Kilcreggan

I am repairing an old dyke that marks the bounds between two houses in Kilcreggan. One is modern but the other, like so many houses in the village, is a piece of Victorian grandeur in minature with things like sculpted stone window details and ornamented wooden eaves.


It's almost 40 miles by road for me so last night I camped on an old jetty near the village. The jetty is two parallel mortared dykes with boulders between. Its long since tackety boots crunched on the stone and it now wears a coat of turf where clusters of pink thrift and sea campion dance in the wind. As darkness fell a riotous assembly of pipestrelle bats gathered giving wild chase to each other. Try as I might I could not hear their flight, even when they performed quick fire swoops and dives but two feet away.

Kilpatrick hills

I went over the hill from Glasgow today to fix a wire on a dyke I repaired a few months ago. The rain was driving in hard and Jim the farmer wanted a better day so we postponed. I had a dyke repair in Kilcreggan to see but not until afternoon. That left me free for a while so I walked up the hill to the Whangie.

The story goes that The Devil was in Strathblane but had an appointment with another soul in Dumbarton. For a shortcut he leapt the hill. On the way over his tail whanged the hillside and sliced it open. A huge segment of cliff peeled away and settled a few feet forward leaving a deep gorge immediately behind. We live in more secular times and it is now a popular spot with walkers and climbers. A well worn path winds its way up the hill and I passed a school party coming down. The rain had by now eased off and, as we passed, I saw that they didn't look quite so bedraggled as I expected given the squall they had been caught in.

A pair of ravens were the only company at the top. They must have a nest on the cliff and, as I picked my way through the gorge, they glided the wind above whilst giving me what-for in throaty voices gruff as Lily Savage.

Cardross Seminary

Just outside Cardross is an architectural wonder. Here, in the middle of the woods, lie the ruins of a seminary built in the 1960s. Elevated walkways - streets in the sky - wrap the largest building while rows of cells run its length each side. A curved ceiling of concrete around wire mesh gives each cell the feeling of a cocoon. On four floors, all but those on the upper floor open onto a single wide space occupying the centre of the building.

Other buildings have curved outside walls with beautiful random arrangements of rectangular windows and panelled ceilings that begin horizontally in the usual fashion before sweeping upward in a smooth curve to finish in the vertical. Edgar a' Chuimreach chuimseach told me that it was beset with problems, leaky flat roofs and so on. It's a pity the designers shot themselves in the foot and compromised the building by inattention to such crucial detail.

It has been closed since the early 1980s and much vandalised since. The woods are encroaching and the buildings now poke out from among the trees. The buildings look solidly urban and to see them among woods like this gives the place a post-apocalyptic and dangerous feel, like the order of things has collapsed and anything might happen in here. Looking at the damage from countless fires I think the neds felt the same. We didn't meet any on our trip but I fear that we, a couple of drystane dykers shambling in after work, probably added to rather than detracted from the Planet-of-the-Apes feel that the place has.

Hadrians wall

I took a train to Carlisle on Friday then went a bit further upland and inland to the Birdoswald centre on Hadrian's wall. It is a fairly grand courtyard farm that was built inside a Roman fort and, much more recently, converted into a visitor and study centre. Here, a number of other drystone wallers and I took a few steps toward becoming instructors. I also took a few steps along the wall and around the fort this morning. The cold wind that blew all Saturday was gone leaving a pleasant and warm day. The rough block of the Roman masonry was regimented into long lines unbroken by risers (those stones that rise above the line of a course), like a long string of words without a breath. Its quicker to build with block so perhaps I am being a bit unkind. This was a frontier after all, with a huge workforce of soldier-masons erecting forts of standard buildings. Like the buildings of burger chains, they were substantially similar across continents, visible signs of some external but enormous power.

Baille Ubhail

Most of the stone in the walls at Baille Ubhail comes from the fields. Iona and Jack collect it all, if not from their own bit then from a nearby christmas tree plantation. There is barely a stone pokes through the ground that its not snapped up. I have been here on and off for the past three years building things like this curve into the driveway. Another load of stone is ready so I am back to do a bit more. This is a good time of year to return because wild watercress, biolair, grows in a ditch nearby.