Angus Martin
Since Judy and I had the afternoon to ourselves on Sunday 8 March, we decided to take the dog up Ben Gullion. The day was sunny, though cold. We took the eastern loop of the trail, both up and down, and on the way down lifted a carrier bagful of litter. I've come to the conclusion that it is pointless to moan about litter in the countryside. The nuisance isn't going to end and the mess isn't going to go away - one simply must lift it!
While going through the Standing Stone Park at Balegreggan with the dog one evening in March, I came across the matching shells of a RAZOR-FISH, or spoot-fish as it is locally. The shells were fresh and absolutely clean - not a morsel of meat left on them. Razor-fish are the most difficult to gather of all shellfish, but gulls and crows can manage the trick, so I'd go for the explanation that some such bird caught the shellfish at low water and carried it inland to break it and feed on it. It later impressed me - and here I may be heading down the road towards 'Pseud's Corner' - that there was a kind of symbolic aptness in finding these shells close to the Standing Stone, for what is the razor-fish in its habitat of sand but a kind of upstanding edifice of shell, part-exposed, part-buried, just like the monolith itself?
Several days later, I noticed more razor-fish shells, this time on Kinloch Green; and on Sunday 15 March, on a walk from the Second Waters back to Campbeltown, with George and Sandy McSporran, razor-fish were yet again in the frame. There were a lot of shells, newly-broken, lying on the foreshores, and on the top of one rock, below Auchenhoan Head, a dozen shells lay where the birds had opened them and eaten out the fish. I can only attribute the profusion of shells to the recent spring-tides, for razor-fish are seldom encountered except at the lowest ebbs.
Local men used to gather them. Some used their fmgers - and I've heard of nasty gashes being inflicted by the fish's habit of rapidly drawing itself deep into the sand while squirting a spoot, or spout, of water (hence the popular name) - while others used a kind of hook. There were sand-banks within the Loch which were frequented by gatherers at spring tides, but one spot that was especially popular was the Back of the Trench.
George and I got round Auchenhoan Head by wading in our wellies, Sandy by travelling the lower cliff-face, for the tide hadn't long begun to ebb. We spent a little time in Saint Ciarans Cave, and I felt, more than ever before, the sanctity of the place. It's a shame, in a way, that the remoteness of the cave and the difficulty of the shore make the saint's cave such a daunting prospect for the casual or elderly walker, but these very factors do, at the least guarantee the archaeological relics some measure of protection.
Nowadays, 1 cannot think of Ciaran - who, like his Master, was a carpenter's son and died at the age of thirty-three years - without bringing to mind Pat Nugent's powerful portrayal of him, which hangs above the altar in the RC Church in Campbeltown. He is standing in a small boat that is coming to land, a muscular, tough-featured character, no stranger to privation and danger, one would guess; and so he must have been, given the life he surely lived.
I noticed, in the cave, for the firsttime in many years, a sandstone slab on which, in 1965, the initials 'RT' and 'ART' had been incised, these representing the late Reid Thompson and his son, Alasdair Reid Thompson, a schoolfriend of my own, who spent a big part of his boyhood on that coast in the company of Robert Davison and Derek McKinven. Alasdair is now a pipeline engineer in Ontario, Canada, and he should be pleased to learn that the stone on which he and his father left their marks, all those years ago, has resurfaced.
I was back at Saint Ciaran's Cave on 4 March, on that occasion accompanied by Bclla, my old school-friend Hugh McKiernan, and Benjie the dog, and we suffered the misfortune of an enforced stay on the headland. Flood tide was well in when we set off around the Head from New Orleans, and was being accelerated by the strong onshore wind. Having briefly, for Bella's benefit, entered the cave, we began making our way south to the safety of the Bloody Bay, when Benjie, who is terrified of turbulent water, shot up the cliff and would not come down, though I cajoled and threatened him at length. I didn't care to leave him there, so we ourselves becwne stranded.
With great difficulty, owing to the dampness of the driftwood, we got a fire lit in a corner of the little bay below the cave, but, after two hours had passed, with darkness coming on and the tide showing no sign of any recession, I decided radical measures were necessary. I removed boots and socks and stripped down to my long-johns, then plunged into the breaking seas and made my way around the cliff-face to where the frantically yelping Benjie remained. He himself had had enough by this time and willingly came down to me and allowed me to clip him on to the lead and drag him through the seas, back to the inlet.
We decided then that we should delay no further, so we made a dash around the headland, back the way we had come, I with Bella on my shoulders and Hugh with Benjie on the lead. The waves were still crashing up against the cliff-foot and the wind blowing strong and bitterly cold, and Hugh and I were thoroughly drenched and our wellington boots filled with water, but, notwithstanding a couple of scares, when the waves almost swept us off our feet we made the safety of New Orleans and I was able to summon a taxi using my CB radio. It was an experience not to be repeated and we returned home, chastened, to hot baths.
On Friday 20th March, Judy and I enjoyed a nocturnal ramble along the slopes of Ben Gullion. We listened to tawny and screech OWLS as we drank coffee on the Crosshill reservoir dam and, climbing Crosshill itself, on our return home, were bemused to observe, for the first time in our lives, the distinct beams of a LIGHTHOUSE flashing through the darkness between the tops of Ben Guflion and Tomaig Glen. We counted the beams - four in succession every 20 seconds - and later found that we were seeing the lighthouse on Altcarry Head, on the north-east corner of Rathlin Island, presumably on account of the low cloud that night.
On the following Sunday, the 22nd, we went by borrowed car down the Learside to the caravan at Poiliwilline. I got out north of Glenehervie and descended to the coast. The most interesting sight was a BARN OWL which the dog and I disturbed from its roosting place on a rocky head. It flew south and we surprised it again in a cave where I expected it to have gone. I looked around the cave, but could find no sign of previous occupation by the bird.
(These beautiful owls are seldom seen in daylight. I wonder if this was the same individual that a camping friend at Polliwillline, Alistair Webb, and a teaching colleague of his from Perth, observed last year asleep in a cave at Auchenhoan Head. There was a pair of barn owls nesting in a rock-hole at Polliwilline, within sight of our caravan, in our early years there - we could regularly hear them emerge at dusk - but they have since deserted the site. However, on the last night of our summer holiday at the caravan, 18 July, there were more than 20 souls gathered around Gordon Hamilton's beach-fire, drinking and eating baked potatoes at about 11 o' clock, when Gordon himself noticed a barn owl gliding noiselessly over the bay.)
I saw last winter's GLAUCOUS GULL once, towards the end of March. It was in the field across the road from the Lintmill, and, amid the other foraging gulls, was very obviously what it was - bigger than the herring gull and all-white. Our usual gulls are greater and lesser back-backed, herring, common and black-headed. The glaucous gull is an Arctic species which roams during the winter, as does the Iceland gull, which is smaller than the herring gull and a native of the High Arctic.
I heard my first SKYLARK of the year singing above Machrihanish during a snow-flurry on 9 April. The Arran peaks were white that day. The previous evening, walking back along Low Askomil with the dog, I found blossom from the Rockbank CHERRY tree strewn at length on the road by the driving east wind.
On the evening of 19 April, while out a short walk with the dog, I noticed a GANNET dead on Dalintober beach, and, as I habitually do, checked its legs for the possible presence of a ring. (The only ring I've yet seen on a gannet was on a bird which was dead in Queen Esther's Bay on the Learside. I was with Jimmy MacDonald. and Ruari MacLean that day, 15 April 1984, and it was Jimmy who located the ring while poking at the decomposing bird. We learned later that it had been ringed as an adult on Ailsa Craig on 1 July, 1966.) There was no ring on the bird and 1 continued my walk along the Esplanade, whereupon I discovered more dead gannets washed ashore. There were 16 in total, adults all of them, and in fairly fresh condition. The wind was south-east in other words from the direction of the great gannetry of Ailsa Craig.
It all seemed terribly ominous, and I telephoned Clyde Coastguard to report the exceptional concentration of dead birds. Some minutes later, Roger Broad, the RSPB's conservation ofricer for South and West Scotland, 'phoned and asked me to collect three or four of the freshest specimens (this condition to be determined by an examination of the eyes.) In the meantime, I had rung George McSporran, Coastguard auxiliary-in-charge at Campbeltown, and we immediately decided to do a quick search, elsewhere on the coast, anticipating, I admit, the finding of even greater numbers of dead birds on the open shores. There was not another bird found, though we checked a stretch of the Kildalloig shore, the bay at the back of Trench Point and Low Askomil shore.
Three dead birds were duly despatched, on 21 April, to the veterinary laboratory at Lasswade, Midlothian. The results of the report, which I received a month later, were inconclusive. Two of the three birds were in good condition. The most striking feature in all of the birds was 'the degree of congestion of the lungs. The birds had died in the water and the lungs were waterlogged'. There was no way of determining whether the water had entered the lungs before or after death, but the evidence was consistent with death by drowning in a fishing net. I assume, therefore, that the birds were removed from a net within Campbeltown Loch and dumped, hence the concentration of the corpses. But what kind of net was it and what boat? Puzzling questions, these.
No 44 Autumn 1998
Page 2: Janet and Marie Morrison's 1999 Trip to Scotland - Part Two
Page 3: A Series of e-mails from Daniel Stevenson
Page 4: An American Lady in Southend, 1878
Page 5: Bits and Bobs
Page 6: Antiquity and Technology
Page 7: Lt Colonel John Porter: A Gallant Provost
Page 8: By Hill and Shore