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scots-gallivanter · 10 days ago

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TWENTY

I’ll sing of a river I’m happy beside

The song that I sing is a song of the Clyde

Of all Scottish rivers, it’s dearest to me

It flows from Leadhills all the way to the sea

KENNETH MCKELLAR, The Song of the Clyde

SCOTLAND HAS SOME mesmerising scenery, most famously in the Highlands and Islands: panoramas that move something inside you. It’s a feather in the cap of the Firth of Clyde, therefore, that in 2022 Glasgow to Largs was the only Scottish route to feature in the UK’s top 10 most scenic bus journeys, as voted by SunLife customers. The ‘Clyde Flyer’ came third in Britain. It runs regularly through Greenock, Gourock and Wemyss Bay en route to Largs.

The views you enjoy to the north and the west, to Arran, the Cumbraes, the Cowal peninsula and the Kyles of Bute, are indeed phenomenal – alpine in grandeur. The Gazetteer of Scotland (1847) declared: ‘No parish in the west of Scotland, and few in the Highlands, can surpass Largs in the beauty and romance of the landscape which stretches along its own area, or is hung out within view of both its uplands and its plains.’

In his 2013 guidebook, Gourock to Largs Coast Through Time, Bill Clark writes: ‘…the distance from Gourock’s eastern boundary at Cardwell Bay to the ‘Pencil’ memorial just south of Largs, is a mere 16 miles. The road that tracks the land’s edge between these two points, however, allows the traveller to experience one of the finest scenic journeys in the land.’ (The Pencil monument was erected in 1912 to commemorate the Battle of Largs in 1263, in which Scotland repelled a Viking invasion.).

These sublime views, of course, are what discerning daytrippers have always seen as they sail ‘doon the watter’, that age-old practice of travelling to Rothesay, Dunoon, Millport, Largs, Girvan, Saltcoats and other coastal resorts during Glasgow Fair holidays. Following the coronavirus pandemic, marketeers have americanised such trips around the Clyde coast as ‘staycations’.

Largs once hosted a huge annual horse and cattle sale to celebrate St Colm; and it attracted thousands of farmers and crofters from all over Scotland. There was no pier, only a jetty for landing passengers. The beasts were thrown overboard to sink or swim ashore. Travel writer John Lettice observed that the fair continued for several days. The vast concourse of people, who flocked there on foot, on horseback, in carriages, and in boats, almost covered the plain next to the sea:

‘All was movement, animation, clamour and din; and to have regarded this motley, and tumultuous scene in undisturbed quiet, from some of the neighbouring heights, must have been highly gratifying to a curious, or contemplative mind.’

As campsites were few and far between in the Largs area we pitched tent next to a busy flyover, near the shore and next to a couple of campervans from which Bon Jovi competed with The Carpenters into the small hours. In the morning a woman out walking her two Snautzers apologised for waking us up but we were already up with the larks. We were unable to use the toilets at the yachting club 50 yards off as a special code was required to access them and their undoubtedly hot showers.

TWENTY-ONE

The coast at this place, as it is with a few exceptions along the whole course of the Frith, is bounded at a short distance back from the shore with a range of hills, sometimes rising in gentle slopes, and at other times in abrupt rocky precipices, from which is to be had a continued succession of beautiful and varied views.

JOHN LEIGHTON, Select Views on the River Clyde (1830)

THE CLYDE Flier bus takes us past sheer sandstone rocks, honed and honeycombed on their well-wooded heights, out of whose crevices gnarled trees thrive. On the other side are the fairytale landscapes of the firth. We alight from the bus for the boat to Bute in an architectural theme park. With its Georgian-style timber frontage, its Chinese pagodas, and turrets; its Queen-Anne-style Italianate clock tower, and its soothing curved design, Wemyss Bay railway station is a glorious A-listed building. It has a pleasing feel, thanks to a group of volunteers who rescued it from dereliction. Now a vibrant place with a colourful community garden, book shop, museum, and multiple hanging baskets, this miracle of glass and metal architecture and engineering won the World Cup of Stations cup in 2023. It is a masterpiece from the golden age of rail, with a rare curving walkway that takes you down along a winding wood and glass ‘tunnel’ to the old steamboat terminal.

You get the notion that Wemyss Bay folk are rightly very proud of their station, but there are several other architectural wonders in the area that have not been so lucky. Beneath one of the picturesque precipices stood Ferncliff, a splendid villa built in 1851 that, along with the similar homes of very wealthy businessmen, earned Wemyss Bay the nickname New Glasgow. It was the home of the Danish consul in the 1870s and, in its heyday, was called Seaside Heights. It became the Rothmar Hotel in 1924; a convalescent home for miners in the 1940s; and a ‘Christian guest house and conference centre’, a Baptist church and then an evangelical centre from the 1970s until the 1990s. One of its rooms was known as ‘The Prime Minister’s Room’ after Clement Attlee stayed there. It was demolished in 2001 to make way for flats.

Kelly House was another country house not far from the station. Enriched by the slave trade in the West Indies, John Wallace, a distant relative of William Wallace, bought the ‘Kelly Estate’ in 1792, and built a gothic mansion with tall chimneys, ornate turrets and sprawling landscaped gardens. An earlier building, Kelly Castle, had burned to the ground in 1740.

Wallace’s son and heir, Robert, who became MP for Greenock, had ambitious plans for a marine village containing 200 luxury villas; a hotel, a school; three churches, terraced walks with a fountain and grass promenade; a harbour and quay for steamboats; a curling pond, a bowling green; heated baths, and a reading room and billiards room. However, he went bankrupt after slavery was abolished. In 1871 the estate came into the hands of James Young, the inventor of paraffin. Young was a friend of David Livingstone, the explorer, and he built a replica of his African mud hut in the grounds. It is long gone.

The house, revamped in the 1880s after Young’s death, was destroyed by arson in 1913 and the site was cleared during the war, when the Forces moved to the area to train for the invasion of Sicily. There is speculation the fire was the work of suffragettes unhappy with the house’s association with the slave trade, but no culprit was ever charged. It is now the site of a caravan park.

Castle Wemyss was the village’s pride and joy, a fascinating place with rare sea views, built by developer Charles Wilsone Broun in 1850. He also built 32 villas nearby, only one of which (Mansfield) remains.

The Cunard tycoon, Sir John Burns, later Baron Inverclyde, bought Castle Wemyss in 1860. It had a badminton court, a pier, greenhouses, Roman baths, and a monk’s cell. It was of great historical value as a fashionable destination for V.I.P.s, among them Henry Morton Stanley, U.S. General Sherman, Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Trollope, Peter II of Yugoslavia, Emperor Haile Selassie, and various members of the royal family.

Trollope wrote some of his novel Barchester Towers during one of his stays, and it inspired him to write of Portray Castle in his book The Eustace Diamonds.

The fourth and last baron was renowned for his parties, some of which according to local gossip, included midnight ‘skinny dipping’. He was briefly married to a daughter of the millionaire owner of the Sainsbury chain. Alas, however, wealth would appear to be transitory. He died in 1957, childless; and his heirs couldn’t afford to maintain the estate. His title came to an end. The estate went to a developer, and Inverkip Power Station was built on part of the grounds. The castle itself crumbled, and the roof was ripped off to avoid housing rates. It was bulldozed in 1984, and a housing estate was built on the site. A flight of steps and a flagpole are all that remains of a priceless and elegant mansion, and gardens likened (in a biography of George Burns) to the Babylonian gardens of Nebuchadnezzar. The powers that were even removed an age-old monkey puzzle tree that stood at the entrance to the drive (‘for safety reasons’).

I had a look in Wemyss Bay station bookshop for anything by a writer who spent her last years in nearby Skelmorlie, and who set almost half of her many children’s books along the Clyde coast. Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s work was incredibly popular from the 1920s to the 1940s. In her Springdale series she renamed Ayrshire, Brigshire, and called Largs, Redchurch.

I pick up a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists instead, bringing my tally to four of them; I have a peculiar habit of giving them away.

I walk around the station waiting for the next boat and come across the bronze statue of a boy. There’s a far-fetched story that Wemyss Bay was named after an 18th-century boatman called Bobby Wemyss. It seems unlikely but it didn’t stop marketing folk calling the statue Bobby. It stands in the station for the world to see – without the mask that was placed on its face during COVID.

#kenneth mckellar #clyde #largs #kyles of Bute #battle of largs #wemyss bay

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