Episode 15
The next place we visited we so did because we’d been told about it in Ruthwell. It was a display in the small church in Eastriggs about the cordite factory that was built here in 1915. It covered an area of 9 miles by 2 miles on the north bank of Solway Firth. Not one building but many mainly so that any fires or explosions could be more easily contained that way. There was up to 30,000 people employed directly and indirectly here at the peak of its production.
It all came about because Britain was desperately short of ammunition in WW1, and some munitions expert was brought in from South Africa to find a solution to the problem. This site was chosen because of the proximity to rail lines, roads and shipping, but well away from the range of German WW1 aircraft.
Experts from all over the Commonwealth came and workers from all over Britain moved here. They were encouraged to come by the high wages paid. £5 a week was the going rate and it was mostly women who were available and came: Other businesses complained about their workers leaving to come here for better wages.
What they made here was cordite and to make this they mixed nitro glycerine and nitro gun cotton together by hand. We were told that it ends up looking like long thin spaghetti. Nothing metal could be worn at all, no rings or bracelets, no bobby pins, nothing metal could be used in case it caused a spark and an explosion. The mixing tubs were ceramic and long wooden shovels were used for mixing. Many of the women were trained in fire fighting and did some very brave things when fires broke out. Not many were killed.
In 1916 Arthur Conan Doyle visited the place (the creator of Sherlock Holmes) and he called this stuff ‘devils porridge’. In all, this factory produced more than all the other factories over Britain did put together. Today virtually nothing remains and what does is enclosed within a military no go zone.
The factory had 125 miles of its own internal railway line with 34 engines, its own power plant to run it and the town. 14000 meals and 13000 loaves of bread were produced daily in the factory’s’ kitchen. Three shifts of 8 hours each kept the place running continuously.
We were in the Dumfries area and Scottish 18th century poet Robert (Robbie) Burns lived here at one time. There is a museum dedicated to him and a house where he lived. He was born near Ayr in what is now a suburb of the town and his house there too is a museum, but we didn’t visit any of them.
There was a special open day weekend and many sites were free to enter but when we made our way round we found that for one reason or another some of them weren’t open at all. Of the castles one had a private wedding, one had something else, the iron age roundhouse had a birthday party, and so on. Yet another castle we arrived at just as it was closing for the day so we didn’t get to see that one either. Still, mostly they are just ruins and you can see almost as much for the outside as from inside. There are a large number of such castles around this part of Scotland, they are only small as castles go and nearly all date from much the same time, the 13th century.
One place we did get to visit is the Shambellie National Museum of Costume. To start with Shambellie is a lovely house built in the 19th century. Built of a soft fawn coloured stone it is 3 stories high and has lovely round towers with pointed roofs. The gardens are beautiful and must be spectacular in the spring when the huge banks of rhododendrons are in flower. There is a view across the firth to the hills of Cumbria (in the Lake District).
On entering we were given a booklet for a self guided tour of the place. In each room there are models and the booklet explained the dress and the period it was from then also gave details on the furniture, the mirrors and the paintings on the walls. One room was a dining room set in the early 1900’s before WW1, then there was a drawing room set in WW2, a less format sitting room from the early 1950’s, even a 19th century bathroom with a lady wearing what would have been appropriate at the time. Another room had a display of 19th century Victorian clothes. A bedroom and nursery were of early 20th century. It was all very well presented.
Another place we visited was the birthplace of John Paul Jones who became the captain of an American war ship during the war of Independence and brought the war to Britain where he engaged some British ships in battle and won. Apparently the Americans treat him as a national hero.
The oldest surviving complete lighthouse in Scotland at Southerness was a nice place to visit on a sunny afternoon and again we got a good view across the firth to the Cumbrian hills. The lighthouse is no longer working and hasn’t done so for a long time. First built in the 18th century it was increased in height twice over the years and closed too, for a while. During the time it was closed many ships ran aground in its vicinity. Now there is not enough large shipping to warrant it. In places there are some low rocks and some of the beaches are pebbly, quite a lot of seaweed washed up on them too, but we didn’t see any sand or anywhere that you could conceivably go swimming even if the water was ever warm enough. On the southern coast of Solway Firth there was some sandy beaches but I can’t honestly say they looked inviting.
We travelled on up through Girvan and up to Ayr. On this part of the trip it was a really beautiful sunny warm day, an almost cloudless blue sky: The sea and the coast looked really nice along this part of the Firth of Clyde. Off the coast from Girvan we could see Ailsa Craig, a large rocky island that is privately owned and in summer is home to thousands of nesting birds. Some way north of Girvan we did come to a reasonable sandy beach, it was privately owed by a big estate with another castle. Several dogs and their owners were enjoying the beach watched over by a great many sea gulls.
At Troon we found a car park with a nice view across the bay to Ayr and sat here in the warm sunshine and ate our lunch. As we did so we watched a number of planes come in to land at the nearby Prestwick international airport. They were mainly Ryan Air planes.
Along the way we noticed several large marinas that had a huge quantity of sailing vessels in them. At Largs we stopped and had a look around one of these marinas. This one alone had just about enough boats for every family in Glasgow or so it seemed. It was like a small town with a whole shopping precinct as well as several ships chandleries and major repair shops.
Near Gourock we took a ferry to Dunoon in Argyll. This area is thickly covered with pine forest that is not all that old as the trees are not very tall. It is all planted forest, mainly spruce I think. Now the forestry people are also planting a lot more of the native broad leaf, deciduous trees like the oak, alder and birch trees because it is better for all the birds and native animals. We saw some nice blackberries in one place when we stopped for a cup of tea so we ate plenty of them. All the roads here are narrow too, mostly one lane and windy so it is slow travelling but fortunately at this time of year there isn’t a lot of traffic and no one gets upset by having to stop or reverse up to let another past. Driving along we spotted an old ruined church. On closer inspection we found that it was the burial chapel of the chiefs of the Clan Lachlan. The small chapel was minus its roof, but the walls were solid. On the floor were many grave slabs: Outside in the graveyard the oldest headstone we could read was from the 18th century but there could have been older ones there. Most were far more recent, late 20th century. The 21st century ones were in a separate field.
A castle we did visit is the famous Inveraray Castle on Loch Fyne. It is another beautiful castle, and the ancestral home of the Duke of Argyll. The current duke is the 13th duke who is a man of nearly 40, he married Eleanor Cadbury in 2002 (not sure if she is of the chocolate Cadbury’s). Construction on this castle only began in 1746 and it took 40 years to build. Nothing remains of its predecessor.
For each room there is a short description on a printed sheet that describes its furnishing, paintings and other items. To start we entered the dining room, this had a long dining table on which stood a very large silver bowl and 2 galleons each on 4 wheels, that looked gold to me but the sheet described them as silver. On the walls were paintings of family member and the ceiling was moulded and beautifully painted. Above each of the four doors was a round moulding representing each of the 4 seasons. They had been made in France but the gilding on them had been done in Scotland. The chairs were French too.
Another room had several large tapestries depicting country scenes that had been especially made for this room, again the ceiling was moulded. In a small round room off to the side of this room and the bottom part of a tower was a china display room with some beautiful dinner sets and other china. A full dinner set of Meissen china occupied one long cabinet, top to bottom; there was a Royal Gloucester dinner set and some Chinese plates as well as much else. The moulded ceiling in this room was made of paper-mache.
Probably the thing this castle is most famous for is the Armoury display. It occupies the central room from floor to the ceiling 3 stories high and painted with the crest. On display are 1300 pieces of weaponry. On the walls of this central room guns and spears and all sorts of weapons are presented in circles and arcs all very artistically displayed. In show cases about the room there are daggers and powder horns, whilst in the hall there was a set of armour and some cannon balls.
Another room had many family portraits and one of them was a Gainsborough, while a cabinet contained enough exquisite family silver to keep any common burglar happy. Elsewhere I saw a display table full of ancient bronze and Neolithic age items that one of the dukes had collected over a period of time; mostly they had been found on Tiree. There were nails and pins, some flnt knives, and a few other bronze artefacts.
Upstairs were more rooms containing more paintings and family items, especially a big family tree going as far back as 1100. Back in the 19th Century one of the Dukes married Louise, one of the daughters of Queen Victoria. There was a painting of her on one of the walls.
A bedroom with a big four poster bed had a canopy that was covered in the Campbell tartan. The Argylls are of the Campbell Clan. Another circular room off this bedroom, part of another tower, had more recent photos of the family members. Downstairs we could see the kitchen much as it was around the early 1900’s. It is not used now, a more modern one had been installed somewhere else in the castle. This one had many really good copper pots and pans hanging up around the walls. There are two baking ovens, one for bread and pastries, the other for meats and suchlike. Two hot tops for boiling water and cooking food on, and a bit rotisserie for roasting a pig or perhaps several fowl on. In the centre of the room were the big wooden work benches. The washing up wouldn’t have been done here but in the scullery, a separate room off the kitchen. It was a good castle to visit with plenty to see.
The village of Invarare is not very large and relies mainly of the tourists that come to visit the castle. It’s quite a pretty little place standing on the edge of the lock as it does. The buildings are all built of the same dark stone as the castle.
As we continued on down the lock we came to a view point where we got a wonderful view over several locks and channels between the islands. It was a beautiful sunny day and there were many sailing boats and other pleasure craft out and about on the water.
Some way further on we came to some ancient stone carvings. These are somewhere between 3500 and 6000 years old. To reach them we had a lovely walk along a path up a hill side through the bracken and heather, a small wood of birch trees and alder, then an area of spruce trees and some blackberry bushes. The carvings were on some large rock faces and clustered together in groups. They consisted of ‘cup and ring’ design. The cup is a small hollow that has been chiselled out with a flint knife, about 1.5cm deep and 4 cm diameter and the rings are shallow circular channels. Often the rings are concentric around the cup, but not always. On some a cup will be incorporated into the ring or placed randomly between rings. There are other channels too, straight ones, seemingly at random to everything else. Archaeologists are trying to see some meaning is all this and no doubt they will eventually come up with some theory about what all these things mean but they haven’t yet done so.
Not far from here in the Kilmartin Glen we saw some ancient stone cairns and standing stones. These all date from much the same period. The stone cairns have been burial places. In one it is possible to see a stone lined burial chamber, one of several that have been found in the cairn. These were excavated long ago and it was found that some bodies had been cremated while others hadn’t. The remains of many bodies were found in each tomb.
Six standing stones in a field of grazing sheep look to me like someone has started a project that they couldn’t be bothered finishing. There are 4 stones in a line, they two 30m away. The tallest is 4m high and would have taken a great deal of effort to get it there and upright. They are all packed with small stones to keep them upright so they must have quite a length below ground too. A small ‘henge’ was near here, that’s a stone circle but the stones on this were much smaller, and there was a ditch inside the stones and a mount outside of them and another tomb in the middle with the big stone grave slab still there. The slab had been placed over the grave. Apparently all these things are on some ancient trade route. There were some more cairns around but these stones were all beginning to look like each other so we didn’t bother with looking at more.
In the village of Kilmartin we called at the church to see some more grave slabs, but these were much more recent than those in the sheep fields. These were from the 13th century onward and were carved by local craftsmen. Some of them had a warrior carved on them, others intricate patterns and Celtic crosses. These slabs were placed flat on the ground over the grave originally, though now some of the better ones are standing upright in a special undercover enclosure to protect them from weathering. When we looked around the graveyard we noticed that there were many in one area that had a skull and crossbones carved on them but we read no mention of them anywhere and we wondered why they would have had this pattern when it is usually associated with pirates.
On the northwestern end of Lock Awe we came across an interesting church. It was built by one Walter Douglas Campbell and is dedicated to St. Conan who is believed to have lived in the area at one time. It’s not an old church only finished in 1930, but it is absolutely unique. This Walter Campbell moved to the area with his mother and sister around 1906 and built a small chapel for his mother as she didn’t want to travel a long distance to go to church. Not happy with the chapel he then designed this church himself, putting in everything he thought might look good so that we now have quite a lovely building that is a mishmash of various designs. It is very large and the cloister has a patterned lead roof, there is a square Saxon tower, some gargoyles chasing a hare, and a Celtic cross are high up on another part of the roof, there are more pointy bits here and there.
Inside the oak wood beams in the nave came from a wrecked sailing ship and there is a many pained, clear glass window in one of the side chapels that was got from a demolition yard but had been in a church in England somewhere. This is a very large church, and even now the village is quite tiny.
The site was not levelled to begin with so one end of the building is very high when the land drops down towards the lake. The rock used in construction wasn’t quarried but rolled down the hill and cut to size on site. It sits on the edge of a steep bank overlooking the lock with a splendid view over the lock to the hills beyond. This Walter Campbell wasn’t an architect and was told at one point that his design wouldn’t stand up, so he made a scale model and ran a steam engine over it and it survived intact so he built his church and its standing well enough too. Not himself though, he died shortly before it was finished, after both his mother and sister.
Nor far from the church we came to the hydroelectric power station and went on a tour there. The generator and all 4 turbines are underground in huge tunnels that have been carved out of the black granite. It was constructed from 1959 to 1965, and opened by the Queen in that year. The water to run the turbines in stored in a ‘bowl’ in the mountains that was carved out by glaciers in the past. It holds 10,000,000 cm of water and can run the turbines for 16 hours. This power station is only used to supply power in peak demand times so it doesn’t have to generate power on a continuous basis. Those turbines can be producing electricity within less than one minute when it’s required. During off peak times the water is pumped back from the lock to that ‘bowl’ reservoir in the mountains using electricity that is bought back at a cheaper rate.
And so we drove into Oban on a very wet afternoon with the cloud down very low and the sea a forbidding looking grey.
© Lynette Regan 4th October 2007