are making a comeback after the descendants of rats that had swum across from a Swedish cargo ship that foundered in 1971 were destroyed in the 1990s.

The island was owned by Crossraguel Abbey in the early 1400s, and misbehaving monks were banished from there to here to reflect on their deeds. There’s a ruined castle on Ailsa too that was built by the Hamilton clan as a bulwark against the Spanish armada. It became a haven for Roman Catholics escaping the rigours of the Reformation, and later a prison. Granite was mined on Ailsa Craig from the early 1800s until 1971 for kerb stones and curling stones. (One factory in Mauchline, Ayrshire, is licensed to extract from here; and Wales is the only other source of the microgranite that goes into the business end of curling stones.)

Ailsa is now uninhabited, a ghost of an island occasionally explored by tourists from the mainland, who come to look from somewhere that is used to being looked at. They come in small pleasure boats that ply from Girvan, Ballantrae and further afield. When you land, you’re in for an afternoon in an open-air museum that fluctuates from forlorn to fascinating.

A derelict winching station, windowless. The ruins of the engine room for past quarrying works. All seized up. A capstan left to disintegrate. Rusted skeletons of old rail track with their weathered sleepers. The bones of a bogie line heavily weeded; they hauled coal along it to the lighthouse (now solar-powered).

A branch line leads to a disused gasworks, eaten by rust. The tracksman’s house is crumbling. The foghorns are long voiceless. No visitor should underestimate the climb to the summit of the Craig. The drops are steep and deep, and I’ve just read that a young lady once fell over the cliff near Craig Na’an; but her petticoat caught the wind and acted as a parachute. All she sustained was broken bones.

The island has changed hands several times: the late Jack Bruce, who was bassist with Cream, bought Ailsa Craig in 1969, but sold it to James Gulliver, the retail baron, in 1976. The Marquis of Ailsa put it up for sale in 2014 but couldn’t get a buyer. The RSPB now has a lease on it until 2050, and Glasgow businessman Bobby Sandhu owns the lighthouse keepers’ cottages. The authorities turned down his plan to turn Ailsa Craig into a five-star hotel complex!

As I look at alluring Ailsa from Girvan seafront, I wonder what my grandfather would have made of it all. A lot has changed ‘doon the watter’. Like Saltcoats, Rothesay, and other once-popular resorts along the Clyde coast, Girvan’s fortunes declined in the 1960s and 1970s when cheap holidays to Spain and Greece became fashionable. The swimming pool closed suddenly in 2009 and was then, without consultation, demolished, although a multi-million-pound leisure centre with a pool went up eight years later.

There is hope for regeneration. As I write, Girvan is one of eight communities in Scotland that will receive a total of £863,050 from Historic Environment Scotland and the National Lottery Heritage Fund for regeneration. Girvan hosts a traditional folk festival on the first weekend of May each year, a festival of light with a lantern procession and shorefront performance in October, and a Lowland Gathering in June. I thought I’d read on the chippie notice board that a psycho event would be held as part of that gathering, but it had stated ‘psychic’.

In an article in The Herald in 2015 Kevin McKenna argued that the beachfront was slowly coming alive again with concerts, dances and themed children’s shows:

‘Perhaps then, someone could wake up the staff of sleepy VisitScotland, which receives millions of pounds of our cash to promote our holiday destinations. On its website this is what it says about Girvan: ‘Girvan’s attractions include the Stumpy Tower, originally built as a prison and today displays fascinating historical exhibits. The McKechnie Institute is also found in Girvan’s town centre, as is a variety of restaurants, cafes and shops to enjoy’ The writer of that scrap of joyless, cheerless prose obviously got the job after several years working on Tirana: The Wilderness Years.’

Come back, Fifth Dimension, all is forgiven. Staid Girvan landed that strange tourist attraction in the Flower Power days. In 1969 Keith Albarn, the father of Blur’s Damon Albarn, designed a futuristic, fibreglass fun house. There had been several possible names for the black, blue, yellow, red and salmon-pink construction, including Coloured Plastic Dream, Dream Circus, Metal Orchid, and even Girvana. Tourists were apparently bedazzled and enthralled by the nod to psychedelia, and by a hippie environment of uncanny sounds, weird textures, glowing lights and fabulous colours within a series of sensory chambers or ‘wombs’. In a vox pop in the summer of ’69, one young woman told the Carrick Herald that she had been ‘a little nervous about what I might encounter in this weird place. I looked up and, to my great amazement, saw what looked to be a dalek … I continued to walk through these narrow passages which were lit up colourfully and I had a feeling of wonder and fear mingled together … I didn’t really know whether I was glad or not to get out’.

Another offered: ‘It looks ludicrous. No wonder the older people turn to each other and say, more teenage rubbish’.

Yet another respondent thought: ‘It looked like something out of Doctor Who or Quatermass, an alien craft which had landed from a parallel universe … I put off going inside it, mainly because it looked like it would be an overwhelming experience, something that would blow your mind … my [older] brother Alex had been round it by himself and came out crying!’

The Fifth Dimension Fun Palace lasted five years: a storm damaged it beyond repair, and it was consigned to landfill. In an article for the Shetland Times in 2012 Tom Morton, a native of Ayrshire, reported: ‘It was like Dark Side of the Moon made out of Lego, with soft furnishings by Timothy Leary. Two bob to get in. At 14, I was absolutely fascinated by it.

Review by: Whiskery Turnip Distillery: Girvan. Bottler: Morrison and MacKay. Region: Scotland/Lowland Single Grain. ABV: 47.5%. Cask Strength. Age: 27 Years. Distilled on 17 April 1989. Bottled on 20 Feb. 2017. Cask type: Bourbon Barrel. Nose: Sweet baking spices and Japanese custard pudding, creamy sugars brought to mind maja blanca— a sweet corn and coconut milk pudding, old polished…

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Calls to end ‘barbaric’ trophy hunting imports as MP backs campaign

An Ayrshire MP has joined the campaign to see a ban on ‘barbaric’ trophy hunting imports. Allan Dorans, MP for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock, has shown his support to prohibit goods brought into the UK from British trophy hunters who kill endangered animals — including lions, elephants and rhinos — abroad for fun. The law currently allows British hunters to bring their ‘trophies’ of animals’ heads and…

Calls to end ‘barbaric’ trophy hunting imports as MP backs campaign

An Ayrshire MP has joined the campaign to see a ban on ‘barbaric’ trophy hunting imports. Allan Dorans, MP for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock, has shown his support to prohibit goods brought into the UK from British trophy hunters who kill endangered animals — including lions, elephants and rhinos — abroad for fun. The law currently allows British hunters to bring their ‘trophies’ of animals’ heads and…