I know- MORE photographs.
But I went over to Bute yesterday early. Dunoon was covered in a bank of fog- held in the bowl of the Clyde- but a short distance from the sea, the skies cleared, and the temperature plummeted from minus 4 to minus 13.
It was indescribably beautiful.
I braved the low temperatures and crossed over to ‘the other side’ today. My intention was to go to Helensburgh, but Greenock was full of slithering cars and covered in freezing fog, so I rather tamely retreated.
But no time is wasted. I made some phone calls from the ferry- and appreciated the stillness.
The ferry is a great place to do this. It moves at a steady slow pace- giving around 25 minutes just to sit and think. It sometimes seems a very long time, and other times no time at all.
Today I had the camera with me too…
We have had a real snow fall today- around 4-5 inches, with some lovely deep drifts. And it is powder snow, the like of which I have rarely experienced away from the mountains.
We have escaped the worst of the winter weather so far this year- sure we have had ice and snow, but not the deep suffocating blanket that others have had elsewhere.
But this morning, heavy rain turned suddenly to thick snow, and over the course of about 5 minutes the roads were treacherous. Will’s school bus was defeated, and after trying to get him to school through the traffic madness, we gave up as all the roads were blocked.
He has not yet stopped dancing around the house singing “No scho-ool, no scho-ool, no scho-ool.”
Apparently my home town of Dunoon officially has one of the slowest broadband speeds in the UK.
Kind of makes you proud.
Of course it is not that long ago that we were all used to dial up speeds (remember that annoying connection noise?)- but these days 1.9 meg is pretty slow. I am currently getting about 54 KB/sec.
But I am just back from a night in Glasgow, where Michaela and I went to see Jools Holland (Sorry- not really my cup of tea, talented though the band were) and then we spent a day shopping in the city.
It was lovely to walk a city with my wife, but it was so busy. Cars everywhere, fighting for a few inches of space, and to be a few seconds faster away from the lights.
So it was good to get the ferry over to the place where even cyber space has been slowed down.
Come and see- it is good for the soul…
Aoradh are planning a massed sky lantern launch on the banks of the river Clyde as a way of celebrating the season of Advent.
In doing this, we pray that we can learn how to wait in hope for the coming of light into darkness.
This is a repeat of an event we did last year- some photos of which are here.
We will be using lanterns made from 100% biodegradable materials- with no wire that can be of potential risk to any animals.
We will be selling the lanterns at a local shop, and making others available free for schools and community groups. And profit will go to a Christmas charity.
Here is the poster-
If you are fairly local it is well worth coming to join us- the spectacle is wonderful.
And the process of making prayers that float upwards is very moving.
This is the blurb that we include with the lanterns-
The light keeps shining in the darkness, and the darkness can never put it out…
As part of our Advent festivities, Aoradh invite you to be part of a celebration of light.
Each year, we are plunged into a whirl of busyness around Christmas- all the presents we buy, the cards we send, the pressure of making ready for a feast. All these things are good, but it is so easy to lose sight of the Christ-child. We wanted to encourage one another to step aside, and reflect…
Our intention is to use these paper sky lantern as carriers of our hopes, expectations and prayers in this season of waiting, and so make our deliberate preparation for the coming Christmas.
You are invited to write prayers and thoughts on the lantern, and to be part of a MASS SKY LANTERN LAUNCH from the West Bay Dunoon, on Sunday the 12th of December, from 5.00 pm– weather permitting.
(NB We will need fairly calm, dry conditions for the mass launch to take place. If we are not able to launch on the Sunday, then we will go for 5.00 on Monday- then Tuesday and so on.)
The spectacle of a large number of sky lanterns rising over the Clyde together is something that we hope will live in our memories, as a visual reminder of the rising possibility of hope.
And of light flickering in the darkness…
Be careful as you write on the lanterns- they are fragile!
We had our monthly Aoradh family day meal tonight- which happened to coincide with the dreaded Halloween.
Dreaded in my case, as I find the increasing madness around Halloween difficult to stomach. The ‘traditions’ we are inheriting are very recent ones- which owe more to 1970’s American films than they do to any folk traditions native to these islands. This does not in itself make them bad- but in this case, I struggle to understand the point of the whole thing.
An evening to dress up as ghosts and mass murderers and walk the streets eating sweets and chocolate…
Actually, when you put it like that, it sounds rather fun doesn’t it?
And that is the other struggle. We took a decision years ago that as Christians, we wanted to keep away from it all. It had too much of the darkness, and not enough of the light. It sided with the wrong half of the tradition- preferring the celebration of devils and demons that was supposed to be a precursor to the celebration of All Saints Day– a day which passes unnoticed.
But this means that our kids have always missed out on the fun bit, although we are certainly much less strict than we used to be- William went to the school disco, and Emily is old enough to make up her own mind.
But then I see some of the things going on, and my resolve stiffens again.
In the middle of Dunoon, a local hall has set up a little fake graveyard. And above it, they have strung some stuffed white sheets, hung from the neck and splashed with red paint. Quite creative really. Certainly a lot of time was taken.
Except that when I saw them, it looked like ‘strange fruit‘.
And also reminded me of the people who killed themselves by hanging over the last year. Relatives of whom may well be driving past…
Tonight, we shared a meal with our Aoradh friends, and it was lovely. To mark the evening, we decided to play a game of pass the parcel.
We turned of the lights, and passed the parcel in the dark, and each layer of the parcel had a candle, and some words about light. The candle was lit, and the words read.
And as the game went on, it got lighter, as more and more candles were lit.
Eventually we got to the middle- a large candle, and some indoor sparklers.
Which we lit, and prayed.
It was simple and profound, and once more made me very grateful for my friends.
I took a walk out into the woods with my friend Simon this afternoon. I had been wanting to explore an old overgrown collection of buildings out along Glen Lean for a while. The last time we tried, the heavens opened, but today the sun was shining- until we got there that is, but this time we decided that a little rain should not put us off.
The old buildings were part of the former Argyll Gunpowder works, which operated over 4 sites in the county from around 1840 to 1903.
There is very little information about the Glen Lean site on the web- apart from this entry on Secret Scotland. There is however a good article by Kennedy McConnell summarising the history of one of the other locations where gunpowder was manufactured in this area (near Tighnabruaich on the other side of the peninsular) here.
It tells of a time when Argyll was famous for its manufacture of fine quality gunpowder, which was exported all over the world.
Powder used to blast and shoot our way towards the creation of an Empire.
Here is a quote from McConnell’s article-
The conversion of the raw materials from Kames into gunpowder at Millhouse required ten separate processing stages, each accommodated in a specially constructed building known as a “house”. A detailed description of these processes is outwith the scope of this article, but the names used to identify the various houses were Mixing, Charging, Breaking-down, Pressing, Corning, Dusting, Glazing, Stoving, Heading-up and Packing, These processing houses were widely dispersed throughout the grounds to minimise the risk of an explosion spreading from one building to another. Trees were planted in the intervening spaces for the same reason. Horse drawn bogeys were used to convey the goods around the works, and these ran on a small gauge railway system. The production machinery was driven by water power.
It was a dangerous business. He lists a whole series of accidents and explosions in which as many as nine people died. I think we can assume a similar history in Glen Lean.
The location of these mills was no doubt chosen at least in part because of their remoteness, as well as the availability of water power and raw materials. Whole communities developed that were dependent on the mills for work, and were decimated when we found more efficient ways of blowing each other to kingdom come, and so closed the mills one after the other.
I suppose you could say that this area has continued the tradition of providing the means of causing very large explosions. The Faslane naval base, location of the nuclear submarines, is just across the water from here.
Walking round the old buildings today was a walk through our military-industrial history. They are being swallowed by the encroaching trees, like an Aztec temple in the rain forest.
There has been no attempt locally to make this part of our history known. No footpaths into the site- you will need some serious footwear to get anywhere near it- and certainly no interpretive history boards.
Soon it will all fall into the river below.
The whole thing seems to be to be a poignant visual analogy of Empire. Our former means of producing arms and ammunition have mouldered away. Obscured and forgotten in a forest of new trees.
And much of what we were, I am glad to leave behind.
And yet there is something still that pulls at me with pangs of regret. Memories of a something precious that we might also have lost. A simpler, more idealistic time, where all things seemed possible.
Or perhaps these are constructed memories, projected onto these old walls.
Old ruins like this tend to foster this kind of thinking.
We are in the middle of various renovations of the old house. It is a constant process, but there is a particular burst of activity at present.
And in stripping back the surface coverings of this old house, you always come face to face with it’s mostly mysterious past. The flowery pencil marks of workmen on the bare horsehair plaster, old brass fittings from doors long gone, bell circuits to summon servants, all hidden under bad renovations done to the building in the 1960s and 70s when the house was a converted into a guest house.
It is impossible not to wonder at the lives lived by previous generations in our old houses.
This house was built in 1840, in a small town on the up. A regular ferry service was established across the Clyde around 1820, and by the 1840’s you could travel direct from Glasgow to Dunoon courtesy of the new fangled steamers. It became fashionable for prosperous Glasgow merchants to have a house ‘doon the watter’ for weekends and holy days. Merchants whose prosperity rested on the commerce of an expanding empire- whose booty poured into Glasgow from plantations of sugar, cotton and tea. A prosperity that rested on the back of slavery and oppression.
Our house was obviously not built by merchants in the top rank. It is one of two identical buildings next to one another and the story goes that they were built for two brothers. They had cornices, but not of the very ornate kind, and the proportions of the rooms were generous rather than expansive. They were sober in their success.
1840. How much has changed, and how much still is the same.
It was the year when the world’s first self adhesive postage stamp was issued- the penny black.
It was the year of the first steam crossing of the Atlantic, by the wooden paddle wheel steamer RMS Britannia.
Napoleon Bonaparte died and his body was brought back to France.
Missionary Scot David Livingstone left Britain for Africa.
Queen Victoria married Prince Albert.
And some great British workmen were knocking in the last nail of a brand new house in Dunoon, Argyll.
Curtains were chosen, and carts lined up to take heavy furniture from the shore up the hill.
A family gathered, excited and thrilled by the smell of new paint.
And here we are, 170 years later.
Screwing together flatpack furniture.
Such progress.
I was admiring the dramatic sky over the Clyde this evening (about 9PM) so I took my camera down to Dunoon pier to take some photos-
There is a bit of a rig doing something to the water works- but it looks a bit like an oilfield has been found just off Dunoon!
I decided to change to the longer lens, and while I was fiddling (of course it would be whilst the camera had NO LENS!) swimming in front of me, less than 10 metres away, were two otters.
Yes- OTTERS!
I could not believe my eyes.
I attached the lens as fast as I could, but this was my first effort, as they rolled over one another playfully-
Oops. Well it was very dark, and I was very excited.
I have never seen an otter in the wild before- and here they were, in Dunoon? Right in the centre, under the pier? On holiday perhaps?
I wondered whether I could be seeing something else- a couple of cats learning to swim? Mink? But actually, two otters at play that close are not easily mistaken for anything else.
They saw me watching them, and swam to the old pier, where they paused and watched me. So here are the photo’s-
I believe that otter have been spotted in all sorts of urban areas along the Clyde, even in Glasgow. But I have not heard of them being seen in Dunoon.
A couple of young otters on their way out along the Clyde perhaps? Doon the watter for a holiday?
this fragile tent 
