Indelible

The weather changed today as we expected it would, the main reason for our visiting the two glens over the past two days. In fact, when I was looking from the centre of Brodick a short time ago, it looked as if Goatfell had vanished completely as the clouds descended to the foot of the actual mountain.

We spent the morning and early afternoon exploring the beach we always visited for swimming and picnics when I was a child. It’s hard to believe how far the topography has changed - the two lagoons of permanent water which used to be swelled by each high tide have vanished, with only a truncated channel remaining and great banks of gorse and knotweed and Rosa rugosa taking the place of much of the stiff clumps of blue-green grass on which we would drape our wet cozzies. Sandbags and rock barriers protect the edge of the golf course- from what? The sea? The inward incursion of sand dunes? And why did the lagoons dry up? All very strange.

We returned to Auchrannie via the most enduring memory of them all. The photo above is taken from the first house in the row of - originally - estate workers’ cottages which used to be known as Douglas Row(now Douglas Place). From the summer before my first birthday till the year before I was married my parents rented no.4 for the eight weeks of the school summer holidays (it has a white car parked outside it in this photo), and the view up Glen Cloy to the familiar shape of A’Cruach is the one I dreamed of for the other ten months all through my childhood years. We played ball games up and down the grass in front of the houses, often with the same visiting children every year, and got lost in the forest that still looms at the back of the houses. I have a feeling that these holidays remain the prime motivation for our present life between the hills and the sea …

Tomorrow we return to our own life, but this was a visit to my youth.