A Harbour Walk

Our second day in Kirkudbright began with me making another walk along the Dee estuary photographing the ducks once again, followed by a trip into town to visit a very old friend, former lifeboatman and harbour master of the town.

After the tea and Tunnock's tea cakes - how long since I'd last eaten one of those?! - my sister and I decided to let the folks get on with their reminiscing while we took off for a walk along the inner Dee, just down from Tongland Power Station , a hydro plant with a salmon ladder.

The tide had just turned, we were essentially following the tide out as we walked past the new lifeboat station - a rib replacing the traditional design based further out to sea back in my day - and a fish processing plant. Since my last visit it looks as if there has been some kind of attempt to turn this stretch of river into a business park. Across the river from where the cheese factory used to waft its odours onto the town.

No longer. It seems to have been transformed into an eco-housing estate with solar panels reflecting a lowering sun. As we got nearer to the harbour, I remembered the feral cats I used to chase along here as they mooched in and out of the boat sheds, pausing now and then to snap up a morsel of decaying fish. Later semi-official town cats like Caesar the enormous ginger tom who used to roam around the square found their way onto postcards, but no longer.

The harbour was quiet when we got there, most of the boats had left on the 2am tide to go and gather their scallops from the Irish Sea and beyond. It was from here that the Solway Harvester went fishing in 2000, only to go down with all hands and wipe out the breeding male population of the Isle of Whithorn. Ghostly broken shells littered the harbourside like a memorial.

The harbour is not as busy as it was, it seemed to me, with fewer and larger boats tying up alongside.

The town is beautiful. But it is diminished. The streets are quiet, with few young people round, and by 9pm positively deserted. Houses are boarded up. Communications are dreadful. Where can the town go? What is its future?

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 19.10.15

Following the tide

Wreck

Another wreck, beautifully matching the landscape

Dee bridge

Sister inspects the queenie boats

Distant marina

Broken shells

Memorial

Redshank arrived after the tide left

Feeding on the mudflats

A Donald Rudd Refresher

I'm going to be heading up back to my Scottish hometown in a couple of weeks time.

Kirkcudbright is famous for three things; how you pronounce its name, the Wicker Man movie connection - more of that later on - and its artists.

One of these artists was Donald Rudd. He wasn't anywhere near as famous as a Hornel, largely because as an online bio said he was rather given to "improving" his paintings after a long evening at one of the local hostelries. But I never knew Hornel, although he painted my Auntie Bella for a few bananas, while Donald was a good friend, a great bear of a sailor who taught me about The Great Bear in the sky.

I wrote about him here last year, before many of you followed this blog.

My friend Donald

Si

Devon Sojourn 2 - Roadford Lake

After exploring the Granite Way and Meldon Dam, we then headed for Roadford Lake, not far from the enticingly named village of Broadwoodwidger and not far from the Cornish border.

As soon as I arrived at the lake the first thing I thought was how much it reminded me of Rutland Water back up in my part of the world. It may not be as large, but the feel of it, with the cafe and shop, bike trails and sailing school is very reminiscent. But at Roadford, you feel very high up, wind turbines dot the horizon and there is the sense that the sky is not that far away.

The winds blow the training dinghies about the water as we have tea and cake. The world's tallest man stands in front of us and looks at the world's smallest puppy, a baby meerkat sized chihuahua.  A giant metal sundial glitters in a lowering sun.

A bird hide proves the birds are hiding. But there are plenty of butterflies, and a big hawker flies over my shoulder like a strafing Spitfire. Muddy ground hints at the autumn to come.

A child screams eerily in the trees. The dense woods surrounding the lake might be very scary at night. But in the day, it was lovely.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 

The calm waters

Sailing woes

Damselfly

Splashing at the edge

Small tortoiseshell

The butterfly seeks a different world view

Very tatty meadow brown

Silver sundial

Chubby hoverfly

Kirkcudbright; Growing up by the Magical Sea

I was brought up for a time in Kircudbright, a confused young boy who's parents had split up, but one who felt safe with all his family, and a beloved pet kitten, around him. Kircudbright was, and is, an affluent scallop port on the Dee Estuary, a salmon river leading in to the Solway Firth. It is most famous for the castle that overlooks the harbour, and also the fact that large chunks of the classic 70s horror film “The Wicker Man” were filmed here.

It is a beautiful place.

The Dee upriver from the Harbour, by Andrya Prescott (wikimedia)

Amongst all this was the young me, always hunting for the feral cats who lived in the harbour buildings, smashing my face open on the dodgems at what we called “The Shows” – you can still see the scar – and dancing about to bagpipe music at the summer “Scottish Nights”, where tourists were assailed by the bagpipes for two hours before the musicians retired to “The Steam Packet” to get wasted with the fishermen.

Kirkcudbright harbour, by Anthony O'Neill (wikimedia)

The main out of town beach was known as “The Doon”, a sandy expanse on the west side of the estuary. There was The Bell rock, you could jump off at high tide, and the wreck you could visit at low tide, and aged about 2, I set off for the wreck.

I was fearless then.

I nearly made it, it is a good hundred metres out. But as you got nearer, the mud becomes as thick and gloopy as can be, and I could no longer walk. Besides, my toe felt something both pointy and wriggly in the foothole, and I got scared.

I turned around, took my stripy swimming costume thing off, very nautical, and walked nonchalantly back to the beach trailing it in the mud. My mother probably though I was dead. As dead as the 19^th century barque “The Madras”, whose wreck it was.

The Ross.  A lighthouse bearing island right out in the mouth of the estuary, scene of a murder in the 60s. I went searching for eagles’ nests on the cliffs opposite, and chasing seagulls around. Fearless once again. Rolling painted easter eggs on the castle moat brae, eating them after Speedy, Donald Rudd's mangy dog, had brought them back to me in his mouth. This was bravery without compare.

Ross Island lighthouse, from www.kirkcudbright.com

Unfortunately, I was rather less brave on the water. I'd be taken out, at gunpoint, on various little 15 foot dinghies, and sit terrified amidst the spiders in the little cabin as the wind howled, and the boat rolled in the swell as we seemingly headed miles out past Ross Island. I think if I ever raised a tremulous voice, I was told to keep quiet. All the kids of the experienced sailors must have thought I was a cissie.

They still would have done, for if ever I found myself out on a boat on any of our subsequent holidays after we moved away, it was still a nautical dentist's drill being used without anaesthetic. I still found it miserable, felt off balance, and felt scared.

It was also usually freezing cold and raining on these pleasant little jaunts.

Luckily, by the time we got a little rib, I was happy enough to scoot up and down the Dee as long as we didn't go into the choppy waters beyond Brighouse Bay. I got some courage points back. But I don't think I'll ever be really comfortable on the water.

I'd rather be by the magical sea, than on it.

Copyright Creamcrackerednature 14.11.14

Artist and Sailor A. Donald Rudd, the man who gave me Astronomy

Most people of my age (and many others!) would probably say that Patrick Moore was their earliest astronomy hero, and indeed for me he was incredibly important. I was utterly in awe to meet the great man, as I did at his Selsey home in 1989. However, he was not my first astronomical mentor. This honour went to Donald Rudd, Kircudbright artist, sailor, and owner of a Morris car with moss growing in the engine.

Donald Rudd's mini biography and artworks 

I don't ever remember how Donald came to be in my life, he just always was. Certainly he was near neighbours to my mum and I when we moved back to my mum's hometown in South West Scotland in 1974. His artist's biography states he was married to a woman called Helen, but until I read that I had no idea. As long as I knew him he shared a house with the formidable chain-smoking Oona, mother of my mum's best friend from way back and to all intents and purposes family. As was Donald himself, always known as “Rudd” to Oona, my mother, and everyone in town.

He was a heavy heavy man, thick necked, balding, and possessor of old school sideburns that didn't quite meet to become a beard. He smoked either a pipe – which I remember sucking on when unlit and finding the most disgusting thing in my five year old experience – or a cigarette that for reasons of greater nicotine and tar intake, he'd pierce through the middle just after the filter, swinging the fag about on a needle.

His voice was what I always remember as the soft Scot's accent of the South West, harshly treated by a larynx with the inbuilt effect pedal of “gruff” turned up to full. There was also a curious wateriness about his voice, a bubbling quality like it was rising up through one of those mud geysers you get in New Zealand. It's hard to believe that when I first knew him, he was only the same age as I am now, he seemed incredibly ancient to me.

He and Oona's house was a long, dark place down an alleyway next door to ours, and thus also near the Tollbooth where scenes from the Wicker Man were filmed. The only light bit was the kitchen, which was custardly linoed and a permanent mess of cat and / or dog food and endless packets of Ryvita that were clearly having no effect on Oona's mass whatsoever. There was a small living area, stone clad, filled with ash trays and dark brown furniture to go with the dark brown carpet. Then there treacherous wooden slippery stairs with no balcony, behind that a nether world of sailing ships in glass cases, painted copies of “The Fighting Temeraire” and other nauticalia surrounding a huge and never ever used dining table.

I remember endless plastic bottles of some kind of home brew filling this back area up at one time, possibly 50 or 60 bottles. It was some kind of mildly alcoholic hibiscus type cordial, and a few of the bottles exploded. In my memory at least. Rudd's favourite other tipple I was allowed to know about was “Green Pop”, some limeade concoction. At night, he preferred stronger brews.

Up the steep stairs, where I'd frequently explore unrestrained, were the bedrooms – untidy, and eventually at the top, Rudd's attic studio, a rose hip sauce on semolina mess of colour, easels, and paint encrusted pallets festooned with sheets of toilet paper and soaked with the smell of white spirit. For some reason I was always equally fascinated with the header tank and the big orange plastic ball on a stick within it. Strange child.

Our Donald Rudd landscape, apparently not many of his works survive

 A lasting memory is of Rudd taking us egg rolling one Easter Sunday on the Moat Brae, the castle grounds overlooking the harbour. We had painted the eggs the previous night, in the delicate blue of antique china, and violet, lovely dyes rather better handled by my mother than my clumsy smudges. The rolled eggs were brought back to us by Rudd's manchester terrier Speedie – who put me in hospital once when he bit me on the face – and then eaten by me irrespective of dog saliva or the dye soaking through the shell to give the eggs an alien quality. 

I remember also Rudd's boat “Fourness” - a noisy sloop with a square cabin, belching smoke up and down the Dee estuary. I think we went out on it once, chugging away out to Ross Island Lighthouse. I hid in a cabin full of spiders.

But above all, Rudd gave me astronomy. He had some kind of ancient almanac, in a rough sort of hessian blue cover, detailing the positions of the stars at each month. The constellation of “Bootes” obsessed me, I thought it was the most wonderful thing ever, and tracked its movements across the faded creamy pages of the almanac. Noting I was fascinated, he gave me a proper guide to the planets – back in those days Jupiter only had 13 moons – and let me look through a little monocular telescope he had. He said he had been a navigator aboard HMS Warspite, although he must have been incredibly young. It was only later that I got given Patrick Moore's “Observer's Guide to Astronomy”, possibly by my Grandmother, and began to recognise the constellations properly. Nevertheless it was Rudd who was my inspiration.

When he died in 1993, I was deeply saddened. It was round about my 21^st birthday, and must have seen him for the last time the year before, his “Rudd's Spuds” cafe abandoned as a last commercial venture. I was given a sort of granite stargazing hare as a birthday present, and in honour of Rudd, it still sits, gazing at the heavens, on my mantelpiece.

Copyright Cream Crackered Nature 29.03.14