To the lighthouse

The lighthouse on Pladda, with Ailsa Craig beyond, photographed from the front door on Kildonan shore

She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

The last two summer holidays have been spent on Arran, in a cottage on the shore at Kildonan.  We would sit on the bench by the door, gazing out to sea.  Before us lay the low outline of the tiny island of Pladda with its lighthouse, while out further the hump of Ailsa Craig rose sheer from the sea, some 25 miles out yet  appearing to be much closer.

So when my good friend Joe offered to lend me the memoir of a hippy art student, deep into poetry, Kerouac and Beefheart who spent the summer of 1973 working as a lighthouse keeper on Pladda and Ailsa Craig, I accepted eagerly.  In Stargazing, Peter Hill recalls the glorious summer when, nineteen and fresh from art college, he spent six months working on various lighthouses off the Scottish mainland.  Apart from his nostalgic reminiscences of early seventies music and politics, I learned a lot about the operation of lighthouses – that now all the lighthouses in the world are automated, an entire occupation eliminated in the decades following Hill’s apprentice summer; but when when manned (as they were back then), there would be three or four keepers working shifts.

Hill describes how a chance conversation in a pub that spring led to him pursuing one of those classic childhood ideas about what you’d like to do when you grow up.  Like me, he imagined the life of a lone lighthouse keeper, daydreaming and stargazing the days away, reading poetry and listening to the latest offering from the Doors or Van Morrison.  He had just read Desolation Angels, Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical account of months spent as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the mountains of Washington state (a book that had a mighty impact on me as well in my teenage years).  So Hill, a long-haired 19-year-old art student turns up at 84 George Street in Edinburgh to be interviewed for the job of relief keeper – but let Hill take up the story, as he does in the book’s introduction:

In 1973 I worked as a lighthouse keeper on three islands off the west coast of Scotland. Before taking the job I didn’t really think through what a lighthouse keeper actually did. I was attracted by the romantic notion of sitting on a rock, writing haikus and dashing off the occasional watercolour. The light itself didn’t seem important: it might have been some weird coastal decoration, like candles on a Christmas tree, intended to bring cheer to those living in the more remote parts of the country.

I was 19 when I was interviewed for the job of relief keeper by the Commissioners of the Northern Lights in the New Town of Edinburgh. My hair hung well below my shoulders. I had a great set of Captain Beefheart records and I walked about with a permanent grin on my face as I had recently, finally, lost my virginity. I rolled my own cigarettes, was a member of Amnesty International and had just read Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. In short, I was eminently suitable for the job.

He gets the job, and for his first tour of duty is assigned to Pladda lighthouse.  The night before he leaves, he gets down his father’s atlas and finds the island marked by a dot the size of a biscuit crumb. ‘Closer inspection showed it was in fact a biscuit crumb. I scratched it off and found an even smaller dot underneath this. This was Pladda.’

The lighthouse on Pladda, photographed from the front door on Kildonan shore

Arriving on Arran and following instructions from 84 George Street, he waits to be picked up by a local farmer for the next stage of his journey, who greets him with ‘Don’t tell me they’ve sent another fucking hippie!’ The farmer will take him by tractor from a remote field and deliver him to a rowing-boat which will take him to the lighthouse. The farmer’s greeting may have had something to do with the fact that Hill was standing on a wall a Scottish burn reading a Langston Hughes poem about a mighty river.

Peter Hill (top left) and the class of 71 Dundee Art College (photo: thisiscentralstation.com)

When Hill arrives on the tiny island of Pladda he learns that not only would he be sharing his new living quarters with three other men, but that he would also be participating in a bracing cooking rota. A pint of vegetable soup, followed by lamb casserole and apple crumble form his first lunch, served by Finlay Watchorn, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Captain Haddock. The keepers smoke like chimneys and drink endless tea poured from a kettle kept constantly at the boil. There’s a TV, on most of the time, and into this remote outpost are beamed daily the latest revelations from the Watergate hearings in Washington.

The least satisfactory aspect of the book for me were the constant references to Watergate and the popular shows on TV at the time: I just had a sense of Peter Hill having googled these things in order to provide some contemporary context.  He also has an irritating (and, I think, inaccurate) tendency to portray every young person at the time as feeling they had no chance of escaping the fate of being conscripted to serve in Vietnam.  Being roughly the same age at the time, I don’t remember it like that – yes, we were angry and marched against the war, but, in Britain at least, there was not that fear.

But those are small niggles; overall, I found Hill’s account of his glorious summer an entertaining read in which he brings to life some great characters – the men, a generation or two older than he, who had served in the war, worked as merchant seamen and who had experience of many lighthouses in all kinds of conditions.  I learned that there are three types of lighthouse. Rock lighthouses come straight out of the sea and, as a keeper, you spend all your time in the tower. Coastal stations skirt the British Isles and are on the mainland, allowing keepers to live with their families. Island lights are situated on uninhabited islands.  That summer Hill worked on all three of them.

I suppose if you had asked me, I would have suggested that all a keeper had to do was make sure the light was switched on at night.  But from Hill’s account I learned that each light had three keepers, and each keeper took two four-hour watches every 24 hours. The watches rotated daily. Breakfast was always at eight, and always attended by all three keepers. When not attending to the light, the other two keepers would perform duties that, on an island lighthouse, ranged from shearing sheep to building jetties to painting the tower white. Each week a keeper would be assigned the important task of preparing a lavish three-course lunch.

Ailsa Craig, photographed from the the front door on Kildonan shore

Peter Hill served on three lighthouses that summer – two of them on islands that we would stare out at from our cottage at Kildonan – Pladda and Ailsa Craig. I discovered that Ailsa Craig, which looks from Arran like a rock rising sheer-sided from the sea, actually has a an area of flat land around its base. It is home to 20% of the world’s gannets – and a terrifying population of rats.

The lighthouse was built between 1883 and 1886 by Thomas Stevenson, member of an amazing family of lighthouse engineers, and father of Robert Louis Stevenson. Thomas Stevenson designed more than 30 lighthouses as engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, while his father designed another 23, and invented the ‘intermittent’ light for lighthouses. Prevented by tuberculosis from pursuing a civil engineering career, Robert Louis Stevenson often travelled in search of warm climates better suited to his fragile health, writing the adventure novels for which he is famous – as well poems, including a couple inspired by his family’s profession:

The brilliant kernel of the night,
The flaming lightroom circles me:
I sit within a blaze of light

That’s an extract from ‘The Light-Keeper’.  Stevenson also wrote a second poem on the same theme, ‘The Light-Keeper II’, from which come these verses:

As the steady lenses circle
With frosty gleam of glass;
And the clear bell chimes,
And the oil brims over the lip of the burner,
Quiet and still at his desk,
The Lonely Light-Keeper
Holds his vigil.

Lured from far,
The bewildered seagull beats
Dully against the lantern;
Yet he stirs not, lefts not his head
From the desk where he reads,
Lifts not his eyes to see
The chill blind circle of night
Watching him through the panes.
This is his country’s guardian,
The outmost sentry of peace,
This is the man
Who gives up what is lovely in living
For the means to live.

 

Among many other interesting insights in Peter Hill’s book are his comments about foghorns. ‘Nothing,’ he writes, ‘had quite prepared me for the painfully loud noise,’ or for the number of hours ‘turning into days’ that the foghorn might have to blow. Hill’s account of a conversation conducted in fifteen second bursts between deafening blasts of sound is hilarious, but will certainly give pause for thought for anyone who might have the idea of buying a lighthouse cottage.  Not always per Virginia Woolf:

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness.
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

The last lighthouse that Hill worked on was on the island – no more than a rock – of Hyskeir  in the Outer Hebrides.  I laughed at his description of the island’s three goats which insisted that humans and goats walk in sequence across the island; if they failed to do so they would be butted into place. The correct order, Hill recalls, was goat, human, goat, human, goat. Hill also gives a vivid account of his last night on Hyskeir, an experience that brings to mind Hitchcock’s The Birds.

The men were already fraught – the helicopter which was due to collect them was fog-bound and they had to stay an extra night on the island with their tobacco ration exhausted. That night land birds migrating south from Scandinavia arrived in their tens of thousands, flying along the beam of light before endlessly circling the light.  Though sea birds know to avoid lighthouses, land birds navigate southwards from beacon to beacon, many of them flying straight into the glass.

My watch started at 2 am. From the moment I woke up I was aware that there were birds everywhere. Dozens of them tapped against every window at ground level and the same manic mantra followed me up the 223 steps to the light room. Then things got worse. Because the light operated on paraffin there was a huge hole at the top of the tower to let the vapour escape and this, of course, let in the migrating birds. Some were fit and healthy, others had broken legs or damaged wings. There were at least fifty walking, flying and flapping wounded percolating around the light chamber.

Fearfully, I settled into a routine for the night. Every half an hour I would run up the stairs, wind up the light, pump up the paraffin, then disappear down to the kitchen while all around me a death rattle was tapped out on the inch-thick glass. At certain hours of the night every keeper on duty has to open the hatch in the light room and venture onto the balcony, often hundreds of feet above the sheer cliff face with only a low rail for protection. On the worst nights I had to pull myself round on my stomach because the winds were so strong. The point was to check that all the neighbouring lights were still burning. On the other lights, you soon realised, they would be doing exactly the same thing. The greatest sin was to let the light go out. The second greatest was to let the light stand so that it was burning but not turning. The night the birds came they were waiting for me on the balcony, sitting tightly shoulder to shoulder staring beyond me to the light. Behind them, tens of thousands of their flock circled in the beams of the light. Every few seconds another one would fly straight into the glass, break its neck and fall out of the sky. Not a night for a smoker to be without his poison.

The next day the flat roof of the outhouse was carpeted with dead birds – redbacks, wrens, tiny finches, thrushes. The keepers got ladders and for several hours threw the bodies into the sea.

Stargazing is heart-warming, nostalgic, and an elegy to a vanished profession. But it’s also an elegy to youth – to being nineteen and at an age when music and poetry, life and dreams for the future are felt with more intensity than they ever will be again.

But it may be fine -I expect it will be fine,’ said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it to­night, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were, if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particu­larly to her daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can.

The walk to Laggan cottage: ruins and ancient footfalls

the hundred
thousand places
with a stone
and some grasses
the dwellings
in ruins
the stones
given back

– Thomas A Clark, The Hundred Thousand Places

There’s a track that leads out of Lochanzra on the northern tip of Arran, out past the greens where golfers make their putts in the company of grazing deer, and up the fell beyond.  Here the path is clearly-defined, consisting of granite blocks, worn by the footfalls of those who passed this way regularly in the years before the Clearances.  For this path is the historic route from Lochranza to Cock Farm and Laggan, an area where once many families farmed the land, but which now is desolate.

Glen Sannox: landscape, nature and industry

Something about Arran that I don’t quite understand is how it is possible, with no great effort, to walk from sea level into the mountains.  One example is the trail that follows Sannox Burn from the golden sweep of sandy Sannox Bay along the gently rising path to the head of Glen Sannox,  where spectacular mountain peaks tower over the head of the Glen.

Coire Fhionn Lochan: ‘mountain line and shoreline’

It’s not a long or particularly difficult walk up from the delightfully-named hamlet of Thundergay up to Coire Fhionn Lochan, the lake like a teardrop that nestles in a bowl hollowed out by glacial ice in the mountains a thousand feet above.  But we did it on one of the last days of the long, cold spring of 2013; it may have been mid-June, but the wind battered us that day, making the going an effort, and the temperature did not speak of midsummer.

Nevertheless it was an exhilarating walk.  We parked the car opposite the access road to the tiny settlement of Thundergay where the main road round the isle of Arran hugs Kilbrannan Sound.  On the shore a pair of swans were fiercely protective of their brood of cygnets.

Back on Kildonan shore

on a clear day
unfasten the gate
and take the path
over the machair
through the orchids
down to the sea
– Thomas A Clarke, The Path to the Sea

We returned to the isle of Arran and the cottage on Kildonan shore where we have stayed before.  Once the coastguard’s home, ‘Streamlet’ is the last house on the shore; beyond here lies nothing; nothing, that is but the ancient meadows, their walls overgrown and slowly sinking into the land as the years pass, and the brooding bulk of Brennan Head.

Walking Arran: two glens and the dog on top of the world

‘Back to winter’ they say in the Co-op in Brodick.  Lowering cloud, a chilly breeze: it all looks decidedly unpromising for a day’s walking.  But as we set off  up Glen Rosa, the valley that pokes a finger from Brodick Bay into the mountains of the north of Arran, things are starting to look brighter.  By the end of the afternoon we will have had another brilliant walk, shedding layers as we go, as the sky clears and hot sunshine breaks through.

The walk up the glen is fairly flat and undemanding, gaining less than 200 metres in altitude before the final sharp climb to the ridge called The Saddle that overlooks Glen Sannox.For the first couple of miles the track leads past grassy meadows and wooded hillsides.

Soon, though, the valley becomes more bare of trees and shrubs, a consequence we learn later of grazing by deer and sheep that have rediced what once was extensive tree cover to small remnants.

Glen Rosa Water rushes along beside the track, crystal-clear water spilling over rocks and stones. To our right, the valley is overlooked by Goat Fell, the highest peak on the island, though it’s not possible to see it from the glen.

After a mile or so the glen turns to the north and the path crosses a bridge over another very busy stream that flows down the steep hillside in a series of waterfalls.

Now the valley ahead is dominated by the jagged peaks of Cir Mhòr which rises to 799 metres (2621 feet) and is sometimes called the ‘Matterhorn of Arran’. Its Gaelic name is translated into English as ‘Big Comb’, a reference to its resemblance to a cockscomb.

The landscape becomes increasingly wild and majestic,with bog cotton (common cottongrass) and wild orchids flanking the path.  Yet, amazingly, this landscape is little more than two miles from the nearest supermarket.

It’s here that we think we identify a stonechat.  At least, the bird we see seems to live up to its naming: it sits on a stone and chats, energetically and at great length.  Norman MacCaig painted a vivid portrait of this bird, ‘a bright child throwing a tantrum’, in ‘Stonechat on Cul Beg’:

A flint-on-flint ticking – and there he is,
Trim and dandy – in square miles of bracken
And bogs and boulders a tiny work of art,
Bright as an illumination on a monkish parchment.

I queue up to watch him. He makes me a group
of solemn connoisseurs trying to see the brushstrokes.
I want to thumb the air in their knowing way.
I murmur Chinese black, I murmur alizarin.

But the little picture with four flirts and a delicate
Up-swinging’s landed on another boulder.
He gives me a stained-glass look and keeps
Chick-chacking at me. I suppose he’s swearing.

You’d expect something like oboes or piccolos
(Though other birds, too, have pebbles in their throats –
And of them I love best the airy skylark
Twittering like marbles squeezed in your fist).

Cul Beg looks away – his show’s been stolen.
And the up-staged loch would yawn if it could.
Only the benign sun in his fatherly way
Beams on his bright child throwing a tantrum.

By the time we stop for lunch, the sun is beating down. After, I take the dog and make the ascent to The Saddle: what is it about getting to the top to see what’s on the other side?

The climb is steeper now, but its only in the last few yards that it becomes a scramble.  We reach the top, dog and I.  Was ever a climb worth it!  The views are spectacular, despite the heat haze.  A small King Charles spaniel looks back down Glen Rosa with some astonishment, perhaps, at her achievement (top).

The view down Glen Sannox to the sea is breathtaking.  Both these valleys were sculpted into classic U-shaped valleys during the last Ice Age, when the glacial ice flowed downhill to carve deeply into the rocks.  There’s a poem by Norman MacCaig, ‘Humanism’, that meditates on the work of these glaciers millenia ago:

When the glacier was defeated
in the siege of Suilven and limped off
to the East, it left behind it all that
burdened its retreat –
stones, the size of
sandgrains and haystacks:
abandoned loot of Glen Canisp.

What a human lie is this. What greed and what
arrogance, not to allow
a glacier to be a glacier –
to humanise into a metaphor
that long slither of ice – that was no more
a beaten army than it was a horde
of Cinderellas, each,
when her midnight sounded,
leaving behind her
a sandstone shoe.

I defend the glacier that
when it absorbs a man
preserves his image
intact.

Well…it was a tough climb for a small dog.  We pause to rest awhile before heading back down the glen and watch a chaffinch sing lustily on a nearby branch.  On the way down we pass a man who asks if we’ve seen any adders – they have been plentiful this season, he says.

Part way along is the Glen Rosa Enclosure, a section of the valley fenced off from sheep and deer in order to allow the natural regeneration of woodland to take place and to increase wildlife diversity.  It’s certainly having an effect: this enclosed area is rich in tree saplings, shrubs and heather largely absent beyond the fence.

It’s a pleasant walk back to the metalled track at the beginning of the glen.  The sun is still warm, and as we pass the campsite young lads are plunging into the river.

Friday was our last day on the island, and we woke to steady rain – rain that had been forecast as a depression headed our way.  But it was the cold that made the weather distinctly unseasonable: it was 10 C – or worse, with the wind chill factor in a stiff breeze.

After lunch, though, the rain moved off for a few hours, and we decided on a walk up Glenashdale to see the waterfall.  For the most part, at least, we would be sheltered from the biting wind.  The walk along Glenshdale begins at Whiting Bay, and follows the burn through mixed woodland, rich with the smell of wild garlic.  The woodland floor was carpeted with the leaves of wood anemone and wild garlic (now over; it must have been a superb sight a few weeks ago).

When I saw this truck, with trees and shrubs growing through it, I was reminded of a scene in Werner Herzog’s recent film Into the Abyss, in which Herzog, probing the circumstances of a triple murder, chances upon the Camaro stolen by the murderers during the crime.  A tree has grown up inside the vehicle during the decade it has stood in the police station parking lot.

A noticeboard along the trail informs visitors that Arran is one of the remaining strongholds of the red squirrel.  There are no grey squirrels on Arran, which is the only Scottish island with a resident red squirrel population.  So vigilance against any incursion by grey squirrels is of primary importance to safeguard red squirrels.  Red squirrels seem unable to survive in the presence of greys, though the reasons for this are not fully understood. There is no evidence that grey squirrels aggressively chase out red squirrels, but grey squirrels seem to be more successful competing for food in different types of habitat – and they brought a disease, parapox virus, with them from America to which they are immune but which usually kills red squirrels.

Glenashdale Falls were a spectacular sight: it was easy to understand how this waterfall  is regarded one of the most impressive waterfalls in the West of Scotland.  The path to the area has been improved over the years and a viewing platform now juts out over the falls to give a clear view of the double drop.

The waterfall descends over 140 feet in two falls to a plunge pool, and then over another ledge to the river below.

We continued past the waterfall on the circular walk that takes you to the Giants’ Graves, neolithic graves that, at 5000 years old, pre-date the Egyptian pyramids.

Rather than being the final resting place of giants, as the legend says, the graves contained the bones of several people. Massive stone slabs, jumbled together in the turf, are all that remains of this large Stone Age burial cairn.  There was once a forecourt, defined by large upright stones, with a rectangular burial chamber entered from the forecourt.  The chamber was roofed with large slabs and enclosed in a stone cairn.  Most of the smaller stones were removed long ago for walls and building materials.  The cairn was excavated in 1902, and some burnt bone, pottery, flint knives and stone arrowheads were found.

Before they were placed in the cairn, bodies were left in the open to let the ravens remove the flesh from the bones, and different parts of the skeleton may have been placed in different parts of the chamber.  People were sometimes buried with decorated pots, stone arrowheads and knives. The cairns were not permanently sealed but were used again and again over many years. The cairns were built using simple tools and required considerable communal effort. They were intended for the remains of the community’s ancestors, not just for individuals.  The forecourts may have been used for rituals conducted during burial and in remembrance of the ancestors.

It’s a wild, windswept location, on a headland offering superb vistas of Whiting Bay and Holy Island.  Looking down at the bay, we could see the waves, whipped up by the stiff wind, breaking on the beach below.

All that remained of our week on Arran now was the packing and the leaving.  But, as Norman MacCaig observes in his poem ‘Landscape Outside and In’, we may leave the place behind, but the song of the landscape continues long after:

My rough ground lies under,
my scrub trees rise over
a tangle of grass half drowned
in a dazing wash of bluebells.
Four things, making a perpendicularity.

Beside them the loch water provides
the horizontal. It itches
with waterboatmen
and dimples with trout.

On top of all, on the high branches
I’m divided into birds, all singing.
How often do all my selves
sing together?..

You pick up a piece of wood,
a water sculpture; and we go to the car
and make for home.

We’ve left behind the bluebells
and the water. But all my selves
are still singing. They make no sound
but you hear their every note.

Gallery

See also

• On Arran: Millennia deep
• Return to Arran, where the world was stilled
• Walking Arran: Iron Age forts, a Viking burial and Buddhist pilgrims
• Walking Arran: rock of ages

Walking Arran: rock of ages

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.  Time and place have had their say.
– Zora Neale Thurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

Arran rocks! They’re all over the place: which is why Arran is the classic destination for geology students doing fieldwork, and why Aerran played a pivotal role in the development of our understanding of the geological story of the earth.  A walk last week along the Arran coastal way between Sannox and Lochranza offered some striking examples of the twists and turns in that geological story.

We parked at North Sannox picnic site and followed the well-defined shore path through a stretch of birch woodland through which we caught glimpses of the Firth of Clyde.  The ditch alongside the pathwas filled with watercress and fringed with wild garlic.  I can eat watercress without accompaniment, and I wolfed down a sprig or two: it zinged with pepperyness, much sharper than the shop-bought variety.

Here, too, were clumps of Water Avens, a frequenter of damp places such as riversides and wet woodlands.  The flowers varied in colour from greenish-white to pale pink.  Its roots apparently smell like cloves and have historically been used to flavour drinks such as beer, and to cure a variety of medical ailments. The Ortus Sanitatis in 1491 reckoned that, ‘Where the root is in the house, Satan can do nothing and flies from it, wherefore it is blessed before all other herbs, and if a man carries the root about him no venomous beast can harm him’, while Culpepper stated:

‘It is governed by Jupiter and that gives hopes of a wholesome healthful herb. It is good for the diseases of the chest or breath, for pains and stitches in the sides, it dissolveth inward congealed blood occasioned by falls and bruises and the spitting of blood, if the roots either green or dried be boiled in wine and drunk. The root in the spring-time steeped in wine doth give it a delicate flavour and taste and being drunk fasting every morning comforteth the heart and is a good preservative against the plague or any other poison. It is very safe and is fit to be kept in every body’s house.’

So: a one yard stretch of waterlogged ditch offered a tangy herb, a powerful food flavouring, and a plant with many medicinal applications.

Soon we came to Fallen Rocks, an imaginatively named collection of colossal boulders, the result of what must have been a terrifying landslip that hurled great sandstone boulders, studded with pebbles and conglomerate, from the cliffs to the sea.

The geology lesson is continuous: the rock fall means it’s possible to distinguish the different strata in the rock: alternations of sandstone and conglomerate reflect the different time periods and conditions in which the sediments were laid down, sometimes in warm seas or lagoons, or during periods in which fast-flowing rivers deposited the coarser, pebble-strewn layers.  All of this, as I understand it, in the Carboniferous period between 359 and 299 million years ago.

put your hand
on the hollow rock
place your hollow
hand on the rock

rocks fallen
from high places
keep their composure

you will have to go
all round it
to see it

have to stay
with it
to know it
– Thomas A Clark, The Hundred Thousand Places

There’s another story told by the level nature of the path along this stretch, with the cliffs set well back from the shore (as on most of Arran’s coastal way).  It’s the story of glaciers and ice sheets that once covered Arran. The weight of all this ice pushed Arran downwards into the earths’ crust. But, once the ice began to melt, Arran began to rise again, resulting in the raised beaches that fringe the island. This uplift – or ‘rebound’ – after the melting of the last ice age has been a gradual process – and is still continuing today.

I stopped to take this photo of the raised beach because, apart from the usual puzzlement when I encounter one of these lost shoes (why so frequent? why always only one?), the abandoned shoe reminded me of something.  There’s a great song by the Texan songwriter Terry Allen, co-written with David Byrne (now there’s a couple out on their own astral plane), called ‘Wilderness of this World’, in which the sight of an old shoe on the highway provokes thoughts about the transitoriness of human life on a planet that just keeps on spinning, and in the vastness of time geological forces mean that the desert falls to the ocean:

There’s an old shoe
Out on the highway
That tells us of the
Wilderness of this World […]

And the desert falls
Down on the ocean
And that motion is all
We’ll ever know

It just keeps on spinning
This bunch of dancing fools
Run crazy across the
Wilderness of this World

Past Millstone Point we came to the lovely, whitewashed Laggan cottage, located miles from any road, its two windows (covered when we passed with trompe l’oeil curtains) facing the shore, the front door a few steps from the sea.

Laggan Cottage was part of a thriving community over a century ago, but now stands alone in the wild – a memory of a time when the sea was the only way here. The cottage has been a haven for artists, and so impressed Scottish author Paul Story that it became the seed for Creggan Cottage in the first novel in his Dreamwords series. This video was compiled by Story over a period of four weeks in the summer of 2010, when he stayed there. Most of the scenes were taken within a few steps of the cottage

Soon after Laggan cottage you encounter the reason for its existence – the ruins of Duchess Anne’s Salt Pan, built in 1710. These workings are of a kind found in only one other location in Scotland, on the neighbouring island of Bute.  Salt being vital to preserve meat and fish, it was a valuable commodity.

The discovery of coal nearby (another gift from the Carboniferous era) made it possible to extract the salt from sea-water. Coal was burnt under iron salt pans for the ‘lumpmen’ and ‘wallers’ to skim off the salt from the evaporating brine.  The resulting salt was then shipped out – it was highly prized, as Arran salt salt was particularly pure.

The ruined building here is the old pan-house, where the furnace and iron pans were located.  There are traces of other, smaller buildings that stored fuel and salt, with workers’ cottages inland.

The coal was dug from pits, now filled with water like the one above.  The process proved uneconomic and the Salt Pan fell into disuse after only 20 years.

There’s a remarkable stretch of shoreline a little further on, where red sandstone outcrops on the beach (above and top).  The colour and weathering of these rocks evoked a sudden nostalgia for Liverpool and the Wirral, where you see this stuff everywhere.

These sandstone strata were laid down in the Permian era, which followed the Carboniferous (between 250 and 290 million years ago). At that time, Arran was situated somewhere between latitudes 13 and 30°N (roughly where the Sahara is today) and it would have been in a Sahara-like landscape that these beds would have been laid down, deposited in wind-blown and river systems.

A mile further, and we reached the Cock of Arran, a huge sandstone boulder deposited on the beach, which, before its head fell off, resembled a cockerel.

Beyond lay the Scriordan Rock Fall, which was to prove a the most stressful section of the walk.  It’s the result of a massive landslip of the rock strata which resulted in an avalanche of rock covering about a mile of the shore.  At low tide, you can bypass the fall by keeping low on the beach.  But it was high tide and we had to clamber and scramble over the boulders. The way through turned out to be slow, tortuous – and worrisome when our dog, jumping down from a boulder, fell awkwardly and began limping as if she had strained a leg muscle.  There was nothing for it, but to carry her over the rocks, hoping I wouldn’t slip and injure myself going one-handed.  But all was well: we got through, and the dog recovered rapidly, pausing only to take stock of the terrain that she had traversed (above).

Now the way was straightforward: the path was level once again, meandering along the raised beach and past the attractive fisherman’s cottage at Fairy Dell (below).

We  were now approaching Hutton’s Unconformity, a site of great importance in the history of geology.  It was here, in 1787, that James Hutton noticed that one strata of very old rock which was inclined nearly vertically was overlain by another strata of much younger sandstone which was almost horizontal.  Since sedimentary rocks are deposited in horizontal layers, it takes eons for geological processes (such as heat, pressure and folding) to force them up at an angle, and longer still for erosion to wear them down. Hutton deduced that, between the two kinds of rock at different angles there was a huge time-gap, which could not be explained by the contemporary orthodoxy, promulgated in 1645 by Archbishop Usher, that the earth was a mere 5000 years old.  Based on his calculations from the Bible, Usher reckoned that the earth began at nightfall on Sunday 23 October 4004 BC.

The nomenclature of the Uncomformity appeals, seeming to refer not just to the geological circumstance, but also to the radical  significance of Hutton’s deduction.  He was then able to put forward a theory about the geological history of the earth that was to have as profound an effect upon society as did Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, as he was the first to propose that the earths’ surface had evolved over an immense period of time, far in excess of Biblical time.

Visiting Lochranza in 1787, Hutton explored the coast to the north of the village. From his observations at Lochranza and elsewhere, he proposed that the earth was much older than had been previously thought. It was at Lochranza where the length and complexity of the Earth’s history was first fully appreciated. In the National Portrait Gallery there’s a delightful portrait by John Kay of Hutton, the frock-coated gentleman farmer,  chipping away at a rock face which may, perhaps, bear the image of Archbishop Usher.

Hutton was on the fringes of the gifted group of intellectuals sometimes called the Edinburgh Enlightenment; his circle included economist Adam Smith, philosopher David Hume, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), and James Watt, inventor of the steam engine.  Although he also is cast as a champion of scientific logic over religious irrationality, Marcia Bjornerud, in her book Reading The Rocks, suggests that in fact his interest in things geological seems to have sprung from a deeply felt spirituality:

As a landowner in a wet climate, Hutton was aware of how much soil was lost to the sea by erosion each year, and as a religious man, he was troubled by the thought that God would allow the continents simply to be worn progressively away. He therefore began to seek evidence for the rejuvenation of the land and intuitively understood that such evidence could be found only in rocks. He recognized that the rocks exposed on the seaside cliffs of eastern Scotland were formed from sediment that had been derived from older continental rocks. And in this single insight, the Scottish farmer simultaneously articulated the central precept of geology and made a compelling argument for an Earth that was far older than the 6,000 years allotted to it by the Church.

In his one great treatise, The Theory of the Earth, published in 1788, Hutton showed remarkable understanding of the principles that  underpin modern geology:

The ruins of an older world are visible in the present structure of our planet, and the strata which now compose our continents have been once beneath the sea, and were formed out of the waste of pre-existing continents. The same forces are still destroying, by chemical decomposition or mechanical violence, even the hardest rocks, and transporting these materials to the sea, where they are spread out, and form strata analogous to those of more ancient date.

Once round Newton Point, the port of Lochanzra came into view.  It’s a sight that the geologist Andrew Crombie Ramsay knew well, and here there is a viewpoint marker that bears a quotation from his Geology of the Island of Arran:

There is perhaps no scene on Arran which so impresses the beholder with a feeling of solitary beauty as the first glimpse of Lochranza.  The traveller may perhaps be somewhat fatigued with his protracted journey as, on a still summer evening, he rounds Newton Point. But tired and hungry though he be, and with the very smoke of the little inn curling before his eyes, let him pause for a moment at the entrance of the loch and seating himself on a granite boulder, quietly contemplate the placid scene before him.

As we approached Lochranza the ferry from Claonaig on the Kintyre mainland was just arriving at the jetty.  This is an isolated place, at the far end of a wild mountain glen, and, facing north, said to be one of the wettest places in the British Isles.  But on this particular evening it was balmy, the shoreline fringed with erect yellow flag  and the sea like glass.  Sir Walter Scott liked the place, writing in The Lord of the Isle:

On fair Lochranza streamed the early day,
Thin wreaths of cottage smoke are upward curl’d
From the lone hamlet, which her inland bay
And circling mountains sever from the world

Our long walk over, we waited for the bus to take us back to our car at Sannox at a stop across the road from the Arran Distillery, built in 1995, which produces the Arran Single Malt and isone of the major industries on the island.  We had some time to spare, so I stepped across and bought a couple of bottles.  After all, as Holinshed wrote in his Chronicles in 1577:

It sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it cutteth flegme, it relisheth the harte, it lighteneth the mynd, it quickeneth the spirits, it cureth the hydropsie, it repelleth gravel … and trulie it is a sovereign liquor if it be orderlie taken.

Then it was on the bus for the ride back through Glen Chalmadale with the jagged peaks of Torr Neaden Eoin so close it seemed you could reach out and touch them.

See also

• On Arran: Millennia deep
• Return to Arran, where the world was stilled
• Walking Arran: Iron Age forts, a Viking burial and Buddhist pilgrims
• Walking Arran: two glens and the dog on top of the world

On Arran: Millennia deep

‘Ancient footprints are everywhere’

The first day of September and we’ve taken the ferry from Ardrossan to Arran to make our first visit to the island which lies only twelve miles out in the Firth of Firth and is only 10 miles wide but, as we soon discover, is a world unto itself: an place of ancient footprints, where a short walk can lead you to places where you really sense that you are just a murmur in the whispering sands of time.

We’re staying in Lamlash, in the elegant row of green-painted cottages that form Hamilton Terrace, facing the sea and the bulk of Holy Isle out in the bay. The island has had religious significance since the 6th century when the Celtic Saint Molaise lived there as a hermit before it became the site of a Christian monastery.  Today it is owned by Tibetan Buddhists who offer retreats and have established a Centre for World Peace and Health.

Holy Isle in Lamlash Bay

On the green before the bay stands the Arran Clearances Memorial, consisting of three sandstone slabs, boldly expressive of a desire to stand firm on native ground.  The Clearances (Scottish Gaelic: Fuadach nan Gàidheal, the expulsion of the Gael) saw large forced displacements of the rural population as part of a process of agricultural modernisation forced through by brutal landlords. When the crofters in Glen Sannox in the north of Arran had to make way for large scale sheep farming, many of them saw no other option than to emigrate to Canada, and they departed from Lamlash. A plaque on the monument poignantly recalls their departure in these words: 

Erected on behalf of Arran clearance descendents across North America to their brave forefathers who departed from their beloved island home to Canada during the clearance years 1829 to 1840. Here at Lamlash on April 25th 1829 part of the clearance (86 souls) when embarking on the brig Caledonia (196 ton) the Rev.A.Mackay preached from The Mound (opposite) formed by the departing his text “Casting all your care upon him: for he careth for you” 1st Peter ch.5 v.7. The Caledonia arrived at Quebec City June 25th 1829. The group was the first of more than 300 Arran colonists of Megantic County, Province of Quebec. The largest group, more than 400, had as their destination the seaport town of Dalhousie, New Brunswick to be pioneer settlers of the Restigouche-Bay Chaleur District. “Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is highland”.

Arran Clearances Memorial, Lamlash

You can drive round the island in little more than an hour, the road hugging the shoreline for most of the way. There is also a coastal path which, like the road, takes advantage of the raised beaches that encircle the island.  After the last Ice Age there was a massive release of weight as the ice melted, causing the land to lift and create the raised beaches.  In the stretches where the path lies across the raised beach the walking is easy. Kildonan shore on the west side of the island is an example of such a stretch, where wooded cliffs rise beyond the meadows where sheep graze.

Kildonan shore

Or here, looking towards Drumadoon Point on the stretch from the King’s Cave, reputedly used by Robert the Bruce on his way to seizing the Scottish crown in 1314, to Blackwaterfoot.  Drumadoon headland is composed of basalt columns, the result of the same series of volcanic eruptions 30 or 40 million years ago that also created the similarly structured columns of Fingal’s Cave on Staffa and the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim.

Looking south to Drumadoon Point

Apart from the coastal road, there are two roads that cross the mountainous interior.  The route from Brodick to Blackwaterfoot is known as the String Road and at its highest point there are stunning views towards the northern mountain peaks and the sea to the west and the east.

The String road – top of the pass looking east

Arran is often described as ‘Scotland in miniature’ because the landscapes of the island are so varied.  One of our walks began in the well-tended parkland of Brodick castle and wound along paths in the woodland of the country park, now owned by the Scottish National Trust.   Follow one of these paths and you will reach the peak of Goatfell, the highest mountain; we took a path that followed Merkland Burn as its rushing brown water cascaded down the hillside through a series of waterfalls and rock pools shaded by firs and deciduous trees.

Merkland Burn, Brodick Country Park

We emerged from the woodland to picnic on an empty beach on Brodick Bay, golden sands stretching away to Merkland Point to the north.

Brodick Bay

Another day we walked out along Kildonan shore towards Brennan Head, through meadows where sheep grazed and the last of the summer flowers bloomed.  Scattered among the shingle were drifts of dog daisies.

Dog Daisies

Among the taller grasses were the delicate, green-veined white flowers known as Grass of Parnassus – given that name by the Flemish botanist Mathias de l’Obel who was so inspired by its beauty that he named it after the holy mountain of Apollo and the Muses.

Grass of Parnassus

Here, too, clustered among the heather were clumps of Bog Asphodel, that at first sight looks like two different plants, one red, one yellow.  But both are the same plant – the red ones being the anthers, while the petals are yellow.

Bog Asphodel

‘Does the song of the sea end at the shore or in the hearts of those who listen?’ reads the inscription on an elegant seat, carved out of sandstone and positioned facing the sea.  Along the shoreline we could hear the bubbling calls of curlew, and oystercatchers swept noisily back and forth over the calm sea.  Further out to sea cormorants perched on rocks, characteristically spreading their wings to dry their plumage.  On the horizon, rising abruptly from the sea, loomed the distinctive, solitary shape of Ailsa Craig,  the uninhabited island that is the granite plug of an extinct volcano.

In the summer of 1818, John Keats and a friend embarked on a walking tour through Scotland. They travelled along the Ayrshire coast from Ballantrae northwards with Ailsa Craig constantly in view. Later, at the King’s Arms Inn in Girvan, Keats wrote his sonnet on Ailsa Craig:

Hearken, thou craggy ocean-pyramid!
Give answer from thy voice-the sea-fowls’ screams!
When were thy shoulders mantled in huge streams?
When from the sun was thy broad forehead hid?
flow long is ‘t since the Mighty Power bid
Thee heave from airy sleep, from fathom dreams?
Sleep in the lap of thunder, or sunbeams,
Or when grey clouds are thy cold coverlid?
Thou answerest not, for thou art dead asleep!
Thy life is but two dead eternities –
The last in air, the former in the deep –
First with the whales, last in the eagle-skies,
Drowned wert thou till an earthquake made thee steep;
Another cannot wake thy giant size.

Ailsa Craig

We walked towards Brennan Head.  Our walking guide suggested that colonies of seals can be seen basking along this stretch.  I was sceptical: when I’ve read this sort of thing before, all we have seen, at best, is a bobbing head out to sea.

Brennan Head

But, as we skirted one of several basalt dykes that cross the beach here, we were met with the pleasing site of a large number of seals basking, each precariously balanced on an outcrop of basalt. We sat and watched them for some time, occasionally shifting and grunting, as the larger beasts sometimes elbowed the younger ones off their lump of rock.  As the afternoon wore on, more seals swam into the bay to join the basking group.  All in all we counted over 40 seals.

According to an interpretive plaque along the beach, as many as 200 common seals relax on the rocks along Kildonan shore, returning day after day to the same spot, only to disappear with the incoming tide when they return to the sea to feed.

As I write this, on my desk is a barnacle-encrusted pebble of some kind of igneous rock, collected from the shore near Lochranza. There seems to be poetry in this object, combining as it does two contrasting time scales – the biological time of the barnacle that typically lives for between 5 and 10 years, and that of the rock itself, quite possibly a small chunk of the Cambrian schist that outcrops along this shore, laid down some 550 million years ago.

On our last day on the island we walked from Lochranza along the coast path to a place known locally as the Fairy Glen. Along the way the path meant a scramble over an angular rock formation with distinct layers that dipped and rose at different angles.  This site has great significance in the history of geology and is known as Hutton’s Unconformity.  In 1787 the father of modern geology, James Hutton, visited Arran searching for evidence that would confirm his suspicion that the accepted idea – promoted in 1645 by Archbishop Usher – that the earth was a mere 5000 years old was wrong.  Usher had calculated from the Bible that the earth began on 29 October 4004 BC, but Hutton’s encounter with the rock formations at Lochranza helped prove his theory that the earth was far older than anyone had previously imagined.  The rocks at Lochranza are a juxtaposition of layers of very old Cambrian schists and much younger sandstone (below).  Sedimentary rocks like the sandstone and the original core components of the schists were deposited on ancient sea beds in horizontal layers and then, over eons, processes such as heat, pressure and folding forced them up at an angle.  Between the sandstone and the metamorphosed schists, Hutton realised, there is a huge time-gap.

Hutton’s Unconformity

A year after the trip to Arran, in the spring of 1788, Hutton set off with John Playfair to the Berwickshire coast and found more examples of unconformities.  Playfair later wrote:

On us who saw these phenomenon for the first time the impression will not easily be forgotten…We felt necessarily carried back to a time when the schists on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of the supercontinent ocean… The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time; and whilst we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much further reason may sometimes go than imagination may venture to follow.

Hutton’s Unconformity

But I have never felt a sense of millennial time so intensely as on Machrie Moor: a track leads on through meadows where sheep graze to open moorland where the only sounds are of curlews piping and the wind rustling the bracken and purple moor grass.  On Machrie Moor stand a series of Bronze Age stone circles, about 4000 years old and made of red sandstone or granite.  In the words of Seamus Heaney, in ‘A Dream of Solstice‘, they stand

Millennia deep in their own unmoving
And unmoved alignment

The first people on Arran to leave visible traces of their lives were Neolithic people, who lived on the island in the period between 4,500 BC and 2,000 BC. They were farmers, and traces of their field systems have been found on Arran, as well as other stone structures such as hill forts like the one on Dunadoon Point.

But it is the enigmatic stone circles on Machrie Moor that form the Arran’s finest collection of ancient monuments. The first  megalithic monuments here  –  a series of timber circles – were constructed towards the end of the Neolithic period (around 2000 BC).  No remains of these timber circles can be seen today.

What can be seen are the stone monuments that were built to replace them, the six stone circles whose grandeur make this site so atmospheric and which were added for almost two thousand years during the Bronze Age.  There is no real certainty about what these monuments were used for, but it is safe to assume that they had some kind of ceremonial function, possibly related to their alignment with the midsummer sunrise at the head of Machrie Glen.

The tallest of the stones stands eighteen feet high and, with the moor stretching towards the distant mountains and the stones towering above you, there is a very real sense that you are standing in a sacred landscape.

This is a Bronze Age landscape of outstanding importance.  Though there has been some excavation, most of the site remains unexplored, largely buried in the peat that destroyed the way of life here.  About 3800 years ago, climate change brought colder, wetter weather leading to the build up of peat.  The peat-bound, infertile moor where these monuments stand would once have been rich farmland supporting a thriving community.

Heedless, unheeded of the years they stand;
The rain drips off their chins and lichens spread
A moist green skin along each stony hand
That gropes among the bones of the grey dead.
They did not see the forests flow and fall –
Junipers blue wave by the fellside shore –
Nor barley batten by the coddling wall,
Nor purple ploughland swipe across the moor.
They hold death in them. Skulls have moulded ears
That deaf remain to curlew, crow and dove.
The human winds blow past them; each one fears
The hoarded ache of malignant love.

– Norman Nicholson, ‘The Megaliths’

John Ormond, friend of Graham Sutherland and Kyffin Williams, wrote this poem, ‘Ancient Monuments’, in which he conjures the men who worked the stone and created the ‘back-breaking/Geometry, the symmetries of solstice’ that we see today.  For the rest of that day I pondered where these stones were wrenched from, and how those people could have moved them.  The next leg of our walk took us down to the shoreline between Machrie and Blackwaterfoot.  There lie stretches of sandstone pavement, exposed and scoured by the sea.  Was that the source of these stones?  And if so, how did they haul them two miles from the shore, to an elevation of five hundred feet or so to the moor?

They bide their time of serpentine
Green lanes, in fields, with railings
Round them and black cows; tall, pocked
And pitted stones, grey, ochre-patched
With moss, lodgings for lost spirits.
Sometimes you have to ask their
Whereabouts. A bent figure, in a hamlet
Of three houses and a barn, will point
Towards the moor. You will find them there,
Aloof lean markers, erect in mud.
Long Meg, Five Kings, Nine Maidens,
Twelve Apostles: with such familiar names
We make them part of ordinary lives.
On callow pasture-land
The Shearers and The Hurlers.
Sometimes they keep their privacy
In public places: nameless slender slabs
Disguised as gate-posts in a hedge; and some,
For centuries on duty as scratching posts,
Are screened by ponies on blank uplands.
Search out the furthest ones, slog on
Through bog, bracken, bramble: arrive
At short granite footings in a plan
Vaguely elliptical, alignments sunk
In turf strewn with sheep’s droppings;
And wonder whether it was this shrunk place
The guide-book meant, or whether
Over the next ridge the real chamber,
Accurate by the stars, begins its secret
At once to those who find it.
Turn and look back. You’ll see horizons
Much like the ones they saw,
The tomb-builders, millennium ago;
The channel scratched by rain, the same old
Sediment of dusk, winter returning.
Dolerite, porphyry, gabbro fired
At the earth’s young heart: how those men
Handled them. Set on back-breaking
Geometry, the symmetries of solstice,
What they awaited we, too, still wait.
Looking for something else, I came once
To a cromlech in a field of barley,
Whoever framed that field had real
Priorities. He sowed good grain
To the tombs doorstep. No path
Led to the ancient death. The capstone,
Set like a cauldron on three legs,
Was marooned by the swimming crop.
A gust and the cromlech floated,
Motionless at time’s moorings.
Hissing dry sibilance, chafing
Loquacious thrust of seed
This way and that, in time and out
Of it, would have capsized
The tomb. It stayed becalmed.
The bearded foam, rummaged
By wind from the westerly sea-track,
Broke short not over it. Skirted
By squalls of that year’s harvest,
That tomb belonged in that field.
The racing barley, erratically-bleached
Bronze, cross-hatched with gold
And yellow, did not stop short its tide
In deference. It was the barley’s
World. Some monuments move.

The power of these stones on Machrie Moor is palpable, a testament to the power of art and humankind’s sense of something spiritual beyond the everyday. In ‘Bridestones’ from the collection Remains of Elmet, Ted Hughes, inspired by the Bride Stone boulders on the moor above Todmorden, wrote of the ‘Crowding congregation of skies./Tense congregation of hills’ and of the sense that in such a place, ‘electrified with whispers’,  ‘You do nothing casual here’.  Which is just about right.

Scorched-looking, unhewn – a hill-top chapel,
Actually a crown of outcrop rock –
Earth’s heart-bone laid bare.

Crowding congregation of skies.
Tense congregation of hills.
You do nothing casual here.

The wedding stones
Are electrified with whispers.

And marriage is nailed down
By this slender-necked, heavy headed
Black exclamation mark
of rock.

And you go
With the wreath of the weather
The wreath of the horizons
The wreath of constellations
Over your shoulders.

And from now on
The sun
Can always touch your ghost
With the shadow of this finger.

From now on
The moon can always lift your skull
On to this perch,
to clean it.

Leaving Brodick

We left Arran after only four days, but vowed that we would return.

See also

• Return to Arran, where the world was stilled
• Walking Arran: Iron Age forts, a Viking burial and Buddhist pilgrims
• Walking Arran: rock of ages
• Walking Arran: two glens and the dog on top of the world